skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Shades of Joel Spolskys classic post 'camels and rubber duckies' which explores pricing discrimination as well.

The joelonsoftware article and this one are both good reading. And both underline the concept that pricing, like software, is never 'done'. You always need to be working on it.
To be fair, this graphical shell functionality has been part of Mathematica for at least the past 7-8 years. In fact, I would argue that within Mathematica, one can work with a much larger number of formats and data sources.
Deabstraction does help: compelling the employer to pay a gas station clerk 30 gallons of gas per hour would screw up the economy. That work isn't worth the value of that much gas.

Mundane labor, that which pretty much anyone can do with minutes of training, is also a commodity. And you haven't lived thru the shortages from everyone wanting to fill their 20 gallon tanks at once.
My high school didn't allow students to use cell phones in class and they were frowned upon being visible at all. I can't remember anyone in middle school having a phone although I'm sure people did.

Your school allows you to just use your iPhone willy nilly?
You are over-generalizing. You are in a fortunate situation where you are able to make this work. What a blessing!
> I've been following this story closely, and I can confirm that McAfee's story checks out with independent witnesses, recordings of conversations, and everything else. [...] There was no meth lab, there were no bath-salts involved, McAfee hasn't even used drugs in 30 years, the bluelight thread was a hoax, the pictures used of him were cherry-picked from a group of 100s normal ones to make it seem he had a gun/drug fetish, he's girlfriends were not under-aged, etc.

[citations needed], otherwise you're just as bad as the media that you're lamenting.
I totally agree with this.

Children play without self-consciousness. ie, they don't think about what other people think or what they're trying to accomplish.

Children play for fun. This is where creativity starts.
My favorite is 005456 ... it's obvious that it's her if you look at it but still abstract.
It will also toast the electronics in your nuclear weapon, essentially making a weapon with a considerable enough portion of U-232 impossible.
Cradle of Mankind to Patagonia in 7 Years: A Journalist's Narrative Walk
We're here to discover as much as we can about all the beautiful things that we can do like create music, art, mathematics, science.

We're here to evolve and to continue creating life so that that new life can do more/better than that previous life.

Evolution is the reason for life.
Absolutely not.

The only thing Flickr has going for it at the moment is its community; which has withered. They aren't going to out engineer or out pace any smaller competitor.

Basically, the only thing they have is gone and is going to be very hard to get back. In Internet speak they abused their community by abandoning them for years.

By "they" I mean the bureaucracy I came to know so well while at Yahoo!. And no, Marissa Mayer can't save the day on this one.

Facebook won the casual social sharing of photos and 500px is winning on the "professional" side.

Disclaimer: I'm a founder of OpenPhoto. We're not fighting the same fight as Flickr though so I'm an external party on this specific topic.
The Heroku outage of 12/12/12
You’ll start running into browser limits at somewhere from 2048 to 2083 characters: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/208427
Comment bait title aside... That's why you do it in steps: you build the bulk of your product first before you have customers and need investment and then you shift your time to other things. Nobody is going to hire an engineer to free themselves up to pitch for money to pay for the engineers until that is a sound decision.
To me the ability to find a job is a more important measurement of stability than the government saying that no job worth less than X and hour can be had.

But back to your question about what happens when employers lower their wages to $2 per hour, they would probably lose all of their employees and have to raise wages if they want workers. Believe it or not, wages do correspond in some way to the amount of benefit an employee brings to a company.

Lets say you want to hire someone to clean your house. How much would you have to pay in order to attract someone with enough skill to do the job? You couldn't just say you'll pay $0.50 per hour and magically get people to clean your house at that rate. There might be some people you'd attract for $5 per hour. As the price goes up, so does the pool of people you could pull from. However, above a certain price, it isn't worth it for you to pay someone else to do it. You might do it yourself or just live with it being dirty.

If having your house cleaned is worth only $5 per hour to you and someone is willing to do house cleaning for $5 per hour should you be allowed to hire them? They probably aren't going to be willing to work for $5 per hour if they can make $10 per hour somewhere else. Does it make sense for the government to say, "You can't hire this person unless the value they provide is greater than $7.25 per hour"? I don't feel that benefits you or the person who you want to pay. I don't feel it benefits society as a whole because I think we benefit by having money flowing through more hands not fewer. Minimum wage says that transactions below a certain hourly rate are not allowed, so it prevents money from flowing through some of the hands that might get it otherwise.
Would those companies necessarily choose not to outsource or automate those jobs if they had the option to do so, without a minimum wage requirement?

