skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I disagree with his assessment. He only has to "invest capital" for each megabyte you download insofar as he merely has to maintain his current network. An individual user has a hardware limit on the amount of bandwidth they can consume, be it imposed by the network or the consuming device. "Each additional megabyte" consumes no more or less bandwidth than the megabyte before it nor the megabyte after it. He has the same maintenance cost whether this individual user is paying per megabyte or per day of access.

What causes him to have to invest capital is each additional simultaneous connection which uses his network. These analogize to subscribers to his service, not bits of data sent over his network.

I mean, does he really believe that he can change people's collective usage patterns during peak hours merely by limiting their consumed bandwidth for the whole month? Surely not. If anything, it will persuade people to eliminate their extraneous data usage and only use it when the data connection is "most important". I'm not one for blind guessing, but I have hunch that these "most important" times of data access probably correlate to his current peak hours.

The power companies face this same problem with throughput, and what do they do? Do they cap the amount of power you can receive per month in order to alleviate load? No! They invest in throughput, and when things get sketchy during peak times, they enforce throughput caps like rolling brownouts.

I have a hunch AT&T also does this with their forced data throttling on those who are consuming the most bandwidth, as if they were the problem! But they are also convincing people to pay more for less with monthly data caps. How they can get away with this is very surprising to me, personally.
Personally I would never pay for a browser plugin. I don't really need those services to do anything more than they already do. Granted I'm sure there are tons of people that want more, but I personally am not one of them.
Probably not. There have been dozens of challengers (Kik, Beluga, WhatsApp), no one has gathered the ubiquity or reliability of SMS. The one one I can conceive of hitting that goal is Facebook, and at the moment they don't seem to be trying too hard.
"only if a threshold of a certain number of users is exceeded"

And thus the stupidity and evil-ness of the whole plan is revealed. They don't want to spy on criminals, who will use the minority methods that aren't monitored. They want to spy on the general population who is innocent of any crime.
1) Don't underestimate the butterfly effect. 2) We can already predict the future to a certain extent. 3) What you wish the universe was like is irrelevant. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wishful_thinking
When something is disrupting your business model, move as fast as you can.

You'll have nothing to worry about but finding a new job after your company fail due to competitive pressure.
I believe a constant solution exists, because Fizzbuzz repeats after 8 items. Still working on it...

<EDIT>

Yes, here's a constant solution: http://codepad.org/Id9eu0Ax
That's straight out of wikipedia.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_version_history#JDK_1.0_.2...

Java version naming is a bit confusing, especially retrospectively.

Starting with the release of JDK 1.2 (which was the third release, after 1.0.2 and 1.1) Sun started referring to everything as Java 2 (J2SE, J2EE, etc.). Presumably this means that there were two releases of Java 1, JDKs 1.0.2 and 1.1.

After JDK 1.4 (still Java 2) was Java 5.0, after that was Java 6 which dropped the Java 2 nomenclature (now different versions are just JSE, JEE, and so on).
Regarding the mental qualities of travelers, I once witnessed this:

announcement: This is NOT a boarding announcement, please remain seated.

people: 80% of the people in the gate area stood up.

announcement: This is NOT a boarding announcement. When we do board, please pick up a sack lunch from the cart near the ramp.

people: 50% started forming a line near the ramp. 30% remained standing.

announcement: Please remain seated. We will start boarding in about 15 minutes. As you board the plane, please take a sack lunch from the cart near the door. Thank you.

people: Most looked around uncertainly and slowly sat down.

Person 1 near me: What was that about a lunch?
Person 2: I don't know. I think they may serve you a lunch, depending on where your destination is.

Me: Envisioning a scenario where the attendent gives you a lunch if you are flying to Des Moines, but No Lunch for You! if you are continuing on to Los Angeles...
On my home machine:

$ stat -c %y Fenster-Free-Software-Song.mp3
2004-05-24 08:11:05.000000000 -0600

Good to see this classic has been youtubed. I still don't know if I have ever heard another song by Fenster...
> we got picked up by some big blogs

What was your method? Cold emails?
So it would change nothing. In which case, why have them copyrightable at all? If companies aren't going to take advantage of it anyhow, it seems additionally pointless.

