skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Cell phones are not sold below cost. You can only get them at a "below cost" price when buying them with a contract which is typically worth $1500+. It's simply deferred payment, not selling below cost. The key here is that paying the additional money later on is not optional. They will charge you fees, hit your credit, send debt collectors after you, and could potentially sue you if you don't pay.

It's true for video game consoles, occasionally, but the consoles are not very useful without games, which they make plenty of money on. The overall average price paid by customers over the lifetime of their purchases is correlated fairly well with the cost of making the stuff. The same goes for razors, printers, and whatever else you care to find that follows this model.

In any case, these are the exception, not the rule. The price of things I normally buy, like food, clothes, gasoline, electricity, and yes, electronics, are strongly based on their costs.

Prestige brands can be sold well above cost precisely because luxury brands become less competitive. Cheap handbags are basically fungible, but luxury ones aren't. When people want an LuxuryCo handbag, they want that, not an equivalent knockoff brand.

When it comes to telecommunications, you can see this happen in competitive markets like hosting providers. The price you pay for a server is pretty strongly linked to the cost of running that server. Dialup ISPs followed the same curve, ultimately ending up with service that was basically free (often ad-supported) because it cost so little to provide, because dialup was a competitive market. Home broadband generally isn't in the US, resulting in prices which can substantially exceed the costs of running the service. In places with more competition, prices more closely match the costs.

To quote the All-Knowing Wikipedia:

"In perfect competition, any profit-maximizing producer faces a market price equal to its marginal cost (P=MC). This implies that a factor's price equals the factor's marginal revenue product."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_competition

Of course, you never get perfect competition in the real world, but that's just my point: to the extent that prices don't match costs, it's because competition isn't perfect. The less competitive a market, the less the correlation between prices and costs.
This is offtopic but, for precisely this reason I recently bought vpn access to a provider that has severs in all major countries. I'm living in Germany, and here, YouTube is almost unusable because everything music or somehow copyrighted can't be accessed. Also, I like to watch BBC programmes or Hulu, again impossible from here. VPN has been a great investment so far.
Really only one trick, but cool.
Skipping having 3-4 incompatible networks probably helped a lot (I'm not familiar with the details, but I think at one point the U.S. had Analog, GSM, CDMA and iDEN networks in widespread use).

Greater regulatory uniformity also probably helps a lot.

And then there are things like the New York metropolitan area having 3 times the population of Sweden, while many other states are many times the size of Sweden (so a U.S. national carrier needs to specialize in both serving much higher and much lower density than a Swedish national carrier).

I'm not insisting that the wildly varying density makes the actual provision of service particularly harder, but combine it with many different regulators and no strong overall regulator and it isn't surprising things are a mess.
> who calls or uses non-iMessage these days

Quite a few people actually. The former is rarer, but there is an increasingly large portion of the populace that doesn't use iMessage (considering it's proprietary to Apple). Sure, you can work around using Google Voice to SMS/Call over data, but that isn't for everyone.
Nifty little app, but in no way comparable with a service the scale of Gmail.

So a better title might be, "Doh! What's above the hood != what's under the hood."
I've stubbed in a quick one for now: http://beathound.com/privacy.
I... what... you need to give me back the time I wasted reading this post. You talk about product demos, learning tutorials, and demos. These are not all the same thing, and have different use cases.

Remember that not everyone learns the same way. Some people are visual learners. So if you're saying that video is bad for teaching people a new concept or technology, then you're just wrong. It works extremely well for a massive amount of people.
Adobe Edge Web Fonts
IPhone 5 vs Samsung Galaxy S3 drop tests
I wonder how you see the publishing of the Spanner paper effects your product? Does this give validity to your product seeing as there is a production system with similar features to yours already in use, or is there a risk Google might provide this system as a service to other companies possibly competing with you.
Bug temporarily affected monitoring for a portion of our customers today
Adobe Edge Suite for cross-browser development
> When the pilot wants to descend, the vehicle needs to be heavier, so the helium in the main body of the craft is compressed and put into storage chambers.

