skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Google claims that prices have fallen and that the supply chain is efficient enough to bring down prices:

http://www.droid-life.com/2012/11/02/googles-director-of-bus...

We have seen over the last 20 years that computers not only get faster but also cheaper. The fact that the top phones have stayed at 600-700 for the past several years suggests that they are padding costs or simply have no compulsion to be efficient in their supply chains. Google says this is definitely the case and they are still making money on the Nexus 4, even though it costs much less than other flagship phones.

Also note just how horrible Motorola built-in UI is, for example. Something's wrong if they can make an inferior project and not expect to get killed. There's a lot of inefficiency at these companies and they don't care and they don't have to care. Google is trying to change that.

The Galaxy Nexus was sold at $399 unlocked (some time after release). The Nexus 4 is $299. Google is trying to bring the cost down further. When top-line phones hit $150-200 unlocked, people will be able to upgrade once or twice a year.

This will actually encourage even higher quality phones. Once all the topline phones fall to $299 or less, it opens up a space for someone else to make a really, really nice phone at the old $600 level. This is not crazy talk. This is exactly what happened with PC laptops over the last 5 years. Now the better Ultrabooks that are now jockeying for the position of "high-end PC laptop."

So there are a lot of benefits and I believe the drop in prices will lead to better phones and tablets across the board.
If you're a naive investor you're cheating yourself. Vanguard, index funds and “A Random Walk Down Wall Street” are all old.
Thanks for the reply, the libel issue makes sense. I've never seen that particular type of penalty before, is that something that happens often? I've personally never noticed it before, but then again I probably have not paid attention to that kind of thing either.
>I know I picked on Amazon a bit here and that's just because the Kindle Fire is being sold at cost below the competition.

First of all it's not clear Amazon is losing money on the Kindle hardware. But even if they are they seem to have adopted the console model - I give you subsidized hardware and then you pay through the nose for content. They are not going to lose money in the end even if they do lose money on the hardware.

Ask anybody who has one of the old Kindles how much they spend on ebooks compared to what they used to spend on dead trees. The impulse buy will get you every time.

And that's a perfectly reasonable and sustainable business strategy, provided not too many people root their kindle and use it for something else.

Amazon lost money last quarter because they made some questionable acquisitions and because they're in the process of expanding into new markets (like film production), not because they're dumping hardware below cost.
Isn't this the same Linus Torvalds who just last week complained about how PC laptops, commoditized and cut down to their marginal cost of production for years now, weren't the target of innovation and how they were stuck using low resolution screens?
“We try very hard to make sure we communicate with Webmasters,” Mr. Cutts says. For instance, he says, he reassured Gawker Media that it would remain in search results after Hurricane Sandy caused it to crash.

This somewhat perfectly summarizes the genius solution Google found to customer service. Google is very keen to react with a personal face to high profile cases while at the same time squeezing all the thousands of faceless small businesses in similar situations into Adwords.
This appears paywalled -- Is the full article available anywhere?
Some of them don't. I currently have an out of state number and the door entry system has no problem dialing it.
Those things are not mutually exclusive. LCD manufacturers can both 1) make better displays with higher resolutions and 2) reduce the cost of producing said displays.

So, there can be a 'race to the bottom' of high quality products.
I use StraightTalk. Unlimited minutes, texts and data\* about $50 a month for a pre-paid sim.

\* I understand there's a soft cap on the data of about 2GB a month, but I haven't run into it yet.
I've done that with my last two phones -- currently i'm using a Samsung Galaxy Mini I bought off Ebay jailbroken for 100.00, with a t-mobile pay-as-you-go sim card in it. I don't miss data at all since I can get wifi plenty of places.
You are probably wanting CASS software. The only vendor I've dealt with is Melissa Data.
On some subtleties of Paxos
Some sites go down in rankings, but other (hopefully) more useful sites go up in rankings.

Also if your company is impacted negatively by this, you should attempt to focus more on social network effects to reduce reliance on Google. For example, integration from Facebook and Twitter opens up more channels for users to visit your site through.
Amazon is exploring the idea of ad supported hardware. Ad supported content on the web has pretty much wiped out paid content. We will see if ad supported HW does better.

To call it predatory pricing is stupid.