Fundamentally, the main reason to copyright something is to restrict others' use of it. Letting companies restrict their APIs' use would be unfortunate, so if it there is really no effect either way they should not be copyrightable.
Mostly it's an annoyance at trying to find relevant web pages on the topic. In that regard the more prolific the software the more it can get away with a common word as a name.

"Go" is the worst of the bunch by far. "Dart" is pretty bad, "Java", "Chrome" and "Python" would be just as bad but they have swarmed the search results so much that it doesn't bug me.
facebook == public

Why don't people get this by now?
2012 is shaping up to be a deluge of rights-curtailing legislation.

Did the guys behind the curtain just decide that smart-bombing Congress with this shit doesn't work, it gives citizens enough time and leeway to resist it, so instead they're gonna try the carpet-bombing strategy instead?

WTF. We shouldn't have to keep fighting these battles.
>"they just side with whoever is more charismatic"

Same might be said about technical people when it comes to Google and Oracle.
If you go high enough up the inheritance tree everything goes back to java.lang.Object, so no.

If java arrays were something completely distinct from objects (like the primitive types are/were) that would have been interesting, which is what I was checking the super class for there.
They can be an opportunity in other ways too. Some conference organizers are keen to engage with local user groups and can go out of their way to offer space for an on-site meetup or similar things and offer cut price tickets or even free entry.

O'Reilly is a good example of this. They let a free side event take place at RailsConf for a couple of years and you could get right into the conference and mingle with all the RailsConf attendees for free! The only thing you couldn't do was go into the talks (and, yes, they had people checking on the doors.)

I think O'Reilly also does "expo hall" passes for certain conferences for $25 or something.. it's almost like getting the best part (hallway track!) for free :-)
AT&T CEO bemoans iPhone unlimited data, iMessage
О ЧЁМ НЕ РАССКАЗЫВАЕТ КОМПАНИЯ МТС
+1 for hilarious analogy
Experimental TLD .42
Primarily, the 42 Registry offers a new, experimental, all-numeric Top-Level Domain (TLD): 42.
For example if we suspected someone was using Craigslist and other internet tools like Skype, to organize and coordinate a human trafficking ring, I would want them to be able to collect evidence akin to a wiretap to investiate the extent of the organization and bring prosecutions.

They already have that ability through physical surveillance. accessing fully public data, and subpoenas.

That after-all is the main thing, if the representatives of the people in terms of law enforcement/districts attorneys/federal have a reasonable suspicion that you're committing a crime, we should be allowed to investigate - and for you to challenge any evidence gained in a court. Previous abuses of power are of course troubling, the NSA phone tapping and others comes immediately to mind, which is why I believe energy is best spent on ensuring proper checks and balances and the rule of law - it requires constant work to ensure we have adequate protections for citizens and an adequate ability to prosecute suspected offenders.

I suspect that many arguing against these powers in their entirety have lost all faith in checks, balances, and the rule of law, thanks to numerous prior abuses (using the PATRIOT Act against non-terrorists, NSA warantless wiretapping, etc.). The government is far too interwoven at this point, and the important issues too far from the public consciousness, for an organization like the EFF to make any meaningful difference in checks and balances. As such, the safest route is to oppose easily abused powers in their entirety.

Just a final point - I want to stress that I do believe the government has and will continue to overstep its bounds with regard to law enforcement, this has been true for time immemorial, and citizens will continue to fight back and push for legal reforms - but simply throwing our hands up and ignoring real, legitimate law enforcement needs seems silly too. Especially when agencies like mine can right now hijack individual sessions of you on our website and watch everything you do.

