skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Developing a jQuery Plug-In: Virtual Earth Maps
Good basic ideas, I wonder at what point the infamous $1,000 limit for lower level corporate purchases is to be considered. That is, if your competitor's software costs $700 should yours be priced $900 or $1900 or even $3500 as the article suggests.
If this is Release 1.0 of the electric car by the time we get to 3.0 we'll be thinking of internal combustion the way we now think of horseshoes and harnesses.

It's still basically just version 1.0 and slightly over 100k in 20 years I expect few people are still going to use gas for "high end" cars. (outside of a few endurance sports.) Adding a fast swap battery pack and/or a transmission is not really that hard of a long term problem. It's a compromise and it's a lot cheaper than many high end cars people are comparing it to so other trade offs or a little more cash would go a long way.

PS: A Bugatti Veyron can't drive 20 min at top speed without refueling but I am not talking trash about gas powered cars.
First, look at your variable costs. These are the things that go up as more people use your product. In SaaS, that means bandwidth and storage. Price accordingly. I think $0.25 per GB for both storage and bandwidth is a reasonable assumption (yes AWS can give you lower, but you have to deal with request pricing and S3 vs. EC2 persistent storage, etc.). Don't price yourself lower than that. If you want to give people 5GB of storage space and 50GB of transfer, you need to charge them at least $15. Those are real costs.

Any free version will be crippled because storage and bandwidth cost money. That's ok. Give a few MB away for free with unlimited time (unless you have a SaaS that isn't going to be crippled by low storage allowances). That way, people can sign up without a credit card and really use the system without any hassle. If they really want it, they'll need more storage and pay. Most of the accounts will probably end up being browsers who don't really want/need your service, but that's ok.

Take into consideration your market. Is this a market with lots of users? If so, go for lower margins, you'll make it back in scale. If this is a niche, that niche will pay up and you'll have fewer users so you'll have to charge more.

Most importantly, make it obvious. Don't make it so that someone looking at your rates wonders why the pricing scheme is the way it is. Make it obvious how to sign up and terminate. Make it hassle-free. It makes you look professional. Don't do paypal or some other form of payment simply because it's easy/cheap. It's a hassle. It looks unprofessional. Make it easy for users to get to what they want - hopefully it's your product, but if not they're still people that deserve the respect of ease of use.
How about just setting a fair rent and leaving it at that? Simpler, humane and with only a minor risk of less than 100% occupancy if your rent reflects the income of your target customers. If you are worried then you might set it on the high side to start off with and then reduce it (for everyone) to increase occupancy - as required.
It would be some pretty big spaceships that could outpace the birth rate.
Venture Capitalists Look Ahead to a Bleak Year
Best Ruby/RoR Web Hosts Compared
Yeah, second that. This is a real estate question that people who run office buildings and apartment buildings need to do all the time. You can have empty space if the other spaces make up for it. Or you can lower it month by month until you have all your spaces filled. You won't make the same amount of money each way, so you need to see how big the demand is and how much money you want to make. If you're feeling generous, lower the rent until all your spaces fill up, and then lower it some more.

If you're being altruistic, or want to cater to some really low budgets, you can have a "artist in residence" type program where you sponsor one or two spaces for free, or you can have a row of desks for single person freelancers that go for cheap.
Social browsing shares users' search habits
Yes, I remember the incident.
Venture capitalists' 2009 outlook bearish
Regarding 1), it's trickier than that. The issue is that there are two types of inflation, monetary inflation (more dollars floating around) and price inflation (stuff costs more money). Due to hoarding, these two types of inflation may not agree with each other. If you inflate the currency by printing money, much of it may be hoarded, since owning money is (in a deflationary environment) an investment. So the money supply increases, but consumer/investor prices continue to deflate!

Now you have large chunks of money hidden away, but prices continue to fall. This continues, until you reach a tipping point and price inflation returns. Then the hoarders spend their money, and prices inflate rapidly (price inflation catches up with money inflation). This isn't a good thing, since it's a major monetary shock, and can lead to a crisis of confidence, etc...

Probably the only way to avoid this scenario is to make sure that the newly printed money has a high velocity, but it isn't clear how to do this. The classical answer is to give it to lower income people, but it's not obvious that this will work in a deflationary environment (poor person buys TV, TV manufacturer hoards money).
We considered a similar approach with our coworking space in Brighton, UK (http://theSkiff.org). We were going try an airline ticket model. eg First people to commit to paying for a particular month get it at the cheapest price with the last desk to be filled going at a premium.