Ha, it's an inverted submarine!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Submarine#Submersion_and_trimmi...
what, you've never seen a salesman before?
Nice set of useful info and resources
If you have been into teaching you would realize that there are different kinds of learners. Some prefer verbal material, others prefer more visual, while some others like written material. The vast majority however prefer a combination of the above.

While you can pour over tutorials on how to use Emacs; just watching a video of a power user using Emacs gives you a different impression. It is really a completely different experience.

Sometimes it is faster to produce a set of video tutorials than to prepare well-written documentation. Hence they make a call. However, I agree that written documentation is the best medium for long term (i.e. smaller, searchable etc)

So, rather than asking for one medium of instruction to stop, I would rather encourage the plurality. Let the end-user pick and choose whatever he/she likes.
I think we're all going to be heading that direction before too long.

Could somebody who can see the video give us a 2 line description so we can see if it's available locally at a different URL?
Facebook: 'Bug' Means Old Private Messages Could Be Appearing On Timelines
tongue-in-cheek:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2F-DItXtZs
Is the demo section supposed to be functional? Nothing happens on my device...
Name of the said VPN provider please.
Customer service manager material? Come join Pathjoy and make people happy.
OUR MISSION:
At Pathjoy, we believe people are happier and more productive if they lived in a clean home. Our goal is to make maid service ubiquitous. Everyone should be able to afford great professional cleaning services!

THE ONE-LINER:
If you insist, we're "uber for maids."

OUR PROBLEM:
We're growing very quickly. Emphasis on "very." The only thing slowing us down is this: http://bit.ly/OKI221

That's what we call our call center. Clearly we can use some help.

OUR NEED:
If you have experience building customer service organizations and/or call centers from the ground up, setting up CRM systems, working in pre/post sales, and managing many people, let's talk. Big plus to those who have spent some time in the hospitality industry.

WHO WE ARE:
Our team is small (just two founders) and we are PASSIONATE about what we do. We're backed by YC (S10) and a number of angels you'll be excited to know about. We're really pumped about where things are headed because we've finally found product market fit, and when you meet us and hear our stories, you'll understand why. As the first addition to our core team, your work is going to have a real impact on our company, and if that excites you, join us!

WHERE WE ARE:
Downtown Mountain View, CA (one block from the Caltrain).

TO BE CONSIDERED:
Submit your resume to jobs@pathjoy.com and in your email include why you'd be perfect for this position.
The libcxx stl uses a #define to for exception support or not. When exceptions are disabled, they assert() instead.
That's a problem if you're living in Wyoming but for the majority of the US population, low population density is not a factor. There are vast mostly empty areas in the US, but people congregate in highly dense cities and suburbs.

Take California, it's 93.3 /km^2, New York State is 159.2 /km^2, New Jersey is 459 /km^2, and DC is 3,886 /km^2.
I don't know where you get the idea that you need to compile CentOS from source from? They distribute images that are perfectly equivalent to RedHats images. The resulting installed systems are binary compatible - I suspect it's not a coincidence that the strings "RedHat" and "CentOS" are the same length.

The main selling point of RHEL is the stability and long term support that makes software vendors like Oracle comfortable supporting it as a platform. If you install CentOS you get that, perfectly free and open source. How is that not giving RHEL away for free?
Similar story but unlike the brave travellers in this thread, I switched to a related profession instead.

I was a Search Engine Optimser and worked for several large companies and agencies, leading teams and getting results.
Over the course of about 12 months, I felt my passion fade, wither and then die.

I (wrongly) decided to keep focused on the money and was able to extend my career by about 18months. 18 miserable, unsatisying months.

Knowing that I like the web and feel like I know what works, over the course of several months I developed a sideline in WordPress development. I then slowly built this sideline into an income that would help me ditch SEO for good. It's now what I do full time.