If the standard of living is low enough that, taking the same wages as an outsourced worker, someone doing that job could still survive, you might have an argument against the minimum wage standard there.

Otherwise, if only option to retain local employment is to pay what those outsourced workers are making, or less, in a market where more than that means living hand to mouth, then it's a distinction without a difference to me.
Samba 4 Threatens Microsoft's Enterprise Lock-in
Worse though. A bag of hair and skin cells could throw police off your trail. A tainted recording might could make it as far as the courtroom, only to have the defense bring in an expert witness to discredit it.
Well, if there would be enough general interest in "The Magazine"'s format, such that a service Marco sold would cause a flood of app-store clones, then whether Marco sells one or not, such a clone will inevitably be created and allow the flood of those clones. That would simply be a realization of basic market forces and not something Marco can control.

However, the bigger issue is that Marco thinks that the editorial format is (one of) the key distinguishers between publications:

>>A publication’s app should be designed and built with purpose and consideration. The Magazine works because I based decisions not on what everyone else was doing, but on what would be best for this magazine. Every publication has its own unique needs, audience, economics, and style, so their apps should reflect that.

I don't think this is significant. The value of a publication is its content, primarily, and the creation and selection thereof. Yes, I do think that a general app store creation service should exist for publications, or even several. Should every publication be burdened with re-inventing the wheel for basic webb/app infrastructure? Looking at the web front-end of The Magazine, I see a basic hierarchy of Issue > Article List > Article Preview, which may not be perfect for every publication, but perhaps close enough? Presumably, the app functionality is also close enough to what a large number of publications would need in terms of UX. Wordpress isn't the perfectly ideal format either for every website with articles but the millions of installations out there still saves the industry a significant amount of time and money.
I don't necessarily agree that it should take hundreds, but it should take more than one.
I don't think failure to deliver is the biggest issue; the real problem is that he seems to have gone completely dark on his backers while apparently continuing to cheerfully update his Facebook status.

I'd guess that he's somewhat overwhelmed by the situation and unable to deal with it, so he's pretending it doesn't exist. If this is the case, I hope, for his sake, he manages to face it long enough to get it out of his system. I know from experience this sort of thing can eat away at you, and that letting people know you messed up can be a huge relief.
Oh, so you really did mean `var tester = test;`

The reason that might be less good than the current approaches is that you may want to spawn multiple 'instances' of the generator/coroutine. If I'm understanding your proposal correctly, you'd only ever be able to run it once.
FCC says Apple's iMessage and other services should allow text-to-911
When talking about abstract capability, sure, but that's never what it means in a legal sense...
Same here, I love guitars and I love web apps but I hate signing up for something without knowing what it does... A video would be awesome!
I wonder how he'll backup his footage
* But if I tell you the book is $39, but for $79 you can buy the book plus all these great videos and code samples, then you are comparing the two packages to each other. All of a sudden $39 sounds reasonable, and you are trying to decide if the extra value in the $79 package justifies the price increase.*

This is a sophism called "False dilemma". Survey callers use it all the time.. it's so annoying. For instance:

<caller> Hi Mr X, I'm working for blabla. This survey will take 1 minute, shall we start?
(Note: They make it explicitly rude for me to say "No"; I.e. they don't open any door such as "Are you interested in continuing, etc.").

<me> No thanks, I'm busy! Have a nice day.
<caller> Sure! Should we call you Tuesday or Wednesday?
(Note: Bang, the false dilemma sophism. The caller tries to limit the option to *only those two!*. But obviously, there are hundreds of other choices.. such as:)
<me> No thanks, don't call me back I'm not interested.
<caller> (Try another annoying tactic)
<me> (Being really tired of being manipulated decide to let the phone open but not listen to it anymore. After 15 minutes, I check back to see if the caller is still here (he's not)).

Meh. It's a good marketing tactic, but it's very annoying.
Team GhostShell Hacks Pentagon, NASA, Federal Reserve
Isn't that a seed round?

I don't see why crowdfunding should be any different than more formal investors here.
- Programmers make horrible designers

Please don't generalize, this is not always true. Being a programmer (with a formal CS background) who used to make a living as a professional designer, I have met a lot of people like me. Good design is about solving problems, good programmers usually solve problems.
When it comes to aesthetics, it's something that people do learn, and programmers can learn, too.