If you leave prices high and keep Apple in business, you have to be concerned about their slow rate of innovation. Most of their innovation is figuring out how to extract more money from you. They are like Microsoft IE innovation. MS was really slow until the FREE Chrome and Firefox browsers started to take significant market share.
The question is, is google the web? why do we rely so much on google ? because we became lazy ... because browsers like firefox promoted google search heavily , until it becomes obsolete as a browser itself because of chrome , because all these comparison sites built their businesses on google search engine, and now google has his own shopping search engine , they became obsolete , and the list goes on and on... our businesses rely too much on google, until google take us out of business...
How to waste good marketing
http://www.amazon.com/Scientist-Rebel-York-Review-Collection...
Low interests rate are indeed preventing investment. Althought capital is readily available for borrowing, as the article says companies already have cash on hand as it is. Higher returns are needed to boost investment. Why do you think so many funds and banks are exploring developing nations. Higher returns.
How is Google squeezing small businesses?
>(my marathon running friends use the "1 mile = 100 calories" rule of thumb)

Weight also impacts how many calories are burned. (http://caloriesburnedrunning.org/; not sure how accurate this particular site is, but I've seen similar results from other sites). A 6'6" person with a healthy BMI weight of 215 lbs would burn around 175 calories per mile at an 11.5 minute mile pace.

Despite this, as a tall person who runs a lot, I've found that a diet change is still really important if one wants to lose weight. (But after this is done, it is nice to go for a ten mile run on the weekend to cut a half pound that can be used as weight loss or to allow more eating throughout the rest of the week.)
Is there any chance in the future of this working on Windows?
For us it was specifically because they didn't want people opening the door remotely. They wanted you to be local.
I'm not exactly sure what solution you're proposing here, to an old problem that's already been around longer than Google or Amazon - Government intervention?

I'm also curious how this would be evaluated if Amazon/Google price their hardware devices in a different fashion than more hardware based companies like Apple/Samsung - on the services they lock you into. I'm skeptical that Amazon is really losing money on each tablet sold, as those tablets really are just vending machines which they then make money off of product sales. (Similarly with Google and its services/ads.) Do we regulate hardware pricing even if the profit calculated isn't directly on the hardware sale itself?
AT&T sells a plan with 5GB/month for $50/month[1] (pay-ahead, not prepay). It is a monthly subscription with no commitment - cancel it at any time. I walked into a AT&T store and the lady behind the counter gave me a free SIM (list price $5.95). I bought the $15/month for 250MB data plan since I was just experimenting.

I found out that AT&T has annoying restrictions based on the IMEI number - for a IMEI that maps to a computer, they will only offer you the $50/month plan. For a IMEI that maps to a tablet, they will allow you to to buy the $15/month plan. FWIIW, they require you to enter a IMEA number, not the number of the device you are using the SIM in. ;-)

I am currently running my phone on a T-Mobile on a $30/month pre-paid plan[2] with unlimited (for some definition of "unlimited") data and 100 minutes of talk. Unfortunately, they have poor coverage in about half the area I frequent... I end up roaming on AT&T and don't get data coverage there.

Both those options are essentially the same as your Singapore plan.

[1] http://www.att.com/shop/wireless/data-plans.html

[2] http://prepaid-phones.t-mobile.com/monthly-4g-plans
Mystery at Port Newark: Why Did 17 Plug-In Cars Burn?
Be your own Certificate Authority (CA)
At the office, I do a physical variant of this: when I'm at my desk, I'm in work mode. If I want to spend time doing personal things at the office, I'll go to another area (eg a couch). If nothing else, it's easy for me to notice when I've been there for a while. And it keeps me efficient in either mode.
Carriers in the US don't make money selling phones either. Flagship smartphones are subsidized by your agreement to lock yourself in for 2 years.
I have created an iOS app already whereby the user can import a screenshot of the game (in any orientation or theme), and it will give you the best results. It should be in review soon.
Show HN: Browsergram, a one hour Chrome extension that Instagrams everything.
This is just a trick by Apple who don't want to admit to doing anything wrong. Expect the judge to notice this and issue another order that the text must be readable and not covered up with Javscript tricks.
The problem is that Google competes with businesses that once thrived on its platform. It's similar to when Microsoft decided to bundle IE into Windows. Google now bundles comparison shopping and local business reviews into search.

If they go too far in this direction it will probably hurt them. Users don't want a search engine that puts its own, lesser quality, sites at the top.

It'd be amazing if Google spun off Google Search as its own company. The business is so narrow and successful that it could probably survive for 50 years without any fundamental change. Instead, it's being distorted and weighed down by a sprawling organization that's desperate to create new businesses, and compromising the search product to do so.
Gigabytes
Yes, but that would break the meaning of the multiplier. That's why there is the global in front. So, global adder is a solid adder (or perhaps a rising multiplier) who regularly works on significant open source projects, e.g. webkit, apache, mozilla, etc.
Yes, but hosts typically respond to outside pressure and it could very well be that someone else's stuff gets taken down with your stuff being collateral damage.

