skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I can't help but think of the deal GM struck with the unions back in the mid 20th century. Lower immediate wages for a nice retirement pension. Little did GM know about the trend of longer life spans.
The British Columbia Lottery Corporation had a similar incentive ($100 in credit) set up to promote their online gambling site. The trick involved betting on both sides of baccarat, which was better than roulette as it avoided the chance of the 0/00 outliers.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/story/2010/09...
I know some really angry designers that disagree, but fair enough.
Assuming a lifetime flying pass purchased for $350 000 in 1981 by a 35-year old and the 1981 US life expectancy of 74.01 years [1], one would have to fly only $15 505 each year to beat the 1981 - 2011 CPI CAGR (inflation) of 3.1% [2]. If we instead use the 2009 US life expectancy of 78.09 that number drops to $14 745.

I fly once or twice a month and don't buy first class tickets very often; it wouldn't take too much for me to cross $15k (and as a 21-year old my threshold would be $13 061 assuming constant life expectancy). Remember, the marginal cost to you of these flights is more or less zero.

AA saw this as a source of financing so one should really see what rate they seem to have financed themselves at. Let's assume we're slicing above travellers who fly 100 000 miles (between Delta's Platinum and Diamond [3]; I wasn't able to find what the average of the top two tiers in 1981 would have been). Airline price per mile for domestic coach ranges from $0.06 to $1.22 [4]. Let's use $0.58/mile as our conservative guess for the cost of a first class flight. Thus we have an airline financing $350 000 for 39 years at $58 000/year at an internal rate of return of about...16.5%.

If American Airlines really believed in a 16.5% floor on US interest rates they should have started by dropping the first part of their name.

Note that we've ignored that $350 000 buys both you and your cuddly friend a ticket.

[1] http://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f9_&#...

[2] http://www.usinflationcalculator.com/inflation/consumer-pric...

[3] http://www.delta.com/skymiles/about_skymiles/benefits_at_gla...

[4] http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870454090457545...
Offering "lifetime" deals to drug addicts is probably a much safer deal than offering "lifetime" deals to moderately successful business executives.
Another way to differentiate yourself from the plethora of eCommerce sites around is to have really good customer service and delivery. I once setup a small online shop selling one particular hot form of consumer electronics at the time, and what gave me the edge over drop-shipped competitors was overnight delivery to anywhere in the country. We always had stock on hand. People are willing to pay extra for good service and certainty, especially when they need something quick.

The way the business worked was that I was working full time in an unrelated s/w development job. My wife would pack the orders in the morning and the courier would pick up from our home location every afternoon. I looked after the invoicing etc. at night; but with an automated process it really didn't take up much extra time. I did try drop-shipping as well but it didn't work out as well for us, although of course drop-shipping would probably enable you to have a larger sales capacity.
This makes sense if you are doing a one-time split test, but not if you are doing ongoing tests akin to the scheme described in the article I link to below (which comes up on HN from time to time). The problem being that in these cases you never really stop testing: instead, you always assign some random proportion of incoming traffic to your various buckets based on your current statistical certainty.

http://untyped.com/untyping/2011/02/11/stop-ab-testing-and-m...

This not only has the advantage mentioned where you limit your regret for making a bad decision on too little evidence, but with some modifications to the algorithm (such as discounting old evidence from your inference) you can also deal with situations where the world in which you are running the different variations is itself changing over time, or where different types of users coming from different browsers may have different behaviors.

From the perspective of someone searching for your site, however, the results might be nearly identical: even if you have massive changes to the phrasing (having versions written in various regional dialects of English, for example), the resulting page will still largely be identical, possibly sentence-for-sentence (though not word-for-word). In this case, you will still want to get one of those variations indexed, and it might not matter which one.

As described, of course, this is both "cloaking" and not: the site is not treating GoogleBot differently than any other visiter on purpose, it is simply going to end up doing that because GoogleBot has different behavior on the site than a normal user, so it will learn and optimize (possibly somewhat randomly or uselessly) from this and end up treating that user differently than one coming from Internet Explorer (which may very well represent a different demographic of user).

It sadly does not seem like this advanced usage of testing is allowed by Google.
> you can sleep in the air

Interesting scenario: A millionaire blows all his assets in a bad investment. Now he's homeless, but he still lives in luxury thanks to his AA unlimited membership. He always schedules his flights so that he can enjoy a good night's sleep in the comfy, fully reclining first class seat.