What you call "legitimate law enforcement needs" I call overstepping the bounds of their moral authority for the sake of saving manpower. Are these agencies hijacking sessions on the agency web site, or here on Hacker News? If it's the former, most web frameworks probably have such debugging abilities built in, and as such is nothing impressive. If the latter, it sounds like the agency is running a beefier Wireshark on the whole Internet, which is (or ought to be) illegal.
My thesis is that unless you understand how to build a community or fit an app into one you are better off not starting.

I get requests from single founders all the time with an idea and no understanding of what this means. An example would be the learn to play guitar iPad book app by Jason Calacanis's company.

If you examine the features and the design it was made to fit into that community of people who are curious about learning how to play guitar. He did not have to build a community just make sure the app built fit into an already established community.

I am using a socially internet connected community as a replacement for the term market as its more accurate.
Node is nearing 10k published libraries.

And ruby has 38237 gems. 99,9% of which are garbage.

Library-count is a terrible metric.
One advantage of this program is that the company receiving the seed doesn't get tainted if Sequoia passes on the A.

Companies can easily add a representation to their seed docs to prevent this or at least force disclosure. The ethical and legal questions are around exactly how the scout/angel presents the investment, how the rights work, how the agreements are written, etc.
Ask HN: Attending a hackathon weekend as a non-tech?
Would you attend a weekend hackathon or startup event etc as a non-technical person? What minimum level of skills and experience would avoid you being laughed out of the venue?
do you think all the news from sarah lacy are not a bashing just for not being in selected few... its money games.. everything is allowed... just don't pretend it to be abnormal. it's silicon valley!
Have you ever programmed in Java? That's a strange question to ask if you have.

http://mvnrepository.com/

Whatever libraries node has is a drop in the bucket compared to java.
Because they had to fight so hard to exist at all here, and were often brutalized by police and/or private thugs, and the memories linger, making them fight for everything they can get. In Germany and Scandinavia, most of the unions seem to see their relationship with employers more as a partnership than a zero-sum competition.
Well said. Also, we engineers let lawyers eat our lunch. Law is there for a reason, but we should dominate law, and not let law dominate us.
Right. Btw, use * for italics on this site.
Okay, valid points. But IMO, for an opportunity to vote with your wallet, $2 is as cheap as it gets (not that one sale will change much, but it is a step in the right direction, regardless of how easy it is to strip the DRM).
Huh? One of her gripes is that she says the speakers are bad, including herself. She says all this about a conference she spoke at, putting both her reputation and the conferences reputation at risk to help bring more strength to her argument. I'd say yeah, you're seeing drama where you want to see drama.
Justin.tv/TwitchTV hosting codesprint this Saturday at Noon PST
Rewrite of http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/04/att-randall-stephen...

The crappiest part of The AOL Way that rags like Engadget pioneered ... is that it works better than having people writing actual content.
That's fine, its who I am targeting!

I was more curious to see if it was even in the ballpark. The relevance i'm not too worried about if the expected response is in the top 3.

Thanks!
It varies wildly from product to product. When I worked there, every product was written in Java. From what I hear, these days, it's a little different.
By the way: The search is still vulnerable: http://tinyurl.com/7wj9qoh

But I think this is the last one ;-)
Cisco to Buy Truviso
University of Southern California (USC) is a private university.
As explained in the article:

Says Nick Mehta, another one of the first scouts, “They
definitely left it open to us but told us to think about the
impact on the entrepreneur. We were told we should tell the
entrepreneur. But they told us to make sure the entrepreneur
thinks about it before they broadcast that Sequoia is an
investor because of the signaling effect if Sequoia didn’t
invest later on.”
That is very very cool.
Distributing Work Without Celery
But we do not know if they answered 4. Well, we do know that it's not the one where the impasse occurred, but that doesn't mean they answered it.
Why fiction is good for you
"easily add a representation to their seed docs to prevent this or at least force disclosure"

Could you please elaborate on this point?
In the end AT&T and the other carriers don't want to be "dumb pipes", but that's what consumers want. Can you imagine the same applied to water? "I'm sorry sir, but we know you used an unapproved toilet AND you went over your allotted shower minutes this month."

