skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There are many things that I like about this idea. But who benefits from this? I don't think the overloaded. I think the person selling.

But let's take a use examples.

In the case of someone like Fred Wilson, he will return your email if it is something that he is interested in [2] and not return it if he isn't interested. Even if you are on his "A or B" list. (And even if you are on his A list he won't necessarily take the time to read or understand your entire email.[1])

So your idea seems to be "Fred will know that I (a nobody) have paid .50c or $5 and therefore be more likely to read my email. After all you are not pitching this idea as a replacement, merely an additional way to get someone's attention. The price has to be below other methods (a billboard on the 101) or express mail.

So this is not going to solve the email problem of an important person. It's only going to put certain email, and this is important, hopefully with a better chance of getting read.

The problem is it really doesn't solve any problem for Fred. He will still get a shitload of email. All he will see is that 15 or 20 messages a day people decided to pay to have him see their message. So this is really a benefit to the sender not to the recipient (like Fred anyway).

[1] I've gotten responses in 5 minutes and in 5 hours and I've gotten no response. Frequent occurrence. Generally if you don't get a response w/i 24 hours you aren't going to get a response because it's not something he wants to deal with.

[2] In order to even begin to approach doing an idea like this you would have to see the mail flow of a power user like Fred. My guess is that he gets so many emails of so many purposes (companies he's funded asking questions, people he has met, pitches, Michael Bloomberg, other VC's) that it would simply not be practical to begin to give out an email address or post an address where people have to pay to email him.
I think that was exactly the idea.
I don't see why you need a central controlling authority. You could implement this on your own MX. Senders initially get a bounce explaining the deal. They can then sign up, select what they are willing to pay per message, and they go onto the whitelist. When subsequent emails arrive, sender is charged (might need to require digital signatures here, the service could issue those as part of sign-up). If email isn't read in X days, charge is refunded.
You are totally off the mark with this response. As people have said, this is not a suggestion for a replacement of email.

I imagine some central hub that manages the protocol used to send messages over the network. In order for you to get on the network you have to enter some identifiable information - as both the sender and receiver. Perhaps, including credit card information.

Once you get credit card information, everybody buys credits and they use that credit to send messages to "important" people.

This could totally work if you get a few "high profile" people to try it out and iron out the kinks. If people like PG, Arrington, MG, etc. actually use it and like it....it will likely be a success.
> (x) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical

Seems to me a very good reason to go ahead! It' less about the what and more about the how.

> (x) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money

I don't see any problem there - all it takes is an automated response with a PayPal link

> (x) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers

They are out of target anyway; this idea applies super-busy/famous people who can afford to lose a few messages.
Surely somebody already said this and there are thousand of reasons of why it won´t work, but what about an inbox only allowed by recommendation. Only the people you already have in your contacts can give access to your inbox (or at least to the important inbox). All the non recommended mail could go to a bulk inbox, just checked now and then(not your workhorse inbox).
That way you make the email work just as society works, some one you know introduces you to the people you want/need to know.
Maybe it isn´t enough filter for PG, but could help to less busy people keep the inbox less crowded.
Freemium is perfect for entertainment products where value is subjective so users need to be enticed with a try before you buy mentality.

With a B2B product, I think the best solution is a trial period to lock the user into the project, and demonstrate value over the long term before asking for money.
I've seen at least one unreleased product that has achieved almost a Path-like experience (dead serious) in Mobile Webkit Safari on the iPad 1, 2 and 3. It's doable and not as hard as you think once you, but it takes embracing everything modern browsers offer you and not building with backwards compatibility in mind. It has yet to be packaged in PhoneGap for the AppStore, but from my understanding the javascript engine available in PhoneGap apps is more performatic.
I recently refactored my Emacs config[1] to use el-get[2], which lets you install from the official package list from random git repos, and even from the emacs wiki if you're so inclined. My config is quite a bit simpler and easier to back on than it was before.

[1]: https://github.com/peterkeen/dotfiles
[2]: https://github.com/dimitri/el-get
A classic that never gets old.

It can be summarized as: "If your idea was going to fix email, it would have fixed email."
Comms (www.comms.io) is my project, it's a lightweight IMAP client for which Windows is the initial platform. The alpha is a few weeks off.
Well, fred could determine what the worth of his time is -- which obviously is not $5.
>>The problem is it really doesn't solve any problem for Fred. He will still get a shitload of email.
Yes, but if he redirects all unsolicited, inbound requests through such a service, then it might make a small dent in his inbox (how small/big hard to say, but even if it is a 1-5% improvement, its huge).
Http://www.chevynewcar.com/37/2013-chevrolet-colorado-release-date.html
I think this is a brilliant idea, and someone will eventually do it.