In that case it pays off handily if you have your content spread. Of course, if you're going to do something that is illegal then it doesn't really matter where you host, then you are basically just counting down until you get booted.
I think the most serious concern is how Google promotes its own offerings above more popular competitors in the search results section. For example, do a search for "finance" and Google Finance is shown above Yahoo! finance, even though Yahoo! finance is better by most measures, and far more popular (see http://www.businessinsider.com/google-finance-yahoo-finance-... )

If you rely on Google to drive traffic, but also compete with Google, that puts you in a difficult spot.

Consumers ought to be annoyed too. Google has historically does a good job distinguishing between links that are artificially promoted (ads) and algorithmic rankings. But Google is artificially promoting their own offerings and presenting them as if they're a result of the algorithm.

This seems like a bad strategy. It has the potential to shake user confidence in Google's impartiality and link quality, annoy site maintainers, and drive away advertisers.
A great API is one that is fully documented and doesn't hide any API calls. One that doesn't keep changing the API calls to make sure older programs break, but create newer API calls to do new things and keep the old ones for legacy support.
Basically, the volatility of their algorithm and the opaqueness of it means that any small business that is getting >80% Google-referred traffic is in for a tough time if they're marked as bad. And mistakes happen. Say:

* A canonical tag that shows up due to a bug. Dead.

* Industry terms that appear duplicative to the NLP parser. Dead.

* Too-diverse content. Lower rankings, but functionally dead.

There's tons more, but I'm not a practitioner of SEO.
I don't think he has a specific "model" for his "predictions". Reading his recent article, he uses statistics and weights informations gathered by polls to determine the probability of each candidate winning per state. You can't really be "wrong" in that sense, but the actual result can vary due to statistical sampling error, polling error, or bias in the polls.

Source: fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/03/nov-2-for-romney-to-win-state-polls-must-be-statistically-biased
> The Fed has been injecting more and more capital into the economy because — at least in theory — capital fuels capitalism.

Free markets fuel capitalism.

The Fed's market manipulation is abhorrent to pure capitalism; it throws the elegant system of free competition and trade horrifically out of balance.
I was told about zencoding this summer.. pretty darn cool and useful.
Fair point, Keynesian monetary policy is focused on lowering interest rates and not necessarily increasing banking reserves.

But lowering interest rates is still a form monetary stimulus (which is currently being employed by the fed) and is a means to inject capital into the economy.
It's tough to find any wrong doing by Google in an article like this. It's pure speculation. Many of their tools, step on other sites toes. Hipmunk and kayak recently had to deal with https://www.google.com/flights/.

When searching for goods such as "macbook pro" you'll notice sponsored links with prices that Google "may be compensated from". That type of stuff seems unfair to me.

I won't say Google is playing unfair as of late, but they are certainly more than just displaying results these days.
Aha John, good thing this is a new account as it's gonna be silent banned in a few hours ;-)
I am pretty sure the thing you are missing is that there will be a segment of the market that will pay more -- as is happening with apple products. There is also a segment that is all about price and these are the people buying devices accordingly.

Unfortunately, there is a segment of the second group that buy cheap and then expect more. Eventually, devices will catch up to meet even the needs of those likely to complain at the lower price point.
I understand and appreciate the great work DragonFly BSD team is doing. I am just pointing out my less-than-satisfactory experience with the ports system
I got FreeBSD and OpenBSD installed successfully on my laptop. Also, if I remember correctly, I tried building from ports as well. On some ports, I got the error that they are not supported for DragonFly. When I could not get OpenJDK port working, I just gave up because it is essential for me to have it working.
I absolutely want one or two. Pretty expensive, though. (just pledged)
I don't think your analogy makes any sense at all.
I do want to be able to host my own servers..one day..as for now I think I will "just get this project out there". I think I've got enough Rails under my belt to get the few pages I need up, and Heroku's free-tier seems perfect to learn and practice on.
I know that miniaturization is pretty tough, but I hope that we get to the point where I can buy something as nice as a Galaxy Nexus for about 200 off contract. 600-800 for a cell phone is tough to swallow when I can buy an awesome laptop like a thinkpad X230 for the same price range, the latest iPad for 100-300 cheaper, or a macbook air for just 200 more.