However, while we felt this might work well if we were simply selling serviced office space, we didn't think it would help create a nice coworking environment. In a coworking space the individuals that come to the space are far more important than anything else. If we made a big deal out of the pricing structure, we might end up with people that are their primarily because they see it as cheap and not because they want somewhere to cowork. We choose to just keep it simple and replicate Citizen Space's approach: http://coworking.pbwiki.com/PricingExamples
So basically, Jeff's just saying, "If you look like X, you've just set all the expectations of expectations X. You'd better meet them. Oh, and BTW it's just like this other concept that got on the front page of reddit!"
If we can get to the point where we're reversing aging, I think we can safely assume reversible sterilization.

Use an economic solution (really simplified here): When you receive anti-aging treatment, you're temporarily sterilized. Each person then gets 1 credit for a child. 3 credits are required to bear a child. One can purchase or sell their credit for children as one would like.

For the first time in human history, if one wants children, they'll have to put conscious effort into it. Only those who _really_ want children will have them.

...unless you don't want anti-aging treatment, then you can have as many kids as you'd like and become 'immortal' the old fashioned way.
I think if it's a nanotech-based solution to aging, we'll have the resources to build some whopping big monster colony ships.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Culture#Orbitals
Predicting the future isn't for Kurzweil
The Do-It-Yourself Scholarship
The problem is the wide income distribution. One freelancer can make as many as 15 times the other one, so what's a fair price for one would be ridiculous for the other, and what's a fair price for the poor one would be under our break-even price. When it comes to apartments, 95% of the households fall within an x to 2x income range.
3X Liquidation Preferences Are Back
Sure, but I'd guess that there's a difference if resources are transferred back and forth within a small region, i.e. neighboring countries warring for a few hundred years, compared to some other country far away taking the resources with them after a successful invasion. And then continue to take everything they can get their hands on for the next few hundred years... It pools the resources in a single place, and as a result it also pools the ability to refine those resources in the same place (because its pretty hard to learn refining if you don't have anything to refine). Maybe it could be compared to how a town supported by resource producing villages made it possible to specialize in a trade that wasn't viable in a village setting.

And the killing off part was mostly a reference to diseases brought (without intention) to the Americas that more or less killed the civilizations there.

But maybe I'm just brainwashed by the people on the left.
Yummyfajitas has a good answer to this elsewhere on-thread. Basically, money collects at whichever firm needs it least. If you give it to low-income people and they spend it, then it's now in the hands of someone who probably just received a lot of money. If they don't need to spend it and expect its value to go up, they'll hoard it.

You need consistent inflationary expectations across the economy to keep money flowing. Keynes actually suggested that this is why it took a couple thousand years after the invention of money for a modern industrial society to take hold. A manor lord has every incentive to hoard the rents his peasants give him, so instead of pumping them back into the economy by funding the promising waterwheel a bright upstart proposed, he sits on his treasure hoard.
Nokia 6233 No Network Problem
6233, 6233 network problem, 6233 network ways, 6233 no network, 6233 pm files, 6233 signal problem, download, network, Nokia
What would really be nice is being allowed to say:
Suspend to RAM if battery left > n%
else, suspend to RAM and disk.

That way, you get the best of both worlds.
Matt Aimonetti: Why on earth would you ignore Merb?
Living a thousand years has some pretty interesting implications.

- Things that seem safe will become dangerous. Small daily risks, such as crossing a red light, will have a much bigger chance of killing you. If you live 15 times as long the risk is 15 times as big. Expect to see people being insulated from the daily dangers of the world.

- Our personal drive will diminish. If you want to do a startup (or whatever else that is nontrivial) you have to act now or it might be too late. If you live a thousand years you can do it next month or next millenium, and you won't feel the same pressure to get started.

- The relation between people that have just reached adulthood and "old" people will be tremendous in terms of experience. Can you imagine the experience of someone that lived through the middle ages, the Roman Empire, the colonization of America, the French revolution and both world wars?

And these are just off the top of my head...
2) In the presence of an activist monetary authority, like the Fed. As you mention in point 3, it can last for decades if nobody prints money. Even then, it's not certain: Japan's deflation has lasted for 18 years and counting.

3) The period from 1873-1896 was a terrible time for startups. It was a war of attrition, where the firms with the most capital just sat and waited for undercapitalized firms to fail. This is how Rockefeller and Carnegie made their fortunes: they bought out all their competitors cheaply when falling prices meant that their competitors could no longer compete.

4) No argument there.
I think an interesting side effect of extremely long lives would be people would be a lot more careful.