(And then Leo DiCaprio plugs him into the Inception machine, and now Leo has 7.6 x 20 x 20 x 20 = 60K years to play with!)
As a serious question, what would you actually try to accomplish by suing? Monetary gain or a morale one?
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Simply Awesome...
I would also love to get into this. I am teaching myself programming but I'm far off from making a career out of it.

I believe I can usually communicate well with programmers, but is there anything else I can do to make myself qualified for this type of job?

Also, are there any recommended sites or places to look for these types of job postings besides the 99tests one mentioned? Thank you.
Interesting. Context via Wikipedia:

>>Henry Blodget (born 1966) is an American former equity research analyst, currently banned from the securities industry, who was senior Internet analyst for CIBC Oppenheimer during the dot-com bubble and the head of the global Internet research team at Merrill Lynch. Blodget is now the editor and CEO of The Business Insider, a business news and analysis site, and a host of Yahoo Daily Ticker, a finance show on Yahoo.

>>Blodget received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Yale University and began his career as a freelance journalist and was a proofreader for Harper's Magazine. In 1994, Blodget joined the corporate finance training program at Prudential Securities, and, two years later, moved to Oppenheimer & Co. in equity research. In October 1998, he predicted that Amazon.com's stock price would hit a pre-split price of $400 (which it did a month later, gaining 128%).

>>This call received significant media attention, and, two months later, he accepted a position at Merrill Lynch. In early 2000, days before the dot-com bubble burst, Blodget personally invested $700,000 in tech stocks, only to lose most of it in the years that followed. In 2001, he accepted a buyout offer from Merrill Lynch and left the firm.

>>In 2002, then New York State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, published Merrill Lynch e-mails in which Blodget gave assessments about stocks which conflicted with what was publicly published. In 2003, he was charged with civil securities fraud by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. He agreed to a permanent ban from the securities industry and paid a $2 million fine plus a $2 million disgorgement."

Link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Blodget
Rails and Ruby can have a little magic thrown in that makes it potentially difficult to debug.
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A younger, stupider me would have suggested writing for one of the freelancer sites. However, that seems to put her on a collision course with lots of not-so-savvy-but-they-don't-need-to-be folks who would be thrilled to make 1/4 of her reserve price.

Ignoring credentials for a moment, does your wife have any skill which is commercially valuable? Can she develop one? Many knowledge-worker things can get delivered over the Internet at fairly high price points.

For example, does she have a solid grasp of high school mathematics? Does she understand who cares about that and why? If so, that trivially supports $40+ an hour. (Customer: Tiger Mom in a high-achieving suburban school district.)

Does she have native proficiency in a foreign language? (n.b. English is a foreign language to lots of people who have money!) Tutoring goes from free to $10 to $40+ an hour. (Why the range? Customer selection. Think less "high school foreign exchange student" and more "executive recently transferred from Nomura Securities to their NYC office who feels his career growth will be stymied by his poor conversational English skills.")

Does she have a hobby which is common among upper middle class Americans and which carries social esteem? Can she teach it?

For more about this general topic, see Ramit Sethi.
What's more likely: nearly infinite sentient universes complete with false memories of human experiences emerging from entropic chaos, or that we don't quite understand the nature of entropy?

The Boltzmann theory is one of those thought experiments that should draw into question it's assumptions out of the pure absurdity of its logical conclusions rather than be taken seriously itself.
I don't know if you can qualify them as necessarily "better" than a document editor simply because the advantage of a resume creator is in its design capabilities.

For those who are uninitiated with graphic design, having an app that can pump out a sleek, modern-looking resume is worth the money. It just comes down to aesthetics. Personally, I use LaTex to create my resume.

And to address the OP's question, I'm sure that is one motivation. But you also have to take into account that a resume-builder is one of the simplest web-apps you could build.
I'd like to point you to Ludum Dare, where 1402 games were made in a weekend (just in the most recent LD), all by small teams or individuals (myself included).

These may (or may not) be the quality that you would expect, but to say that people don't like to build games for fun, and that some would be fun and possibly take off, couldn't be more wrong.
> To wit, the barrier to entry is low.

... but the barrier to success on the scale of FarmVille or Draw Something is very high. That's when a company with massive amounts of money that can be spent to hire game developers and market to users has a distinct advantage.
Eugenics is mass murder and and forced sterilization is the murder of the unborn. There's plenty of resources and goodwill to make up for unwanted groups by a certain few. You take your mate selection and keep it to yourself.

