skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It never ceases to amaze me how many people "fall" for this "lifetime" pricing model. In fact I said the exact same thing three months ago [1].

The fact that the service provider is not getting any future revenue from you, even if they've fairly discounted your lifetime value, gives them the incentive to get rid of you.

Additionally it gives the wrong incentives to users to "abuse" their "unlimited" service. You saw this with AT&T's "unlimited" wireless data plans recently [2].

I know why people do it: as an alternative to raising capital. Businesses do Groupons for the same reason. In fact, I'm feeling like a broken record here [3].

The problem with Groupon (and similar "offer" sites) is they create the wrong incentives and attract the worst kind of customer. The best situation for Groupon and for businesses is for lots of people to buy the offers and then not to use them.

The lesson here is that if you want to create a sustainable and liked business, you need to align your incentives with those of your customers [4].

As a customer, stop falling for this charade.

As a business, stop taking short term cash flows for perpetual liabilities just to raise capital.

Seriously.

EDIT: regarding "unlimited" (in Karunamon's comment), he is correct: we do need to hold companies to a higher standard. For example, Australia's ACCC (I guess equivalent to the FTC but with a heavy focus on consumer rights) has cracked down on the use of "unlimited" (eg [5]).

But that just reinforces my point. In Australia pretty much all Internet plans have stated quotas. With unlimited plans you create the wrong incentives to throttle users, impose nebulous "fair use" conditions and generally whittle away at what's really "unlimited".

It's the wrong incentive system.

With Internet quotas at least you know you're getting what you pay for and your plan is priced for your usage, not some median or 95% usage that will constantly have the provider trying to throttle "power users".

[1]: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3936701

[2]: http://mashable.com/2012/03/01/att-limits-unlimited-data/

[3]: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2649739

[4]: http://www.accountingweb.com/blogs/ronaldbaker/firms-future/...

[5]: http://www.lifehacker.com.au/2010/12/accc-taking-tpg-to-cour...
Ridejoy has hundreds of active rides in Canada (especially around Vancouver, but also Toronto, Montreal, Calgary and Ottawa) and three Canadian cities are in the Popular Destinations section of our iPhone app.

We also launched our iPhone app in Canada: http://mobilesyrup.com/2012/08/14/ridejoy-ride-sharing-app-m...

So definitely check out Ridejoy in Canada as well :)

(Good luck to gozman/LiveRides, more people trying rideshare helps everyone)
Seriously. We are looking at hosting right now and are considering Rackspace and Joyent. In fact, I am one of the lifetime hosting people screwed over by this move, but this makes it an easy call. No way we are trusting Joyent with anything.
I don't even think that question matters. The question is, can Sweden objectively and fairly litigate a rape charge involving Julian Assange? If they can, the UK must honor its extradition treaty. If they can't, the UK shouldn't. The suggestion that Sweden is so corrupt that it can't handle basic criminal law is an extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary evidence. No evidence has been presented to support it, at all.

The rest of the argument is to my ears just fever talk. Some US muckity muck said Assange should be killed? Ok. I won't vote for that moron. There are also US politicians who believe we should have nuked Iraq. There was never any real risk that we we going to fire nuclear weapons at a 3rd world country. Random politicians say all sorts of idiotic things. Thankfully, they cannot suspend criminal law as a result.
It went badly because a few groups had tried to inflate the stock for its IPO, and as soon as folks got their hands on financials that became apparent.

Without a revenue plan and saddled with immense costs, that company is generally not fiscally healthy, certainly not enough to justify 100x valuation over annual profits.
Does that plan require the cluster to spin up if you haven't had a visitor in a while? That's the reason I don't use Heroku for my personal site.
None of which is actually substantiated.

Neither is the rape that he is accused of...
If the rule is everyone can be what they want to be, that doesn't bode well for those that end up as the exceptions. And as you say, there are always exceptions.
Regarding build systems, ocamlbuild is included with the standard ocaml distribution and gives a high-level interface that is much simpler to use than ocamldep and friends. Especially when combined with findlib.
I love the sarcastic titles that end up being love articles about how great it is to work at Facebook. Why the passive aggressiveness? Why not just title this "Five Things I Love About Being an Intern at Facebook."