Driving fast, not wearing a seatbelt, skydiving, going to war, heck even leaving the house would be considered crazy. who would want to risk ending their lives in an accident if they could live for another healthy 900 years?
What's the ultimate end game of living for ever?

Who's read Asimov's "The Last Question" http://www.multivax.com/last_question.html

Imagine you can live to 1000 or more, at what point does your brain run out of space for memories?

When you're finally out of room in your memory buffer do you just turn it into a FIFO queue? So you could collect a whole bunch of information you like (like favorite books, music, movies, etc) start consuming at one end, forget that by the time you get to the end and start again. Repeat forever.

Alternatively you could expand your mind, you turn into a cyborg or something. See Asimov's The Last Question again.

Or you could stimulate your (possibly digital) brain's please center - forever.

And this leads me to a theory of what happened to all the other advanced civilizations in the universe.

Assume human like intelligence evolves somewhere out there, then:

Scenario #1: Self destruction.

Scenario #2: External destruction, asteroid or something.

Scenario #3 Super-intellect is achieved:

#3.1 Rational super intellect realized existence for the sake of existence is pointless and quits.

#3.2 Irrational super intellect wants to exist rational enlightenment be damned. Irrational intellect expands and expands.

In other words, if some alien species out there advanced enough to reach trans-humanism (or trans-alienism hardi har har har) then it probably also transcended any irrational genetic fear of death and then promptly took a bow and exited stage left.

I guess what I'm saying is you're doomed either way.

Either you are primitive and doomed to die a natural death.

Or you're super advanced and too smart to fear death, then you have something to do for a while but eventually...
Hyperinflation causes more visible woes, because it's pretty obviously painful when your cash is worth 1/10th what it was yesterday. Deflation only causes that sort of visible pain when there're mass layoffs and bank failures, like in the Great Depression.

However, in terms of lost opportunity cost, deflation is far worse. It encourages people not to invest, because they earn better returns on their cash than on productive projects. So the society stagnates.

Think of the Dark Ages - a whole millenia lost, where nothing much happened. From everything I've read, it wasn't really a time of misery - people had enough to eat, they survived. But nothing much happened. If the Roman Empire had continued, even with its inflationary tendencies, we might've seen the industrial revolution a millenia earlier, and be writing these comments in 1008 instead of 2008.
I vote against designing programming languages for cavemen.
Lincoln was before Grant, obviously, but yes, that is the story. I'm not sure if it's apocryphal or what, but I believe it to be true.
I'm personally against the idea of selling software. It doesn't have any real value because it costs nothing to reproduce. Sure, the development costs money, and you need to live, but there are other more morally correct ways of obtaining cash than selling something that should be free.

For more, see fsf.org
The discussion on that page pointed to this utility...

http://www.jinx.de/SmartSleep.html
I believe that's already the default behavior of OS X. It will put the computer to sleep (ACPI S3), and start dumping contents to hard disk. If the battery dies or is removed between waking, it will read it in from disk. I'm not 100% positive on this, but I do recall reading a similar description.
I guess I'll be the first to say it: why?

Rural areas cannot have the same connectivity as urban areas without government subsidy or people paying more per month. So, why shouldn't they pay more per month?

If they shouldn't pay more per month, should they subsidize my rent so that I don't have to pay more for housing than they do? Why shouldn't we encourage people to live in places that it is economical to provide services?

Rural living is different. You get a lot of privacy, freedom, land, etc. In exchange, you loose out on things that require a dense population such as the latest internet connectivity, theaters, stores open late at night, etc. It's a trade off.

If we are going to stress rural broadband, I think the best idea is to push Verizon and AT&T in their rollout of 3G wireless services. Wireless is much easier and economical to roll out to rural areas. It isn't as fast, but it has a good upgrade path (with speeds increasing to several Mbps in a year or two and continuing on from then). It's also easier to upgrade. In rural areas, you could have one tower serving many square miles and all you need to do is upgrade that one tower. No fuss, no muss.