Richard Branson already organises meetings where you donate a few thousands to a charity of his liking in order to have access to a dinner and a chat with him. Why wouldn't he add a few dollars to charity per email AND mitigate his inbox problem a at he same time.

Also I love the idea of an automated system to adjust the asking price as f(total unread messages)
That's a fair point. But in practice the target sizes on typical iPad apps aren't close to the lower limit of practicality, and the UIs of such apps are constrained more by not being ugly and confusing than by how many touch targets can fit on the screen.

Hence, e.g., all the speculation that Apple will produce an 8" tablet that's basically an iPad 2 scaled down somewhat, to have the same pixel size as the (old) iPhone -- whose target sizes don't seem to be too small.
I think the larger issue here is that there aren't enough of these companies to hire the best Canada-trained developers on a long term basis; the most talented end up leaving for greener pastures (usually US). When they stay they often choose to work remotely for a foreign company, or locally for a satellite office, rather than contributing more directly to the local economy.
> Give it time. The number of consumers burned by an acquihire is still relatively low, but it's growing.

Dwarfed by the numbers burned by pivots or outright failure though.
He’s Watching That, in Public? Pornography Takes Next Seat
I think this idea might have potential actually for non famous people. Besides the market for famous people simply isn't that large and suffers anyway from becoming impractical if it were successful. (Unless you raise the price per email to an objectionable level).

But consider whether people would agree to receive email if they were paid per message. All the emails would be pitches and the price paid for the message would depend on a bidding system tailored to both the end user and the person selling something (or the advertiser).

Arbitrary examples:

Car dealer wants to send you an email: .02
Supermarket: .04
Local plumber: .10
Life insurance salesman: .15
PC Mall .01

The idea being that people agree to accept and read spam (maybe you have to click to show you read the message which would have to be only a certain length) to get the money.

Add: While this sounds like opt in it's not. This is money per message. You have to read the messages in order to collect the fee for reading.

Would a life insurance salesman pay .15 per recipient to know that his email had a good chance of being read? I think he would.
Either you buy disposable software, or you buy software that comes with a maintenance guarantee. But to buy the former and pretend it's the latter is bizarre.
I find it strange that this article is placing a paid model in opposition to a freemium model. Freemium is nothing more than an indefinite free trial with limitations placed on usage. It doesn't indicate that you don't want to charge for your products.

Far and away the best execution of freemium I've ever seen is Wufoo. You get a few forms for free to start using the service and can get genuine utility from the service. By the time you hit their escalation trigger, if you're genuinely getting value from the service the cost of change far exceeds the cost of subscription. If you're not getting genuine utility from the service you'll find something else. If you never hit one of their escalation triggers then you're a negligible cost to them and since all free forms advertise Wufoo when submitted, you're doing free marketing for them, which can be offset against the cost of supplying those free forms in the first place.

It's a beautifully designed freemium model and, I think, well worth studying when you're designing your own pricing strategy because it obviously works insanely well for them!
Advice received so far;
PYTHON-Scales easier,Find more and cheaper programmers,

RoR-
Nobody is arguing this is a legal problem, they're arguing that this is a moral problem.

Users did buy into the Sparrow thing because they expected updates/maintenance etc etc. Their purchase was contingent on the ongoing support of the service, they would not have bought a product they thought would be discontinued.

Now, you can argue that they should have known that the service might disappear without warning, that they should never have used it if there was the possibility of them being bought, but where does that leave us? Should people just stop buying popular apps created by small companies? Should people insist on a legally binding "community promise" to open-source a product if active development stops?

This also neglects the fact that users are statistically credulous - as a group they're simply not rational enough to seriously consider the possibility of the developer being acquired. The Sparrow guys had to have known this, so they either did something unethical when they sold the app or they did something unethical when they sold the company. The blog post says that it is fine to take advantage of them for their credulity, but that's not an ethical position, that's just Ayn Rand.
The author "almost forgot" the real main reason why it's "so hot"...
It would be interesting if you only had to pay if you didn't get a response.
There was no such thing as TDD programming when I learned to code. Same with these old guys. There also were no interactive debuggers (or at least not like the new ones).

Anyway, I used to use the interactive debuggers in Visual Basic and Visual Studio, but for the web its easier to just be in an ssh terminal and so I just use logs.

If you want people to use TDD, then they should start learning it close to when they start programming, and I think that will make it much easier and more natural for them to do.

I have done some TDD, but not very much because it always feels like extra work. What I am used to doing these days is sort of small feature test programs when I need to and its convenient or just running the application and looking at logs. I think if I had learned to program with TDD it would be a lot easier.
What does that have to do with his point? It's totally irrelevant.

People love Sparrow, I can only assume because it made their lives better.

A tiny few are benefiting from the Sparrow acquisition, lots are realizing they're going to suffer in the long run by having to degrade, or at least Sparrow eventually falling behind other products in some areas.