All these articles make me think this is how Facebook conducts their meetings and communications. "Hey Bob, I really hate your work." "Oh, you LOVE it, right?" "Yeah, that's what I said."
Show HN: mongomapper-paperclip
It's always really entertaining to me to see a bunch of dudes moralizing over what does and doesn't constitute rape.

EDIT: Preemptively: yes, I know; men can be raped, and not just in prison. Believe me, I know this better than you even want to guess at or speculate about. That doesn't change one whit the fact that people tend to talk shit and judge the world from their own categories and preconceptions, and not others'. This (generally, not specifically; your comment was simply the one that pushed my "Okay, I need to say something about this nonsense" button hard enough to actually respond) is just one of the more egregious examples of that.
For the parents of our generation, all you really needed to do was show up and squeak by with a 3.0. School was harder, college was harder, and there were more opportunities.

We need to stop pretending that there is one root cause to this problem. The real cause is the degradation in the quality of the American populace.
The deals on lowendbox are a bit too low end. The providers often disappear after a few months.
The Courage of Conviction
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure C doesn't use the 'new' keyword, it uses 'malloc'.
Flash didn't fail on android. Not that I used it all that much but when I did it worked great on my phone.
There is a quote from a Mad Men episode: "Not every ballerina can grow up to be the prima ballerina"

It feels relevant.
Set up an IMAP connection, copy everything over to your local machine, connect via IMAP to your new mail host and move everything over to it. I usually use Gmail for Business but be aware that this now has a 10 user limit on the free account.
Scan Reveals Brain’s Structure To Be Much Simpler Than We Thought
Crowdsourced data analysis with Clockwork Raven
How to Criticize Women in Technology
Pallets: The Single Most Important Object in the Global Economy
> Is there any substantive difference in extradition
> proceedings from the UK or Sweden?

The UK will not extradite to the US if the accused faces the death penalty. Sweden will. Assange's lawyers argue that the US's apparent desire for a Swedish extradition indicates that US prosecutors want a conviction that will lead to his execution.
What about python 3 support?
Faster Charging Batteries - Carbonized Li-On Batteries Charge 100 Times Faster
This makes some sense, but honestly I'm not seeing much new in these endless repetitions of the same debate. It goes back to at least the 1960s and the debate over the "Me generation" [1]. Probably earlier. There's a tension between raising armies of cogs-in-the-machine on the one hand, and beautiful butterflies on the other, and some orthogonal other questions besides.

Some of it also interacts with politics, and I'm not sure I accept all the premises. For example, from my current vantage point in Denmark, society does generally believe that you are entitled to at least a basic living (food/shelter/healthcare), even if not a great one. Then it becomes a question of what you wish to do above that, in both economic and non-economic senses. One presumably wishes to both earn more money than the absolute minimum, but also to contribute to society beyond the absolute minimum; the two desires may or may not be aligned, and there are many paths to doing either/both. In other countries (notably the USA), political views are different on that question. In my own personal opinion I do think it is, in part, "a moral or systematic failure on the part of society" that the situation in the USA is as it is, but that's sort of its own debate (I'm not really anti-market, as I feel they're useful and in any case inevitable, but I don't necessarily think that maket valuation is everything).

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Me_generation
Yup, that's pretty cut and dry, and that's what I was looking for, so thanks. You guys that got hosed by this may have a breach of contract case if you'd like to take it that far.
Tired of setting instance variables in Ruby?
Wrong on all counts. I'm old, experienced, and maintain decades old systems.