I haven't looked deeply into Russells reasonings and theories in this area, nor do I want to.
let's not forget about the real tax from winning and the payment. govt always wants his share and the lottery won't pay in lump sum.
This is all bad probabilities if you don't take into account the fact that you repeatedly buy tickets. I'd like to see a more detailed study counting the probability of never winning when playing systematically for 20 years, for example.

But nevertheless. Yes, the lottery is a tax for the poor. And if you expect your life to change for the better by winning a big bag of money (that you will have taken to the other suckers who lost, minus the organiser's fee), then you just need to reconsider what makes a happy life. You should also consider how many people get isolated after they have won, not knowing how to deal with such a change, such a "responsibility", such a social pressure from family and friends after they have won.

I'd never play the lottery not because of the ridiculously low chances of winning (I also am a statistician), but because what I would win would change nothing to my human condition. I prefer reading Epictetus instead. It's cheaper and the effect lasts longer.
Not the stock I'm concerned with. It's the fact that 1 in 8 people in the world now use Facebook monthly. When that becomes 1/3 or 1/2, what happens? A successful IPO can make that happen.
Thanks. It took me about two weeks to get the MVP up and running.
Yes. If you want to go then go.

I've been to startup weekend and can say there is a good mix of people of all levels and backgrounds. When it comes to teams join one for the idea or for the people. That's about it.
Send me an angel..... right now!
Age group is not the determining factor there.
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Note that Ubuntu disables hibernate by default in the current release 12.04 ("Precise Pangolin").

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PrecisePangolin/ReleaseNotes/UbuntuD...
Interestingly, I can fantasize about winning the lottery and spending all that lovely, lovely money too. All without buying a lottery ticket.
I think there really is no silver bullet here. In many cases, a particular problem has a simple solution with a lot of state. To fully specify a pure function on that much state, you may need a lot of working memory.

In certain cases, you may be able to reduce the size of working memory through recursion or related techniques: "The red-black tree T without node X is the subtree on the left without node X if ... possibly rotated based on the color of the top node in subtree T' ..."

But sometimes, it really is simpler to just do things imperatively with mutable state: "First recurse into subtrees until you find node X. Then, unlink it from its parent. ... Rotate if its color is red. Repeat with parent node ..."

There are many things that are strictly simpler with mutable state. Most prominently I think are hash tables, but there are others. Not all programs are best-described as a composition of maps, folds, and filters.
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'The decision of whether to buy a lottery ticket shouldn’t be based on the probability of winning, or the expected return of a ticket, but on the entertainment value that comes from imagining a different life.'

sounds like college, s/entertainment/networking
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Isn't this just a simple matter of probability? Given an event, however unprobable it is, it can happen given infinite time? From a purely mathematical standpoint, this is correct.
I completely agree.

Perhaps some of these startups assess that LinkedIn is too "corporate" and too complex for creative or younger folks and are trying to tap into that market.

But most of these startups are:
* Build your resume with us, its really easy
* Buy our templates
* Maintain multiple resumes etc.

These are services that job sites probably already offer. I just haven't been able to explain the surge of numbers of these resume building startups.. :-/

Full disclosure: I freelanced for one such startup earlier this year..
This kind of stuff goes into management books as classic case of why merely quarter to quarter of focus on company performance is so dangerous.

I am sure the then CEO and his fleet of execs even got a good deal of rewards for rolling out this scheme.

If companies really want to make up on profits in such a low margin industry the way really is to make travel cheaper and easier. Not offering unlimited plans and then expecting customers to not treat them as such.
Fair point, though it stands to be mentioned that this would require an Act of Parliament and hasn't happened since consols were first offered in 1751 (though the coupon was reduced through 1903).
I think what Dennis means is that there is a philosophical reason why working memory is limited, and it's not just an idiosyncrasy of organic meat-brains.

Of course the specific number is highly affected by human biology.
Please forgive the self promotion, but in an effort to teach myself something about code, and to help people I know in a similar situation as you described, I have been building out a Website with resources for making a little bit of extra money that I think you might find helpful.

http://cushmoney.com/

Personally, I would suggest taking a look at both LeapForce and LionBridge, because they offer 10-20 hours a week working from home at $15/hour evaluating Google's search results and doing other online tasks. They have an application/approval process to go through, but it could be a good fit for what you are looking for.