So my advice is this:
Be truthful to yourself, if you don't have the passion, don't stick it out hoping it'll come back.
Change track, take a break, do something unexpected to give you a refresh/restart
If you have responsibilities, try to develop a side project, or several, to give yourself a new direction
C++11 Standard — What are Smart Pointers good for?
The easiest way to manage it is to have a stockpile. The best way is to have a pipeline of shipments coming off boats each day and going through distribution centres as quickly as possible.

Unless you are sure that you are going to sell out everywhere keeping some back makes sense so that you can send them where you need them most. Doesn't make sense to have them sitting in the regions where they aren't needed when other places need them. I picture less than 20% but would see it as distribution strategy rather than a shortage strategy.
> If you don't get support for that subscription, I can't see a difference worth $350 between RHEL self-support subscription and CentOS.

* Access to the RHEL repositories, with faster updates than CentOS or alternatives.

* Ability to upgrade to supported tier.

* Possibly: access to RHN pages with their forums, documentation, etc?

None of which would be huge advantages to me, but I can totally see the potential value.
Huh? Most languages with exceptions provide stack traces, so you can find which function (and line) caused the exception and also what functions were called up to the function that caused the exception. This makes it pretty easy to find out which call to open() caused the exception.
I am very astonished by the comments I read here. That internet is way cheaper and faster in Europe and Japan than it is in the US is a fact, period. And it is not because the governments pay for it. It is because the market competition works there, not here! America is not always where capitalism is best implemented! Antitrusts law should step in and these companies must compete!
One wonders if this blog post would have been written at all if the author was familiar with NaN in floating-point numbers and knew that isNaN was a thing.

isNaN is the defined method of checking if something Not A Number or can't be converted into a number.

The Real WTF (and infamous "feature" of JS) is that many things can be converted into a number.

isNaN("string") => true
isNaN({}) => true

but you might not expect that

isNaN("3e2") => false
isNaN("") => false
isNaN([]) => false
If the phone OS originated on a PDA, it wasn't locked on the phone version, but for all the other phones, it was a serious PITA to get software out there. Remember BREW and the costs to deploy / get approved (that was the easy one).

Apple didn't give up that. Apple followed the non-PDA path.
patio11's podcasts are great. He provides both the audio file and also the text transcript. If you read the transcript, he adds notes and context with in brackets.
A site which won't even show home-page pictures until I roll the cursor over them? (An observation meaning little on its own, but much in light of bstpierre's experience.)
8.63 euro or $11.15 for 100Mbps internet in Romania. And that includes 24% VAT.
I recently canceled my AT&T contract, paid my ETF, bought a straighttalk SIM, and now $50/mo ($45 plus taxes.) for 'unlimited' service. It works without unlocking because straighttalk is an AT&T based MVNO (or at least the sim I bought from them is.). It's not perfect, but I'll make back my ETF in four months.
Are you really posting from Iran? Are you familiar with the Tor Project:

http://www.tor-project.org/

In any case, please be careful there, friend. Be very careful.
On hand size, I only bring it up because I see far too many guys that seem to be blind to the fact that a significant portion of the population has physical characteristics that differ from their own. My hands are actually bigger than most womens as well and they're still small relatively. I can't speak to the asian market but the note is a mini tablet almost. If it weren't for me being used to one hand texting I probably wouldn't care as much about the sizes. But it is a rather big factor for myself personally.

I have used the google maps app on android actually, I'm hoping for google to release it onto the apple app store (assuming it isn't rejected that is, and until we have information on that i'm not going to discuss this aspect further as its somewhat pointless).

The android 4.0 google maps is quite nice actually and it would be nice to have both apple maps and google maps. I'm not arguing that apple's take is the best way with their transit directions. Just that both have different pros/cons and currently one con with googles transit methodology is they are the gatekeeper to the updates. I'm not reading any further into that con itself and noting that a local transit authority could release their own app that updates time information on iOS 6 and fix this for their users. That to me seems a bit of a better way to go about it. Yes I'm aware of googles efforts to standardize transit data as well, in this case the fault is the data providers not feeding their schedule information to google. But hopefully with the approach apple took both sides can be fixed.

