skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>I'm not sure general brand awareness efforts are as financially valuable as interactions with customers that are in "I'm about to buy something" mode.

Maybe? Personally, I spend all my advertising dollars/effort (and good brand building requires far more effort than dollars.) on brand building, and as little as possible on per-customer sales (except as it relates to the 'brand building' - support is part of that.)

I mean, it's like commission. For co-location, it's traditional to give the referring party 10% of what the customer pays you for the life of their contract. (sometimes it's for the life of the customer, and through any upgrades, too.) - every customer pays a different price for the same product, and you are expected to spend hours selling to the customer.

My approach is to put the price and information on the website, and then advertise that. Spend little effort on each individual sale.

The advantage of per-customer effort is that you can specially craft your offering to charge as much as that particular customer can pay.

The disadvantage, of course, is that is a lot of work, and it doesn't help your reputation any. This is a big reason why IAAS is crushing co-location; It literally takes months to get the real price out of a co-location provider, while amazon has the prices right there on the website. (I mean, the off the bat price is about twice as high as the "real price" after negotiating and looking around in co-location. Cogent quoted me $3/Mbps six months ago. I signed papers at $0.65/Mbps. There isn't as much room when it comes to power? but my highest quote is easily twice the price of the lowest quote.)

I don't know about you, but as a customer? I will pay more to know the price up front (and to be reasonably sure that I will pay a similar price if I need more later) - I mean, I won't pay 400% more, but I would pay 30% more, that negotiation isn't free on either side.

So yeah, I think brand building is the better advertising value in the long term. It is more effort, though; writing articles probably has a better return than buying ads for brand building. (buying ads has a place, too.)
programming languages are often less "designed" than you might think. consider the history of C: the path leading up to the first formal spec, ANSI C 89, was twenty years long and involved endless mutations and competing versions--commonly called "dialects"! many languages (perl, python, etc.) have only a reference implementation, not a spec per se, and things like HTML (not precisely a programming language, but definitely a computer language) are so flexible and underspecified in practice as to resemble human language quite closely.
How the iPhone 5 will have a 4" screen w/o increasing size or fragmenting apps
You seem to be disagreeing very strongly with a bunch of things I didn't say. Let me clear up a few misconceptions:

1. I don't believe Ruby is taking over the world. Six years ago it was, but now it's fairly mature and stable. I do believe that Ruby is better-loved overall than Java. (Incidentally, you'll notice Java is dropping two orders of magnitude faster than Ruby on TIOBE's chart.)

2. I have been programming Objective-C since 2001 when OS X came out. I'm pretty familiar with it.

3. HN is not "the horizon of the entire programming world," but it is pretty well-embedded in the Silicon Valley startup scene, which is what I was discussing at the time. My point is this: Take a look at any area where passionate coders get to choose any technology stack they want and you will find Ruby is generally more popular than Java. If HN's job listing isn't convincing to you, let's take a look at another place where coders choose their own language — open source. On Github's ranking of most popular languages, Ruby is #2 and Java is #5.

4. I am not trying to convince you that you should love or hate any languages. I am saying that many people do, and their feelings towards these languages affect how they behave.

As a side note, I agree that programming languages are tools, but honestly, most artists and craftsmen I know do have favorite tools — a favorite violin, a favorite kind of film, etc. Heck, many people have a favorite chair. It's OK if you don't, but it's not that weird.
The article mentions "arrested for a felony" not "convicted". Obviously these are very different things, and it shouldn't be too hard to see why some people have a problem with people found innocent still having their privacy invaded, not to mention the incentives it gives authorities to arrest more people. It almost encourages 'fishing' by arresting people with little to no evidence (or on unrelated charges) to get the DNA sample, and then releasing them without pressing charges. Groups that already feel targetted by the police might be wary of policies which give incentives for making questionable or spurious felony arrests in order to get data for investigations into future or previous crimes.
> when you also have to remember their redefinitions of words like SHOULD, MUST, MAY, MIGHT, PERHAPS, QUITE POSSIBLY

So why not generate them with tooltips, i.e. when you hover your mouse over an ALL CAPS word, you'll get a tooltip with RFC2119?
So what's the business model here now ?
>I don't see how fixing the income inequality fixes the root problem there.

It doesn't, but it might make the lives of millions of people better in the medium term, and possibly result in knock on legislative changes that give more power to working people: repeal of anti-labour laws and so on. Which makes further real change to the system more likely and possible.

You will find many far left wing types have little interest in proposals to fiddle with the tax system, for the reasons you describe: it doesn't fix the real problem. And in a funny way it may well be against the interests of the proletariat: it prolongs the slow death of the current system. That doesn't mean the far left doesn't talk about income inequality of course, but they do so with a different aim: to increase awareness among the working class of their exploitation, with eventual revolutionary goals.