And I'm not arguing for not commenting, I'm arguing for writing more expressive code so that function names are the comments and additional comments are not required. Nothing beats executable comments.
Pretty cool, but it's definitely a gamble for a small business that doesn't have proven revenue yet:

- At $10k / month $275 is 2.75%

- At $5k / month $275 is 5.5%

- At $2500 / month $275 is 11%

It doesn't say if there's a commitment or if there's a way to switch back and forth depending on volume.
The nature of the charge is nonexistent. Sweden hasn't charged him with anything. Sweden is making a huge fuss over wanting to question him, and being stubborn about wanting to him to Sweden first. This implies to many of us that Sweden is not acting in good faith.
We're not saying rape. We're saying våldtäkt (which is a broad term). The closest equivalent your language has is rape. Something apparently gets lost in the translation, as is so often the case.

Let me give another example of a broad term: Violence. It can mean one kid pushing another on the play ground. It can also mean dropping a nuclear bomb on a city. Do you also think it's disrespectful to the victims of Hiroshima to ask the boy on the playground to stop being violent?
I generally agree with the points of the article. I think a better title would be "What you need to know to be anything you want to be".

The economy is complex enough to provide room in just about any field someone would want to enter--but there is no golden ticket piece of paper that will open the door for you. No one wants to grow up to put plastic on the end of shoelaces, but many are not adaptable so they try to beat a dead horse even though technology has supplanted their job (a bad move as you rightly point out).

My point being, don't swing too far in the direction of "Life sucks, deal with it!" because that's not quite true either.
Conversion is primarily based on value of the product to the user and the price. If its valuable and free, you can expect maximum conversion. If it is arguably valuable and not free, the conversion rates will generally go down as the price goes up.

Suggesting there is any reasonable expectation in general is really not at all possible. Find comps for products that are the same or similar, check out their prices and find out their conversion rates. Only then can you start to formulate a reasonable expectation for your specific product.
Although the idea comes from Buffett, I think the quote actually came from Andreessen, but I couldn't find the original source (his old blog probably).
I love what Betable's doing and I'm excited for their team. I took part in their first hackathon in SF a few weekends ago and built an app on their platform.

The brilliant part of their business is that they're the casino. You give them the inputs, they give you the outputs but all of the actual gambling, for every app, all of the odds - everything - is all handled by them.
Jackie and The Beanstalk: A Children's Book in the Browser
As a computer nerd, I really felt like AMD was on it's way to great places in the early 2000s and believed in their product over Intel, as most of my friends who built their rigs were leaning towards the former. Alas, I couldn't have predicted them fizzling out so badly after the mid-2000s.

http://www.pcpro.co.uk/features/372859/amd-what-went-wrong
Nonsense. Even then, Paypal does not work in many countries. With BitPay, it works everywhere. Bitcoin is more secure than your credit card or your checkbook, and it's anonymous.
3D transforms is nearly completely dependent on the GPU of your machine. about:gpu in Chrome will give you more information about the differences and capabilities of your machine. In some cases, old drivers are too unstable to support and so they're blacklisted by Chrome.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_by_deception

> Saying that it's rape is really inconsiderate and insulting to the actual rape victims...

I'm glad you've apparently surveyed every rape victim and asked them if this law is insulting to them. I'm sure you're not just talking out of your ass about an extremely delicate and traumatic subject.
Ask HN: What do you think the future holds for TextMate?
I know I am! Great method :)
This is going to sound harsh. This story exposes a simple fact: These developers went at this in utter ignorance of the realities of business.

If their goal was to put out a free app and not try to make a living off of it, then fine. I take it back. You don't need to know anything about business or making money to give shit away. If this is the case, don't complain and be very thankful that people around you are kind enough to support you financially and beyond.

If, on the other hand, their goal was to offer a free product with IAP in order to earn money and make a living, well, their decision making reveals their level of business ignorance.

Why is it that the competitors they refer to have such intense IAP approaches? Could it be because that's a pretty solid way to monetize your app? If my goal was to make money in that segment I'd certainly stop all coding and look at what others are doing in detail. I would not hold myself back due to ideological nonsense. If it is a business, it is about making money. If it is a hobby, it is not. So, yes, I would copy, borrow and mutate ideas from others who, before me, trenched the territory and became successful.