In urban areas with dense populations, wireless actually makes less sense because so many people would be sharing bandwidth that you'd have to put cell sites everywhere and that isn't so feasible. Rural areas are really prime for wireless. Push the wireless carriers to serve these areas a little faster.
Eisenhower wrote most of his own stuff, and before that he wrote most of John D MacArthur's speeches.
Being against selling software because it costs nothing to reproduce implies that selling other more "tangible" products is only priced to recoup reproduction cost. Pick any product that you aren't opposed to selling and think about what percentage of the price is there to recoup production cost.
Re: "entirely online" bank accounts, E*Trade is a company providing such services.
Meet Lois Whitman, The Poster Child For Everything Wrong With PR
This is a bit off-topic, but I really enjoyed William Gibson's Spook Country and especially was intrigued with the headsets used to overlay 3D renderings on locations via a GPS-enabled server. Ray Kurzweil talked about VR visors, but I think adding GPS massively increases the value of th eidea. I have since had several bursts of musing on locative art, entertainment and education (particularly history lessons).
Example iPhone app using TouchJSON
Dark Energy Stunts Galaxies’ Growth
You may have a better brand name on news.yc.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2bjqYPH7rAo
If it was, we can chalk the weasliness up to the whole company

I find it hard to talk about "the nature" of a company the size of Yahoo - this is more the "weasliness" of some HR employee which didn't get corrected by the structure of the company. Of course, it doesn't say anything about the many brilliant employees that had nothing to do with the layoffs.
Yes but he does have a point.

I remember this from Reddit. And lets face it, the transition is never sudden, it's not like tomorrow bunny with a pancake on its head will be the top story on HN.

The decline will be slow and it will happen via those rare stories that both hackers and non hackers find interesting.

Videos, any kind of video, are much more dangerous then pictures, and pictures more dangerous then text.

This is definitely something that an engineer can appreciate, but it is also something ANYONE can watch think cool!
Imagine the implications for wealth, too.

If the means of life extension is not hideously expensive, then anyone past a certain age with even the smallest bit of sense will be rich beyond the dreams of mortal men. Compound interest works.

This would have interesting social ramifications. As it is, most states are organized such that the old are relatively rich, the young are relatively poor, and the young's income subsidizes the old's healthcare costs. In a state with some people who are 420 and some people are 20, the Methuselah will be worth $300 million. For every dollar invested back when he was twenty.
Our personal drive will diminish, but so will our aversion to non-fatal risks. My current reasoning: doing a startup has the opportunity cost of me taking a finance job (not so much these days) or trying to become a tenured professor. Realistically speaking, due to the aging process, I have about 13-18 years of my life to spend on such things (after 40-45, change gets harder). After age 40, I'll probably just keep doing what I'm already doing.

Give me 1000 years to live, I might just spend the next 20 years trying to build an AI. I agree with Yudkowsky that it might be the most important problem of our time, but I'm unwilling to spend my life on such a long shot. Give me 1000 years to spend, 900 youthful, and I'll give it a shot. Worst case, I learn a lot, and I can use those skills in my startup phase (my next 20 years, out of 1000).

Of course, it's different for potentially fatal risks; if I lived 1000 years, I'd probably be less likely to take up Eskrima (my latest project) and I probably wouldn't have fenced in college.

[edit: added this paragraph.] Incidentally, anti-aging would be a major boon for women. Realistically speaking, most women can pick only one of {career/accomplishments/etc, children}. Even those who can pick two must still face the choice of mid level management + children vs startup founder (or something along those lines). Anti-aging gives the opportunity to do both.
What's killing newspapers is the same thing that killed the slide rule
Another interesting aspect is the concept of retirement. The way I see it, retirement is done in one of two main ways now: people who save their entire lives to live comfortably for the last 20-30 years, and people who live paycheck to paycheck until they fall into a meager retirement. I think this difference will be magnified many times if people live to 1000.

Imagine working for 100 years to save up enough money to live comfortably for the next 900 years, and how different that is than the people who will live paycheck to paycheck until only the last 20 years or so of their lives. It will create two very separate classes of people.
The price charged for our own product is now quadruple the "OMG! Nobody will pay this!" price I introduced the software at a few years ago. Every time the price has increased, sales and revenue have increased as well.

The best suggestion I've read (some time ago on the BOS forum) is to keep raising prices until you start receiving complaints about the cost. If nobody is complaining (not even the cheapskates), you're not charging enough.

Another bonus from higher prices: You no longer get those nickle-squeezers whose only criteria was finding the cheapest option. To generalize from my own experience, those folks are colossal pain to deal with.
I'm not so sure. Did people become twice as cautious when life expectancy doubled in our fairly recent history? The retirement age of 65 was originally set because it was deemed so unlikely that anyone would reach it, now it is almost considered a given that people will live past it and I don't think people have become more cautious as a result. The other thing is that if people feel that medical technology has advanced enough that they can be pulled through ever increasing traumatic circumstances they are more likely to attempt higher risk behavior.
Handheld calculators?
Updated again to include new essays. Also, the RSS feed has been removed, and a couple of other spurious links, just 'cos I was there and could do it.

I'm still interested in additional links based on semantics.
5 Easy Ways to Tackle IE6’s Transparency Issues