People have been debating the relative merits of gradual reform/revolutionary change for a long time now…
Submitted this because I feel very strongly about data caps/throttling, whether for broadband or home networks.

However, I also have always disliked the phone contracting system in general, because it serves only to make it harder to switch networks, thus reducing competition in the market.

Given that the only reason I stay on Verizon is that I have an unlimited data plan with a 4G phone, if that goes away, I'll just switch to a GSM network off-contract, and get all the benefits of using a GSM phone, plus the flexibility of having no contract.

I'd prefer to hold on to the unlimited data, but I bet I'm not alone in saying that unlimited data is the very last thing keeping me tied to Verizon - I wonder if there are enough of us that this may actually hurt them.
Haven't you heard of Amazon Instant Video? It has no subscription fee and has the latest movies for rent, on demand, and the highest they go is, I believe $3.99. I don't have a cable or satellite TV subscription at all but I have a PS3 and can use Amazon Instant Video with it, I believe there are devices that you can get to use it if you don't have a current gen video game system.

Personally, I don't like Netflix's streaming video model, I much prefer that of Amazon's but I would definitely like to see the price decrease. Having a large library of movies (mostly older, some fairly recent), doesn't do me any good unless it has the movie I want to watch at that time. I don't watch all that many movies so when I do watch one I want it to choose from any movie to do so, not be limited to a subset of movies for which they were able to negotiate rights to stream them.

I think the "buffet" model of streaming content works for TV shows a lot better since they're shorter and most people are more willing to watch what they consider a "sub-optimal" choice of a show than a movie.
> There is very little automation required in writing, though.
>
> Writing is for people, not compilers, and people don't like reading the same thing over and over yourself.

isn't romance half the US fiction market or something? romance authors are basically human automatons all executing (not implementing) the same function over and over again.
"limits on income are likely to encourage people not to try truly hard or truly risky ventures."

When people say things like this it reminds me of religious fundamentalists who claim that a world without belief in God would be some sort of anarchist murder-on-the-streets hellscape because people wouldn't have a reason to act morally or ethically anymore.

Not only is it incredibly pessimistic to believe either of these things, but you don't have to look far to see tons and tons of real-world examples that prove that the statement is completely ridiculous.
Yep, each distinct photo is independently sent.
Also it is often external influences that will drive performance improvements e.g. Nginx, Redis, Memcached, Javascript caching etc.
If his concept was that people become wealthy because they were "successful" and exceeded the effort of others, thus they deserve to be wealthy then I absolutely think inheritance takes away from that concept.
Unless there's something I missed, json.Unmarshal works the same way iff you have a struct that matches the JSON data very closely. If the JSON data is a little more free-form, you're stuck with a map of interface{}. Having to muck about with types is just a little tedious compared to JavaScript where there aren't really any types and anything can concisely be converted to a string. (I did a little project involving JSON a while ago in Go, but I'm hardly an expert at the language, so if I missed something, I apologize for the misinformation.)

In retrospect, I think I may have overstated it a little bit, and I doubt this problem would crop up too often for most apps.
The issue is that a very small number of very wealthy people are holding onto a very large amount of money. Any money that isn't being used to buy, sell, or invest in something is effectively just taken right out of the economy. Everyone is poorer because this money is "gone" from the system. All this wealth is locked away as a number in a computer.
Yeah, obviously two totally different things. Just a cheeky title since I found it humorous that they both ended up with the same acronyms and the GIL at this point is well understood/feared/discussed while this import lock is something that I hadn't ever heard of.
Cocoa's key-value-coding in javascript and perl
hey guys

just wanted to let peeps know that i've put up libraries in both javascript and perl to bring cocoa's key-value-coding to both languages.

basically they're perl and javascript implementations of cocoa's NSKeyValueCoding category. available here:

http://quile.github.com/keyvaluecoding-perl/
http://quile.github.com/keyvaluecoding-js/

cheers
The reason is very simple: Open Source has become a standard way for the industry to produce software, with even companies like Microsoft and Apple participating. So mentioning it in you marketing materials is a bit like emphasizing that your software runs on computers.
He should also use that re-record as a chance to put in more data to support his point.

And flesh out his thinking. For instance, that bit about:

> "If the typical American family still got today the same share of income they earned in 1980, they would earn about 25% more and have an astounding $13,000 more a year. Where would the economy be if that were the case?"

I would love to see some stabs (pessimistic, median, and optimistic) at following out the economic effects of that question. What is a reasonable ratio of the $13k which would be put toward more spending, and how would that effect the demand seen by businesses, and thus the number of jobs supported?
Would be nice if it converted lists into their <ol> or <ul> equivalents.
That is not to say that the level of inequality is not greater than it was before or is elsewhere. The extent of inequality has grown in the states (http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2011/02/income-inequalit...) and compares unfavorably with other countries (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_equ...).
Targeting medicare and social security is silly anyway. They are funded via a separate tax (FICA/SECA) that only applies to the first 200K/250K of income.