We can only hope that it'll work out in our favor and they can stop preaching to us how we should use their bandwidth.
You can also use TeX mode so that typing \phi will give you φ :).

Also, the very first time you use an input mode, you can just type C-\ to choose it. After you choose one C-\ toggles between that and the standard one, which is why you need C-x RET C-\ to choose another one instead.
Despite SMS being a hack that costs carriers (essentially) nothing to send [1], the reality of this situation is that telcos will be/are quickly losing one of their largest profit points to services like iMessage.

Real question: Where are they going to recover that profitability from?

[1] http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2008/12/text-messages-c/
I voice regret of actually using AT&T.
Aardwolf: remote JavaScript debugger for iPhone / Android / WindowsPhone 7
Just another silo. You know what has the ubiquity of SMS? Email.
State of Data Last Week #97
Statistical mechanics of magnet balls
The new Git-scm.com
You'll also get a g.co link if you click the link icon in Google Maps and then tick the Short URL box. http://g.co/maps/s6hjr
Providing value over what a 500 loc client app and a 50 loc Node.js server can offer would be a good start.
It's pretty simple actually (spoiler):

For any sequence containing fizzbuzz, match up the fizzbuzz with 15 and you're done. Any sequence of length >=7, fizzbuzz will be present. Thus, we only need to think about sequences length <7 that don't contain fizzbuzz. Solving this by brute force is constant time, since you only have finite possible inputs.
I don't know--entering \Phi isn't that bad. You don't need the {} bit, which would be annoying to type. With a clever editor (Emacs) you can even automatically complete it most of the time, so it isn't a real issue.

It's also certainly easier than learning a new keyboard layout (KDE actually offers a keyboard for APL, for example) as long as you're not going to be using too many special characters.
People told us we were crazy for months. During our YC interview PG told us it was one of worst ideas he'd heard. Thus, I believe founder conviction is one of the most important parts of building a company.

As an aside, SendHub isn't really focused on SMS marketing, there are lots of services out there for that - people use SendHub for both interactions within their business as well as communication with customers.
Fine-tuning Nanotech to Target Cancer
Why Socialcam Will Fail (the medium is the message)
Game Programming Camp
if this is truly the case, how do they provide your stored data over their website, i call shenanigans.
One Rubyist converts to Clojure
Fixed. Keep them coming :).
May I ask how this is Bayesian in anyway? I understand that using the term Bayesian is good for directing clicks to a site, but this seems like good old fashion frequentist math. None of the hallmarks of a Bayesian approach to the problem are here: having a distribution over hypothesis, having an explicit prior, computing the posterior of the distributions.

I have some experience with the medical trial literature and specifically bandit algorithms and using cumulative regret verses other statistical measures like PAC frameworks. And regret is most certainly not a Bayesian idea. Instead you are explicitly modeling the cost of each action (providing an A or B test to a user) instead of assuming all costs are equal.

Yes, this is a better approach because it explicitly models the costs associated with the exploration/exploitation dilemma. But, it is not Bayesian.
What makes the move from unlimited data to "pay for what you eat" is the bizarre tethering restriction: they expect people to pay $25 more per month to tether without additional data.

If your shifting your model to selling data, wouldn't you want to make it as easy as possible for your customers to consume more data?