Lets be honest, this is the first version of apple maps, as such it is somewhat inevitable it won't be complete. That said, developers have been pointing out the same failings since beta1 was released. I think the hullabaloo over its failings are somewhat premature. Yes it should be better, but at this point its spilled milk.

> Please elaborate, because I don't get your point. If it's that this contrasts with my stance on maps, it's not that I want browser choice instead of a good browser - I want both (just as with maps).

My point was more that making the designation for "advanced" to include features that your favorite OS includes but not another, you're being somewhat disingenuous. This is regardless of what you want, but its hard to argue that one missing feature that not everyone uses downgrades the entire OS to not advanced. Now arguing about "most advanced" is fine as I would agree it probably isn't, but this is after all marketing blurb as promotional material. I doubt even apple would be arguing that this is any sort of absolute statement that could be empirically proven. Maybe the marketing department would but I tend to ignore such statements as hyperbole.
"Another complicating factor is that as Masters of Disk it’s not surprising Google ..."

Masters of Disk? He seriously that that was a good line? One of the many things that annoyed me about that post. Thanks for the links.
Here is a screenshot of the article. http://i46.tinypic.com/358du2c.png

Couldn't get the video unfortunately. I'm in the UK, the VPN I used was Hotspot Shield, it's free.
NaN is incredibly useful, but I'm not so sure that 1/"a" = NaN is a great idea.
Don't think it's quite forgotten. Showed up on my netflix a few weeks ago. It's a great biopic of the nacent computer industry in the 70s-80s. It gives a lot of credit to the pioneering venture capitalists of that time.
Many simple obstacles that can be cleared up easily is worth doing :)
Nice use of bootstrap and changing things up so it doesn't look like a default bootstrap site.
yup, i developed my data encoder better than tor , BTW thanks bro.
Yeah, I think more and better competition is the answer but I'm not sure what the best way is to get there. More regulation? Less? We do, for the most part, have pretty good baseline infrastructure in the US. The infrastructure part of the problem is the 'last mile' piece, but in my mind this is something that can be easily accomplished by new, locally based entities. I think that municipally owned broadband is a really interesting option - GreenLight in Wilson, NC has had some good success: http://www.wilsonnc.org/living/fiberopticnetwork/greenlighth... - but they have had to fight off lobbying efforts by TimeWarner Cable and others to make such municipally owned efforts illegal, and the legality of such services is still on a State by State basis.

So - I guess another question might be, how do we make Community owned broadband an attractive option across the country?
My friend, we are still a looooong way from the Perl 5/6 debacle! What language doesn't hit a few stumbling blocks?
Source Code Pro (monospaced Source Sans), released open source by Adobe
Interesting you switched to Couch. I was hesitant to recommend it reading the post because I feared you were turned off JSON stores entirely, glad to hear that's not the case.

In general it feels like Couch actually takes storing data seriously. Append-only and whatnot. It's slower and a little bulkier than Mongo, but it does the important things right (1.0 bugs notwithstanding.)

I'd love a follow-up blog post on your experience with Couch.
After seeing all of the responses come back with big company names and a somewhat dismal outlook on small/lean companies and finding a path toward sustainable revenue not from ads, I got to thinking about why that is...

The biggest hurdles seem to be around critical mass (many things only get interesting when you have a certain amount of users/content), lock-in (users' inability to easily move between new services), and silos (apps only working with themselves, or at best, other apps on a single domain).

More thoughts here: http://blog.chaoscollective.org/post/32205575097/where-the-i...
That's not a picture of a microburst, that's an artists rendering.
In a similar vein, Pinboard offers to snapshot and full text index all your bookmarks, for a small annual fee:

https://pinboard.in/upgrade/
If you're looking for a truly easy way to do CI with GitHub, you can set it up in literally one click with Circle: https://circleci.com.