But obviously the product wasn't generating enough revenue to protect it from a predatory acquisition.

This is no different from the 80s days of people buying companies to dismantle them so they can sell the assets.

It's just that the assets are developers.

So people are lamenting that something, somewhere in the equation is wrong. And it's probably down to the low prices they're charging in the app store.

Cheer on the cash out all you like, but it's never good for the customers. Time and time and time again the customers always suffer in these kind of acquisitions.
Why the sudden change of heart? To me, it sounds like a terrible idea if the amount of money you'd take would be a significant loss for them.
el-get is pretty cool but I think package has the following advantages over el-get:

1) it's standard emacs

2) although it doesn't have yet it will be able to support digital signatures for packages (as well as other security mechanisms)

As a developer of Emacs packages (it seems to be the only code I've written this year, outside of work) I am sticking with package.

I don't know how much the tips here might be relevant to el-get, I think not very.
Minecraft developer sued by aggressive litigator over DRM patent
I understand, disagree with, and respect your opinions about how I run my company. :)
"redirects all unsolicited, inbound requests through such a service"

How does he determine that the mail is "unsolicited" exactly? His email address is already out there in a zillion places. What do you suggest he do email everyone who has his email address and reject all mail to the old address? Or that he create a white list? Not going to happen it would take to much time to set that up from scratch.
While I agree with you, I think the desired flow of that page is that you quickly scan, and when you see something you like, you hover over it. Having text on each color may distract the user's eyes to read all of the names.
Pinterest, Tumblr and the Trouble With ‘Curation’
Rather than comment or criticize the idea as a whole, there's one issue that stands out to me --

Read receipts are a terrible idea, and 'percentage read' is also a terrible idea. What's to stop people from getting an assistant to click through each message -- or, more likely, download a script that does the same?
The Surefire Way to Make Up Your Mind When You Have No Idea What You Really Want
This is fundamentally what LinkedIn has done with InMail right? If you pay LinkedIn then you can send an InMail to someone famous/important etc. without being connected to them.
I'd never seen the Hershey's / Ferrero Rocher experiment referenced in the article (that supposedly "started the free-mania") but couldn't the opposite conclusions be drawn from the experiment? I.e. that having a free option (somewhat obviously, perhaps) reduces revenue for the vendor?

In the experiment, when offered the choice between a Hershey's Kiss at $0.01 and a Ferrero Rocher chocolate at $0.25, 50% of respondents chose Hershey's and 50% chose Ferrero Rocher - for an average Revenue Per Customer (ARPC) of $0.13. When the price of the Kiss was lowered to $0.00, 90% chose the kiss and only 10% chose the Ferrero Rocher - for an ARPC of $0.026. All things being equal, the vendor would have to have 5X the number of "sales" to achieve the same amount of revenue, and the marginal Cost of Goods Sold/Cost of Sales would have to be zero to achieve the same amount of profit.
Ask HN: a solution to the patent mess
Issue a software patent for 5 years with a possibility to extend if it's being used in a actively selling product (measure the revenue).
The product value must come from using the patent.

Reasoning:

1) software is easy to build, so 5 years is more than enough

2) to claim any damages the patent needs to be validated by the market first

Makes sense?
I bought TextMate because it was a capable editor in the midst of many to choose from. I don't use Sparrow but it seems much more like it's filling a niche that's not quite filled yet and people are buying it because it's worth it, but also because they see the potential.

A de facto EOL happens, developers get busy and projects get backburnered. But a acquisition a lot of time means the developers are hitting their stride and have a lot of potential.

Sentiment? Maybe. But come on....they coulda been a contenda. No one is claiming a right. It's just a shame that the potential for this is wasted. (Not the teams' talents, but their development investment in Sparrow.)
Woman strips in public to protest e-book pirates (NSFW video)
Or use hashcash instead of real money http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash
12 Surprising things you probably don’t know about weight loss
Saying something is a negative doesn't mean that it is in all counts bad.

A common argument is that more creativity is restricted by copyright than is enabled by it.

That makes copyright a poor trade off.
The Future Isn't About Mobile; It's About Mobility
Majority of "top grossing" apps are free. The article seems to reflect the opinion of a small minority, who happen to make a lot of noise in a few circles.
Apple pays Amazon for a One-Click license. I imagine Jobs was really in love with the simplicity and just had to have it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1-Click#Apple_Inc.
Personally I think read receipts on their own per message are not a bad idea but I do agree that there shouldn't be an incentive for recipients to game the system by falsely marking messages as read. It should be optional. Not all messages need to have receipts. Maybe you should charge for that as well?
The password you can use without knowing it
This could be made as a third party system where you direct your email through. An auto-response could be sent to emails on the "pay list" with instructions on how to complete the delivery of the message.