I don't get it. If tethering was free, I'd use more of it, and happily pay for it.
I am not, actually. The inspiration for this gem is actually Gary Bernhardt's WAT Lighenting talk.

https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/wat
New and refreshed Git homepage
I really appreciate the customer service you just dealt me. :) I purchased recently and inquired about today's discount, and received a quick and fair response. Plus, you made an update to blog post as well to make things clear for customers. http://news.railstutorial.org/confusing-coupons
Thank you!
Exactly. The loudest voices and most effective negotiators are the ones who tend to rise to the top. The Suge Knight comparison is apt - someone with resources and intimidation skills, yet no talent pertinent to the meat of the industry, whether that's music production or tech. The game industry has it pretty bad, too, as far as promoting creatively bankrupt smooth talkers as soon as they've had the slightest brush with success. Try rewinding the clock a few years and pitching Minecraft to any of these guys, and they'd give you the game industry equivalent of Clive's rant, which I guess would be "Do you even play games? You have to have a narrative, an objective, a scruffy white male lead, and the ability to blow shit up. I don't even know what you're doing here, this isn't a game, it's a map editor. Nobody's gonna go for this shit." The solution is, of course, to scope your project like Notch did and release it yourself without listening to the cynics :)
oops... I parsed the title wrong. I didn't notice the hyphen. I thought it was curious that a planet would be eating white dwarfs.
I was going to say something similar. While I realize that we are mostly entrepreneurs here, aren't there some of us who believe in working hard and providing a reasonable service or product at a reasonable price? In all seriousness, people often consider giving to charities and whatnot as a contribution to society. Wouldn't it be even greater to simply run a service - especially in this case - for an "honest" amount of money; ie, enough to make some profit, save some, and cover costs? Is this line of thinking completely absent from society?
Paid marketing has never really worked for me. I've had a few apps reach number 1 in their categories and they key was getting lots of downloads in the first 24-48 hours. Once it's up there it's not much work to stay there.

I have a few hundred followers on Twitter and sent out several promo tweets a day.
I gave out 10-20 promo codes.
I left comments on forums which relate to the app (some forums will ban you but with some you will get good interaction.

So basically you need to get as many sales as possible out of the gate. I've found that if you don't make the top 25 in your category within the first few days it's never going to happen.
Given your statement that privacy is a relatively modern concept, I find it interesting that the EU has comparatively stronger data protection laws.

Those countries in general are way older and have older laws than the US. So if they can have strong data protection and privacy why should the US not have an equivalent?

Giving up protection in the name of commercial interest is not a good solution or compromise.
Where are they going to recover that profitability from?

They won't. They'll eventually need to adapt to the reality of their business, which is to move data from one point to another. They'll get to decide how to monetize their dumb pipes but their current SMS business model won't last.
Got a link for the 600k figure? According to the US Office of Personnel Management, http://www.fedscope.opm.gov/employment_access.asp, these are the annual numbers:

Sept 2011 - 2,130,289
Sept 2010 - 2,113,210
Sept 2009 - 2,038,183
Sept 2008 - 1,938,821
For me, it was also the last item in the autocomplete.
Your point about "widespread" and "mass market" is important.

People can't cope with encrypted email. There are very many broken implementations, and even with the good crypto people install it wrong or use it wrong.

Something that's idiot proof is important.

But then, "they'll" just pass a law requiring people to hand over the keys, or go to jail for X years. (Which could happen now under contempt of court laws, but would be easier under UK style RIPA law. (http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2000/23/contents) (http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/counter-terrorism/regulation-in...) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulation_of_Investigatory_Pow...) )
Yes, what a boneheaded argument. Even if the prediction was true, there's a lot of money to be made in 10 years. Should we stop buying new cars because there will be hovercars in 2022? Those judges are going to be holding their breath for a long time, waiting for that glorious day.
I bet Ma Bell had the same sad face on when they no longer had a monopoly on leasing phones to customers.

Time moves on and the pipes get commoditized. I hope congress chooses to side with the people rather than mandate profits for the corporations to whom we lease our airwaves.
Strange Sex Habits of Silicon Valley
> Can you imagine the same applied to water?

I don't get unlimited water for a monthly fee, I get charged per gallon. I'd imagine virtually all people have this situation.

Utilities - water, electricity, gas, etc. - compare to AT&T's new model better than their unlimited one.