And the only reason why SS/Medicare are running out of money is because the government frequently borrows against social security surpluses. You may remember, back in 2000, one of Al Gore's campaign promises was to put social security into a "lock box" with the hopes of stopping this (IMO it likely would not have buy-in from congress but it's still a good idea).
Go on Fiverr and you can get similar for $5, ditto for Twitter following offers. But using this approach on a serious project you don't want getting shut down in future? Risky and not worth it IMHO.
Isn't Node's http.Server also a basic HTTP listener? What's the distinction you're trying to draw?
Thanks for sharing! Much more convenient than Wikipedia, my usual go-to site for status codes.
A Facebook Co-Founder Reflects on the Path Forward
you know, now that i think about it, the first question really ought to be, why the hell does the man who brought us the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloomberg_Terminal bloomberg terminal need to "learn to code"? is he just talking about updating his skills, or has he actually been running one of the world's biggest data companies for more than thirty years without knowing how to program?
Your point doesn't stand. Read the rest of the data. Namely, notice that according to this data, the median AGI of the United States is $32,396/year.

So half the population is making less than $32k/year. Yes, the top 10% and the top half of the population are taking on almost all of the income-tax burden.... because they (we, in my case) have almost all the income.

There's nothing fair about demanding tax money from people who are just plain poor. You tax the rich, because rich people have money.

Now, we could talk about distributing the tax burden "fairly" across the rich and the middle class, but that assumes we have large, broad middle class. Which we don't: making a "middle-class salary" like, say, $66,193/year already puts you on the border of the top 25% of the country.

And then notice that to get from the top 25% to the top 10%, you have to make almost twice as much money. Top 10% to top 5% isn't that large of an increase, but top 5% to top 1% requires more than doubling your income.

So, to be clear:

To go from median to top 25%, you need to roughly double your income. To go from 75th percentile to 90th percentile, you need to almost double your income. To go from 95th percentile to 99th percentile, you need to more-than-double your income. We're operating a tax system designed for a bell-curve income distribution when what we actually have is a power-law income distribution.
The tax cuts weren't just for the wealthy though. You're basically just doing the Buffet-rule by only removing Bush tax cuts for the wealthy. Not going to help much.
How American Men Are Using the Russian Facebook to Find Brides
Maria: A real MVC javascript framework
Why I switched back from Heroku to CloudBees
Quote:

"When Heroku announced that they supported Java applications, and then Grails applications, it was not long before I migrated all my apps over to their servers. But more recently, I’ve had issues with a more plugin-rich application. And tonight, after several weeks of fighting, I migrated this app to CloudBees for one general reason: Heroku was really designed with RoR in mind (...)"
This article is so full of platitudes and buzzwords it is embarrassing.
Much easier to read. Thanks.
Why I keep an old pair of Jeans
I will be at Lake Shasta, current plan to be at the top of Sugarloaf Mountain at the head of Doney Creek. I already have the shade 14 welders glass, but I'm still hacking together the pinhole telescope for projecting an image.
Can a Sense of Purpose Slow Alzheimer's?
At the end of the day, a country is a business.

No, it's not. It needs to manage its finances responsibly, but that is quite different from being a profit-generating business.
In addition, the point at which the top tax rate kicks in has varied quite a bit throughout the 1900's. For instance, in the 1950's, when we had a top marginal tax rates over 90%, the top bracket also kicked in at 400k, which would be nearly 4 million in todays dollars. That's why merely looking at the top marginal rate is kind of misleading.

http://ntu.org/tax-basics/history-of-federal-individual-1.ht...
> and the highest they go is, I believe $3.99

So that's 2 movies a month for roughly the same amount? With Netflix, I watch 2 movies a day. Have to agree that the offering is a little sparse, but it's a much better alternative than watching regular TV.
Amazon Instant Video doesn't work on an Xbox 360, which is what I use for streaming Netflix. The rentals work on my Tivo, but not the free streaming included with Amazon Prime. And it doesn't work on my iPad at all.

Netflix works in all these places and works well.
Pentagon seeks to join 3-D printing revolution
can believe this is a YC company, can not see any value out of it....
Half the taxpayers of the United States make less than $32k/year. How's that a comfortable standard of living?
I've been just watching this discussion unfold up till now - and I've been impressed at the level of analysis coming from both sides - arguments that are at least in some minor way backed up by numbers.

But your comment is offensive. Dangerously so.