The only exception to this is if you truly have in your hands one of these edge-cases that will succeed because it is so unique, entertaining and, yes, addictive.

This also demonstrates a reality of FOSS (even though this was not OSS): In order to provide FOSS someone has to be earning a living somehow or the equation is never balanced. That's why FOSS is never really free (as in cost) because the development costs are being banked by someone. Linux, as an example, is probably the most expensive piece of code ever developed.

This case was a simple failure to make the right business decisions and nothing more.

That's how you end-up on the street and broke.
I agree, that is why it's up to the developer to improve their skills if they don't want to keep writing Action classes and POJO JDBC classes for that legacy Struts 1.1 webapp.
This is rad!
Python script for summarizing JSON structure
Quinn Norton wrote an article for Wired describing cryptocat and headlined "This Cute Chat Site Could Save Your Life and Help Overthrow Your Government" http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/07/crypto-cat-encrypti....

Chris Soghoian criticized that article and articles like it here that overly hype their subjects. He compared it to the unwarranted hype for Haystack. http://paranoia.dubfire.net/2012/07/tech-journalists-stop-hy....

Ryan Singel, editor of Wired's Threat Level, called Soghoian's article a sexist attack on Norton here: http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/08/security-researcher...

Soghoian replied here: http://paranoia.dubfire.net/2012/08/responding-to-wireds-ad-...

This is the news.ycombinator thread that discussed Soghoian and Wired's responses: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4354959

This is Quinn Norton's, the original reporter's, response.

I disagree with Norton (and Singel) and believe if Soghoian' original response had been sexist, Norton would have been able to quote from it. As it is, she can only make a tone argument.
I agree wholeheartedly. My wife is an associate professor at a top-10 CS school (though she's not in the CS department).

I wish we could FORCE all the incoming freshmen to read this essay. And read it again every semester.
Viral Marketing 101.
I am forced to use Dojo whenever I am doing any sort of ESRI Arcgis web map development. While I agree that there are some nice points in Dojo, I think it's a travesty the way they were okay with PUKING all over the DOM with their Dojo specific markup. We have data attributes now, so hopefully they are beginning to leverage that. The app I'm working on now still uses Dojo 1.7 and it still has quite a bit of "dojo-this='foo'".
Apple bashes Amazon and proposed ebook settlement
Dear Joyent

You got me:

"We've been analyzing customer usage of Joyent’s systems and noticed that you are one of the few customers that are still on our early products and have not migrated to our new platform, the Joyent Cloud."

So sorry about not appreciating enough your new platform because " Everyone that’s moved to our new cloud infrastructure has been pleased with the results".

About the whole "lifetime" ("As long as we exist.") thing ... Stupid me. I never get that. I mean that was meant metaphorically, right, like in marriages?

Ok then, you divorced me. Thanks that I can still sleep under your roof for one and a half month.

And yes: You keep the house. And the money. I keep my files.

I think, we can call this a true a win-win situation. Sorry, I mean "win-win".

Sincerely.
I can't help but wonder if the bounded/unbounded screenshots would look and feel different if they had used a white iPhone as well. Perhaps the bounded screenshots look better because the black menu bar matches the black bezel of the iPhone?
If you don't really care, why was the vast majority of your comment concerning it?
Apple working with hearing aid manufacturers to improve audio experience
^ whoa!

a very nice read sir; great insights as always
Anybody can be anything they want to be. It just takes more work, time, commitment, and tenacity than people realize.
Is there a particular reason why Assange chose to ask political asylum in Ecuador?
Yes, but it leaves a fairly small sweet spot. $120k through $250k you're saving money, but anywhere outside that you're paying the 2.75% transaction fee (or higher, if you're on this new plan and running less than $120k worth).
Why top Ivy Leaguers are the best sellers
Was having this convo with some friends of mine, who all agreed with this...