We'll do everything else, from setting up the DBs you need, to caching your github checkouts so that they're really really fast, to optimizing your test VMs for test speed (don't you know bad IO from cloud machines cause tests to randomly fail!).
A little ADSR envelope and one smidgen of FM synthesis helps...

var data = [],
sampleRateHz = 44100,
lengthInSeconds = 8,
sampleCount = sampleRateHz * lengthInSeconds,

//Notes sequence, play with it ;)
notes = [87, 0, 87, 0, 85, 0, 82, 0, 80, 0, 82, 82, 80, 0, 82, 0, 85, 0, 78, 0, 78, 78],

noteLength = sampleCount / notes.length,

//Base Frequency based on the notes
baseFreq = function(index) {
var r = 2 * Math.PI * 220.0 * Math.pow(2,(notes[index]-69)/12.0) / sampleRateHz;
return r;
},

envelope = function(offset, attack, decay, sustain, release) {
if (offset <= attack) {
return offset / attack
}
offset -= attack;
if (offset <= decay) {
var prop = offset / decay;
return 1 + prop * (sustain - 1);
}
offset -= decay;
var susLen = 1 - (attack + decay + release);
if (offset <= susLen) {
return sustain;
}
offset -= susLen;
return sustain * (1 - offset / release);
};

//Fill up the sound data!!
for(var j = 0; j < sampleCount; j++) {
var currNote = Math.round(j/noteLength);
var currFreq = baseFreq(currNote);
var sample = currFreq * j + 0.5 * Math.sin(currFreq * j * 1.21);
var offset = (j % noteLength) / noteLength;
var amp = envelope(offset, 0.05, 0.01, 0.5, 0.75);
data[j] = 128 + Math.round(96 * amp * Math.sin(sample));
}
Observations from a startup demo day junkie
Internet Radio Royalty Bill Would Change Rate-Setting Standard
> But personaly if they all pass that test then why pick one winner and have them all as part of the standard SH-3.[1-5]

That would be horrible for security and ease of implementation. Anyone implementing hashes would then need to implement 10 different hashes, some way to specify hash used, keep them all performant and patched against risks like DPA, ... . It is exactly that kind of kitchen-sink approach which is responsible for many flaws in SSL, PGP, etc. to date, and which makes implementing real-world systems such a pain.
> The idea that you might have to bump your college degree by 5 years is unimaginable at age 22.

Or to anyone with a conscience who doesn't want to become known as a liar.
Free Open Source Statistics Cookbook
Chrome canary and Dev channel have a built in Share button that fires a Share webintent
The size isn't really the fundamental problem. High density areas in the US are also poorly served. My thought is that the root problem is that free markets for the service in the US aren't efficient because the players are too big and too few. Neither has the FCC regulated the market to a structure that would bring out competitive activity.

Europe has more regulation to ensure portability across markets, as well as smaller regions, fundamentally divided by national boundaries. This sizing leads to smaller required capital investments, allowing more competitors and less customer lock in. Collectively this results in a more competitive market.

Vs. the US where the cost of spectrum auctions alone lock-out everyone but the largest x companies. With few other competitors, it's logical for the companies to rely on open pricing signals to avoid competition on price.
The good news is that the time that it can stay aloft is substantially longer than any rotor or prop driven craft.
> Yes, it's goofy that typeof (NaN) == 'number'.

You should be harsher on him. NaN is definitely a number in practically every programming language.

(type-of (/ 0.0 0.0))
SINGLE-FLOAT

System.err.println((new Double(0.0/0.0)) instanceof Number)
true

from types import *
type(1e10000 / 1e10000)
<type 'float'>

It looks like the blogger is just out and out mistaken. But there's more. The poster goes on about NaN not being easy to check for: not realizing that it's the only value which is never equal to itself. He even thinks this is a bug.
Surely you don't think that this is a reasonable model for how a database should work, do you?
Long Haul Heaven
This sounds like a great list of FAQ questions that could be added