The idea is at least easy enough to setup and give it a try...
Japanese rock gardens originate in Zen monastery practice in Kyoto. That is, Zen monks designed, built, and maintained them as part of their practice of Zen Buddhism. The best-known ones are all part of Zen Buddhist temples today. So in that sense, rock gardens are Zen.

The other two cases are not as open and shut.

Basho, who brought haiku into its modern form, was not a monk, but did practice Zen meditation as a layman, and lived as a pilgrim and hermit, teaching a circle of disciples, like an abbot. Issa, the second most influential haiku poet after Basho, was an honest-to-goodness Jodo Shinshu Buddhist (though not Zen!) priest. Furthermore, the haiku aesthetic embodies Zen's fierce focus on the ephemeral beauty of the current moment. I think that saying that the practice of haiku is "influenced by the same principles" is such an understatement as to be absurd.

Right now I am not going to dig into the history of raku.
This isn't a critical thinking problem, it's a math problem. As a critical thinker, I would estimate what floor I think the egg would break at, then estimate a safe floor I feel the egg won't break at. The more eggs I have, the less safety margin needed. After finding the first "safe" floor I would go up floor by floor (or more than one floor at a time if I had spare eggs).
The date is the in the right side (with hour and everything)
Alternatively, Gmail users potentially gain from the talent acquisition. Arguably, the win could be greater than the loss.
Rate my.. not exactly a startup
I know I'm not reinventing the wheel here, never the less I think it's useful. I envision it as fun site to let off some steam and vent a little.
Not to mention even if said cool shops were thriving - and few are -, there aren't nearly enough of them to hire, say, the 5000 workers that RIM is about to let go. As of this writing, StackOverflow lists:

- 31 jobs in Toronto;
- 4 jobs in Montreal;
- 2 jobs in Ottawa;
- 2 jobs in Vancouver.

These cities account for probably more than 60% of the Canadian IT workforce.

Contrast that with:
- 28 jobs in Austin;
- 91 jobs in Seattle;
- 55 jobs in Boston;
- 143 jobs in SF;
- 170 jobs in NYC.

There is something very wrong with this picture, especially when you consider that Canadian universities produce a huge number of CS/CE/SE graduates every year.
HTML5 split into 2 web standards
"Want to change the volume easily and still have access to f1-f12? Lenovo's got dedicated buttons for it."

In preferences, you can set it so Fn+F1 through Fn+F12 trigger the usual features, so that you can still have easy access to vanilla F1 through F12.

Take some time to dig through the preferences menu on OS X, you'll be surprised how configurable things can be.
The email service is more important than a fucking app that makes one's life better. This kind of hysteria should be reserved for the day that email service shuts down.

BTW low pricing of apps is essentially (or at least was at the beginning) because without that Apple would not have been successful in persuading consumers to adopt paid apps on a tiny device - in most consumers' mind (even today), a software is worth paying if it is on a "real computer" and does something "big" (like statistics or anti-virus or the OS). Everything else is taken for granted and to change that mindset low prices were a necessity. And it still is thanks to the gazillion apps out there.
Why not make it an option? I too would much prefer to see all the names at all times.
Is there any literature on portfolio-based hiring? That's basically how people are hired into most research positions: hiring managers evaluate the research you've done, and invite you to interview based on it.

Interviews still are important, but they're usually not about assessing the technical ability of the candidate - that's already been established from their prior work. Rather, it's more: do I want to work with this person?

The github-is-my-resume meme is rather similar to this approach, I believe. I don't believe that one's github account is a resume, but it is a portfolio.

Anecdotally, I can say that IBM Research does well by hiring former interns. (I did two internships as a grad student before being hired.) That's exactly a work-sample scenario, and I know that it's often the easiest hiring decision for managers: they already have worked with the candidate, and have observed what they can do.
mention to his audience that he will entertain unsolicited inbound mail only through such a service (not guaranteeing a response, but higher probablity that he will read). he of course cant go removing his email from all the existing places, but instead going fwd try to use such a service as his incoming channel for unsolicited, inbound msgs.
And most retailers are careful about having a large stock of anything that is not made by Apple, as they have a tendency to be stuck with them. I worked in retail and we rarely dared to order more than two of any new tablet that hit the market, if it was from someone but Apple.

So when a good product finally comes by, there is a natural shortage, even though the item is not really that popular.
So what happens when everyone adopts slightly incompatible variants of this system?

Endless loops of "Please pay me 2 cents via PayPal so I will read your message with the Subject: Please pay me 3 cents via PayPal"

Oh, you'll put in an exception for those messages?

Next message is from your mother. You're going to charge her 2 cents?

Ah, whitelists. Management problem.

Also: PayPal can't efficiently handle micropayments. (Well, for 33 cents apiece, they will.) So you need your own micropayment system. Which will be incompatible with your prospective customer's micropayment...
Direct link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u404SLJj7ig
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