- giving the executive decision powers in the hands of most of the developers is a recipe for a disastrous product

I respectfully disagree here too, for the sole reason that developers can learn the ability of making decisions in a relatively rational way. I would even wager to say they might be more inclined to trust in data.
You can start with his blog and follow the discussion. It's not the most organized site (due to the situation) but it should lead you to what is going on.

Also note how the Belize government has not put out any evidence or press releases about any found meth-lab, drugs of any kind, warrants for arrest, etc. You can bet that they would use anything to discredit John in a split second if there was anything to be found. But the situation is so barren for them, and his friends so loyal, that even a corrupt government is having a hard time with it!
You got me. In my defence, that was a textbook case of Poe's Law.
OP had it coming. Why would you use your real identity in this situation? What a n00b.
Will this vector-based video codec kill the pixel?
Solar and Wind will never, ever produce 24x7 power in predictable and economic quantities. They have their place but baseload, constant and affordable power is still a challenge to be solved.
I'm in exactly the same situation right now and I ABSOLUTELY agree with you on everything. One minor thing here though that I don't call it a 'startup', it's rather a 'small business', which grows linearly, not exponentially (not yet at least).
When you submit an app to the appstore you have two options: release it as soon as Apple approves it or release it on a date you set (assuming Apple approved it before). It's very convenient for scheduling app releases on certain launch dates obviously
Not really - before, the policy was that a student could have a phone on them, as long as they weren't using it.

I had to present to the principal and pitch it to a district committee before the policy was changed. Even now, students are allowed to use their phones in class only with this app (or another teacher-approved app).
"For everyone who is a backer and has met Alex personally, please vouch for his passion on Kickstarter. Doing it here does not help."

I'd actually suggest the reverse - linking this thread to people on Kickstarter. I think a lot of people posting on Kickstarter need a little more education on what it is exactly that they're investing in.
What about a pricing model similar to what [ncunch](http://www.ncrunch.net/) is doing?
Seconded. Every once in a while a new service's pricing page is posted on HN and someone says "Why should I pay $X / month for that? I could Write It In A Weekend (tm)"

That's not the point. What matters is the value to the customer, not the cost of production. Cost of Goods / Services is not the smart way to price.

In a few weeks I'll have a blog post on this, name checking my new best friend Hayek.
Well it's a professor, so he probably really does think only stupid people cheat.
In a sad way I suppose it suggests a business opportunity to robo-file small claims actions on your behalf.

BTW, I don't think this is a good example of replacing regulation with private litigation, I expect it will be an example of behavioral change in the presence of more literal examples of the risks. As lots of people point out in this thread, clearly a large number of people were thinking "store" not "random guy who might come up with the goods" when they backed a project, having a few of these get a lot of press might have a chilling effect on backers.
Prizes like t-shirts and USB sticks are not the reason people fund projects (okay, sometimes a t-shirt with the project's logo is very special). I think the excessive rewards happens mostly due to anxiousness by creators, not 'market demand'.
For one, a pledge to a Kickstarter project is absolutely not an "order" for a product. It is an investment in a future which may or may not come to fruition. What happens if you put down $60 at the local Gamestop on a game that later gets cancelled? You get your money back, yes, but in the meantime, Gamestop gets to keep your cash.
How do Google get their apps like this approved? Indie developers get rejected all the time for replicating a function that an apple app already does, but google has chrome and others and now maps?

If Apple want to distance themselves from Google, surely they could just not approve any of their apps.
Ferrofluid GPU Simulation with the Barnes-Hut Algorithm
Source code? I really, really want to try something like this but I've never done GP and I'm not sure where to start.

In lieue of the source code, can anyone point me to a reference on GP and maybe something about image generation in C? In particular, what's an efficient graphics pipeline for converting all of these polygons to pixels? Something like bresenham for the edges and then additive coloring in the middle? And then how do I convert an RGB pixel array into some reasonable image format? I apologize for my ignorance, I don't even know what to start googling.

I think it would be a good exercise for me to write something like this from scratch on my own, just want some pointers to start.
Just because you have the institutional memory of Flickr during its fall from grace doesn't mean the rest of the internet, particularly the younger generation, does.