Your view is actually incredibly typical throughout history - its latest incarnation is Social Darwinism, where one mistakenly applies a biological and genetics principle to economics and morality.

Social Darwinism has been the tool with which countless people have been oppressed, abused, and killed. The pro-slavery crowd used that argument - that colored people were genetically inferior, and that if they were meant be to free, they'd already be. This line of thinking was also popular amongst the Eugenics movement in the early 20th century, which had clear and strong ties to the Nazi party (boy this argument just Godwins itself).

With its colorful history, social Darwinism is nowadays inseparable from racism and fascism.

But your claim is even more specious than this lot of despicable people. At least the slavers and the Nazis made arguments that certain races deserved their lot due to "inferior" genetics, but your appeal to Darwin/evolution doesn't even involve the least bit of biology. It's just pure hand-waving by applying one completely unrelated field to another, with zero facts to even attempt to back it up.

Shame on you.
The 1% is the 1%.
Never heard of the site until now, I really like the design and the idea. I can see why this can be useful.
Countries are the largest companies that exist on the planet.
There's an important difference between wealth and income that PG does not go into.

Sure, I'll buy the idea that taxing income discourages work (though its impact is far more muted than some people would like to suggest).

However, I've not yet seen any argument that taxing wealth itself discourages work or wealth creation. If anything, taxing wealth keeps people from sitting on their assets and doing mere "wealth preservation".

If I were a Ramen-profitable startup entrepreneur, I'd much rather be taxed at 2% of my net wealth than at 30% (or even 15%) of my capital gains. Indeed, if I were anyone who planned on leveraging my capital to actively create wealth (c.f. Elon Musk) I should much prefer wealth taxes over capital gains taxes.

If we live in a meritocracy then anyone with a lot of wealth should be able to relatively easily average >6% ROI year-over-year.
How common is your birthday? Find out exactly with an interactive heat map.
Former citizens who renounced citizenship to avoid taxation.-Any alien who is a former citizen of the United States who officially renounces United States citizenship and who is determined by the Attorney General to have renounced United States citizenship for the purpose of avoiding taxation by the United States is excludable.

It would be hard to prove that he renounced his citizenship specifically to avoid taxation (he did it nearly 6 months before the IPO, and had been living abroad for several years), and even you could prove it, it is not an automatic exclusion.
Agreed, I'm kinda surprised so many people are talking about it. You might as well write a series on whether to be religious or not... nobody's business but yours.
You can find soldiers at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, that doesn't make the tomb a military installation. The mere presence of military personnel does not make a facility a military installation. Since the Pentagon is where the civilian leadership of the military is located, the building is arguably a civilian facility.
It's easy to pay TARP back in full when you can borrow at the Fed at 0% and lend at 5%. Favor. Education performance has stagnated ever since the DoEducation was created. Who benefited? Not me or my kids!

And the fact that we have third-rail (untouchable) programs in this country is NOT a strong argument in favor of more "investments".
I'm a member of 23andMe. I have my mom's face and my dad's bad sense of humor, so there were no surprises when it was confirmed that they are my biological parents. :)

However! In order to see close relatives (anything closer than 4th cousins) you actually have to click a checkbox and confirm that you want to see who you're closely related to. And the other person has to also. 23andMe WARNS you that you might be surprised at the results.

So yeah. 23andMe is awesome, title is linkbait. You should disregard the silly article and become a customer of 23andMe, it's important to know your own genetics. It only costs 200 bucks-- compare that cost to future medical costs that you don't prepare for!
FWIW, I tested this a bit with a friend, and it only shows that you've read the message if you're signed in to FB chat. I always stay offline and the sender was not able to see the read-receipt.
I find it ironic how Open Source was originally coined to pitch the practical benefits of free [as in speech] software to business-types without having confusion between free-as-in-freedom and free-as-in-price and now Open Source has become so synonymous with free-as-in-price that it has essentially the same problem it was coined to solve.
If you're working on a problem that you can solve alone, you need a bigger problem.
Aren't there two issues here

* how much (usually as a % GDP) should / does a govt take?

* how does that tax burden get shared out

the first is an issue of services provided by govt, but thesecond is an issue of fairness.

If you want more services you need to pay. As a % of GDP the USA takes about 26-28 % whereas pretty much every other Western country is between 35 and 45%.

My take on that is welfare costs. Full health and pension support for all the USA is going to be expensive, and will probably bring the US in line with Europe

the issue now is fairness - but even taut is really about ability. The easy targets are the middle classes - they have money but rarely enough to take advantage of tax loopholes

but if all the money is now held by the richest 2% then the richest 2 % will pay. The alterntive is no government

we all live by the 1930s maxim - I rob banks because that's where the money is. If the richest people in society have the money, that's where the bank robbers / IRS will go.

Fair has little to do with it