Is there really 600-800 dollars worth of technology in a smart phone, or are the margins really high? I honestly don't know one way or the other. I do know however, that the Galaxy Nexus is the best phone I've ever used, and the fact that it was 349.00 when I got it played a large part in my decision.
I think it depends on the legal agreements between the parties. Many hosting and service contracts make an effort to preserve an expectation of privacy.
Oddly enough the first ebook I wrote for Kindle was pirated. It was not the best book, but sold 800+ copies in the first few months. I am trying to improve as a writer so I can write better. The ebook only got one star in a review, and I did not use DRM to protect it, so I guess someone bought it for 99 cents and then converted it to other formats and pirated it.

In a way it made my ebook more popular when it was given away for free. Kindle only allows me 5 days of a free Kindle Select promotion every 90 days, but because the book was illegally downloaded it someone became more popular even if it was hard to read and poorly formatted.

Eventually the Bit Torrent site took it down, and Amazon found it and I guess issued a cease and desist order or something.
I learned both perl and python by using them to replace my sysinit scripts on a Centos box. If you can get through this, I'd say you're "conversational" in a language.

You'll also know Linux better than most ever will.
New Jersey Allows Voting By Email And Fax For Hurricane Victims
I'm not entirely sure why you're being voted down. I would like to see more detail from you, but I get the feeling that a Reddit mentality of "I don't like this, down boat for you" is at play.
With the rates you're able to charge, I think you already have it as figured out as anyone. You could answer this question yourself and anyone else out there would have no better idea than you.

Personally, I feel like the once and always most valuable skill is knowing how to ship from A to Z and have a proven track record of this ability. In other words, you have pushed out a quality product which has had some success (probably not enough to quit freelancing or you wouldn't still be doing it.) I believe that most agencies out there don't have this skill / experience. There really isn't much room for it in most dev shops because it's not their specialty, the overhead is high and with a healthy client base, they just don't have the resources. But there there are handful who do this (many of the *labs types of agencies.) Being able to build a product is valuable, but being able to direct (consult) the client to success after the product is built is far more valuable IMO. As an extreme example, just think of how much 37signals could charge if those guys were still doing client work. They probably wouldn't even be building products, but rather consulting for astronomically high rates (but they would still be a bargain for those who could afford to pay the tab.)

Another huge value would be to put together an A team which would be able to pull off the above. There are lots of great independent freelancers out there, but not so many crack-shot teams. If you need evidence for this, then just go look at all the aquihiring which has been going on just to grab talented premade teams.

Of course, the end game is to make valuable products, and this can break you out of the dollars for hours grind. Build a great product and you can raise your income at internet scale.

Do all this and the actual technology / platforms that you use all of a sudden doesn't seem to be of much importance.
I am 44 years old and on disability. I still try to write programs, but I write small ones. Due to a mental illness and a stroke, my abilities are limited, and I cannot work a job, but I keep on trying.
I'm going to venture a guess that hosting controversial clients is more trouble (in cease and desists) than its worth.
I don't think Rackspace is hurting itself by not servicing the controversial/illegal content market.
It's not about missing apps, it's about the quality of the apps.

In addition, most startups invest more time in developing iOS apps first and release android apps as an afterthought.
Need Programmers
Sure, but I consider the third party services as a backup or a fail over, in case my local server is lost.
A related "gotcha" is not driving the gate hard enough. The 6A rating is also predicated on driving the gate hard enough to drive the on Rds to its minimum value.

I would be suspicious of this, in conjunction with inadequate heatsinking (i.e. heavy copper pads under the FETs) especially if the FETs are being driven by 3.3v. Looking at the specs, the FET is rated at 50mOhm given 4.5v gate drive - very acceptable - but if the FET is driven by 3.3v, it will have much higher Rds (may be running in the linear region which would be very bad). Note that the gate threshold voltage is 1.5v typical but 3v max so driving with a 3.3v logic signal would be marginal in the worst case situation.
> The Fed's market manipulation is abhorrent to pure capitalism

Perhaps, but systems should use managerial feedback systems to dampen large deviations. The incompleteness or the ineffectiveness of money-supply controls does not lead us to conclude that no managerial feedback should occur at all.

EDIT: expanding on that, I'd say we often go 'round with that binary question, when we rarely ever ask, "what would be a more effective way to handle disruptions to the economy?" in which case we'd begin to examine the available and potential metrics, the tools of affecting behavior, and whether those tools can be used without violating autonomy. If we have successfully optimized for efficiency and available capital, as the article suggests, then how could we next optimize for risk, experimentation, and innovation?
Skewer: live Emacs JavaScript interaction
I believe he means that the expectation by the parent is for the child to perform well enough to get into an ivy league school, but the consequences of the child not performing well are non-existant (the bar being low).

Alluding to it being a moral hazard.
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