They sold themselves ever since they were 14 and starting high school. Selling admissions officers of their achievements, selling teachers and counselors of their desires and passions... that's the hardest part in the admissions process. The rest (getting a high GPA and high SATs) is secondary (since most applying to HYP have 4.5s and 2300+ SAT anyway - need differentiation) and honestly, pretty darn easy to obtain if one simply tries. And while they're about to graduate out of college, they're continuing to sell, sell, sell, branding and marketing themselves for consulting and banking positions.

Have to hand it to them, it's an awfully important life skill to have in this world.
Hopper: The Not-So-Lean Web Start-up
Quoth the page:

> "we’ll bill you $275 on the first of each month. Change pricing plans at anytime from Square Dashboard."

So no commitment. If your volume drops too low, seems you can just drop back to their usual rates. And since their "overage" rate is just the standard rate, there's no reason not to do it if your volume's higher than their cap ($250K/yr, max $400/swipe).
> "If AuthenTec was developing a technology for Apple’s new products, would the deal need to have been completed “quickly” if it wasn’t going to be used in devices launching later this year"

Isn't presenting and cultivating a sense of urgency one of the older and more well-understood of sales strategies?

By proposing a tight deadline Apple could simply have been trying to narrow Authentic's perceived options down to "negotiate with Apple on final price" rather than "fish for competitive bids".

Similarly the change of focus from sale back to licensing may have been designed to rattle Authentec's negotiators. A traditional sale, upon finding a due diligence concern, simply waits until the concern is resolved.

Apple's switching focus back to licensing is consistent with trying to emotionally rattle Authentec's negotiators, who likely considered the sale 'all but done' at that point and dissuade Authentec shareholders from further dickering over price, as it presents Apple as perfectly willing to walk away from the sale.
Greatist is hiring a Social Media Strategy Director in NYC
This article brings an interesting question to mind -

How will we land humans on Mars without contaminating the planet?

I mean, Mars's atmosphere is mostly CO2, and bacteria are well-known for their ability to survive in harsh conditions. There may not be life on Mars now, but who's to say there won't be after all the astronauts leave...?
It is common for it to become a diplomatic issue. It is NOT common for one party to threaten to enter the other partys embassy. That is, in fact, quite unheard of.

In the UK, as far as I know it has happened exactly _once_: To evict squatters from the Cambodian embassy after it had been unused by the Cambodian government for nearly 12 years in order to prevent them from gaining title to the property.

The UK has, despite having had this law on the books for 25 years, not used it a single time against an embassy that is actually in use. Most countries does not have laws authorising this kind of entry at all.

Even dictatorships none of us like to compare us generally treat embassies as entirely inviolate, and more than once have provided free passage for people who have obtained asylum in an embassy. Many of said regimes routinely claim these people are common criminals.

In other words: The UK has done something that is absolutely outrageous by even bringing this up.

On the other hand, what is not unheard of, is CIA agents getting people of interest gift wrapped by Swedish police in violation of Swedish law, and being allowed to strip them, drug them, chain them and ship them off to be tortured by dictatorial regimes.

That is something the Swedish government has admitted to having been complicit in.
Yes - there was once a bug that took me three weeks to track down, and it ended up being in the compiler.
I believe it's referred to as "link bait"
Is this a promise, or a contract? It seems that if they want to renege on a contract that they ought to refund the entire amount.
Is it illegal to chop up payments that exceed $400? If not, I'd say this is a nice way to save a bit of money if you do more than $10,000 in business every month. Not sure if it's worth the hassle to implement though.
Ah, so that's why 90% of my colleagues with Ph.D.s in physics didn't get jobs as professors of physics. They just weren't of a high-enough quality.

If only they'd worked 35% harder, the universities would have created physicist jobs for everyone. Yeah, that's how economics works!

You might want to go back to the part about "opportunities".
You clearly don't work with college-aged students in the United States if you think the material in this essay is old hat. Regardless of what's been written or how often, the vast majority of students entering top universities today are deluded.
If they were discharging this responsibility through bankruptcy then it wouldn't bother me.