Side note: I know the site isn't really polished yet, but I'd love some constructive feedback if you have any.
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Agreed - you probably won't reach anywhere near $1K per month unless you are in the 300k hits per day territory, which is pretty much impossible for most bloggers. Just extrapolating my own blog figures from adsense - I've made maybe $50 in adsense so far, from half a million views (over the past several months). While blogging is technically easy to monetize, it is very difficult to make decent money from it.
If you're analyzing lotteries, one thing you have to think about is the diminishing utility of money. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diminishing_marginal_utility ). Your first dollar is a lot more useful than your millionth dollar. Or another way, having a million dollars is not a million times as useful as having one dollar - it's a lot less useful than that. This makes a lottery a pretty bad investment even when the expected-returns are in your favor.

Not to mention all those stories of people who win the lottery and then lose all their friends out of jealousy. But that's harder to analyze.
This is what made me spit out my drink at the top of page 2

But that crash was a product of investors’ and analysts’ overexuberance (sorry!),
not evidence of a fundamental flaw in the tech industry’s start-up ecosystem.
In fact, given that this technique doesn't have a name yet, I propose that it henceforth be known as "Hooper Selection"
You may be able to increase your expected value by choosing numbers that are less popular. It would be interesting to research the psychology behind number selection and choose combinations less likely to have a multi-payoff outcome.
Look at it from a usability perspective. I see a pretty direct parallel to software. Especially in terms of making the most common operations simple to execute, and in reducing the "number of clicks" to make a timer change happen (although admittedly we know enjoyment > number of clicks).
Honestly can't people check that someone else didn't already post the same story?
I believe the author is trying to convey that even a remote possibility of winning fuels his fantasy. It is impossible to win without buying a lottery ticket.
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And compared to putting down the window in my car, turning on the AC is a lot of work. Two buttons and a dial compared to just one button.

One is clearly superior to the other though and anyone going near a car should have zero difficulty with either...
Ask HN: How many of you webdevs got degrees in EE/CE or similar?
I'm currently a junior in college studying Electrical Engineering with a focus in Computer Architecture and Organization, but ever since I was young I've had a passion for designing and developing websites and have become pretty skilled at both backend development and front-end design.

While I fully intend to continue my study and get a masters in computer engineering, I'm seriously considering going into web development as a career or starting my own web-related tech business after that. I was wondering how many of you who do development professionally (design, programming, or both) got EE/CE degrees? Does knowing the underlying principles of the computer hardware or languages like assembly and c (in addition to ruby/php) give any advantages in professional web programming? Is the pay comparable over the short and long term?
Jesus what a poorly produced video.

"aaand, we're done.."

Correction:

iPads + INTEGRATION + Medicine = the future.

Seriously, the iPad is not a freaking silo. The iPad is a portal. You can only use the iPad as a node on a system. Without access to, integration with and innovation around the data that you need to access the iPad is nothing.

I love where Dr Chrono is going, but the iPad as an end-all-be-all is too short sighted.

They even stated in the vid, that their first efforts were not enough.

The problem with Dr Chrono in the hospital, as I have stated at length on HN before, is that Hospitals are billion dollar businesses - they have MILLIONS invested in their EHR and these systems are VERY complex (walled garden syndrome)

Dr Chrono, I hope you read this: INTEGRATE NOW with Nurse call and provide VOALTE like features. Have a dr chrono iphone and ipod touch version that uses wifi.

I have a TON of experience with this. Email me.
> It boggles the mind every time I read about one of these "unlimited for life with a fixed initial cost" products.

"For life" is a particularly egregious example, but these sort of conflicting incentives are everywhere. It's one reason I've been so happy with the popularity of pay-as-you-go models in, e.g., AWS.

I've always been leery of "unlimited" hosting for a monthly fee because your incentives aren't exactly aligned with the host. NearlyFreeSpeech.net, for example, highlights that fact in their marketing materials that since it's pay-per-use, the more successful your site is, the more money they make, so it's win-win.

Netflix and home broadband also suffer from these problems.
who the fk sold it for that price - beaker? ;-)
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All you can eat buffets at $x a month kind of schemes perfectly fit this case.

The catch in such businesses is they serve repeated food, often spicy and oily. Which makes them unhealthy. By that, they effectively manage to make their customers eat less and increase their profits.

Except that to keep customers in the game, at times they do serve good food at some period.
A heavy theme of the article is how good Zuck is at building a suitable management team. He'll have to pick a Tim Cook someday.