Instagram has proven that social networking around "artistic" photos has an audience. If Flickr can be the more professional, big-boy Instagram (maybe even with a website!), then I can see it attracting a new audience.
The iPhone Gets an Answer to Google Now
1) If you take away Uranium from a thorium reactor you will rather quickly lose criticality, so you won't be making any new protactinium. Thorium breeders run very close to steady state, and only make a very small fraction of fuel more then they need.

2) I'm pretty sure there is a rare reaction that you will get protactinium-232, which has a much shorter half life the protactinium-233 (about a day instead of about a month) but it can't be chemically separated. It will decay to U-232.

The nature article is alarmist, and not practical. It would only make sense if you had a separate neutron source that was not a thorium breeder, and probably will still have a good amount of U-232. Since you have a neutron source (probably a light water reactor) why you wouldn't use the extremely well understood methods to make plutonium from U-238 is beyond me. You quite literally just need to put uranium metal in the neutron flux for 1 month and chemically separate out the plutonium. Much easier, if I was designing a nuclear weapons program I sure as hell wouldn't pick Thorium.
Not likely - the new app offers mobile posting, and that's about it. The Flickr site requires people to pay $25 a year to upload more than 200 photos, and regardless of what you think of premium models, there's intense competition. Flickr itself is stagnant. Years stagnant, we're talking. Features, API integration. I'm really, honestly unsure, even subscribed to their devblog and being a premium customer for 5+ years, what their dev staff are actually doing.

I loved Flickr. It's on life support. And the prognosis is not good.
Metrics that Matter Most for 2013
This is pretty good advice.

Pricing is a big topic in itself and I think it's worth taking the time to look at it more closely. As I always say when pricing is raised on HN, no decision you make will have more impact on your profitability.

(I also usually link to my review of an entire book devoted to pricing, here it is: http://chester.id.au/2012/09/12/review-the-strategy-and-tact...)

Just think about it. Pricing is a decision that gets made infrequently. It sets the upper bound on potential profitability; whereas costs have in theory no upper bound.

People think about costs more because those are hidden from the customer and can be constantly twiddled. But it's meaningless without a smart price structure.

Right now I'm working on a little niche web application. What will I be doing in the new year? Well, coding on it, sure.

But I will also be getting a new, well-fitted business suit, going out to my customers, and finding how much Problem X is costing them. I'll adjust my pricing scheme to match, because my intention is to capture a fraction of value, not to pluck a number out of the thin air.

Seriously. Buy that book if you have a business, any business. Use my Amazon referral link or the non-referral link, I don't care. Just get the book.
Voice nav would be the only reason I'd use Apple Maps; If google maps has it I'm certainly switching back.
Apple made a decision at some point (seemingly under pressure) to allow not just Chrome, but all "browsers" (a term that I feel needs to be put in quotes, as all of these applications, including Chrome, must use Apple's HTML renderer, and only thereby have control over some aspects of how requests are cached and the surrounding UI).
Man arms DIY drone with paintball handgun and shoots human cardboard cutouts
Completely separate.
Software Pioneer McAfee Arrives in U.S. From Guatemala
Pulse Tech Talk Livestream 7PM
My main thought watching the video: "Holt shit that is some good advertising." A slickly-produced, epic, emotional and humble tribute to the richness and absurdity of human life - all inconspicuously presented through a panorama of Google's entire product portfolio - tying the sweeping feelings stirred in you either consciously or subconsciously to everything Google...
And what about on the android and windows app stores?
Two reasons:

First, while it's not entirely a zero-sum game, there's a considerable competitiveness aspect - there aren't enough college slots or scholarships to accommodate everyone getting a good degree from a strong school, and if there were, there wouldn't be enough jobs to hire them into. So at various points, people are going to not make the cut. Do we simply say "well, if you're not in the top X% of the nation you'll have to make do on $10/hour?"

Secondly, because we can't simply wave our wands and make everyone 15-30 IQ points smarter. Getting every poor child to be as motivated and intelligent as that anecdote is at least as large a problem as income inequality generally. It's like saying "I've got a cure for cancer, but it requires time travel" - you've just reduced a Very Hard problem to a different Very Hard problem, which is a solid achievement but doesn't actually solve anything.

EDIT: And Thirdly, why should the answer be that poor people have to work their asses off to catch up just because they made the wrong choice of parents? It's like a race where some contestants have to carry dumbbells - it's great that they can actually succeed, but it's still miles and miles from fair.
North Korea’s Satellite Is Out of Control: Why This Is Very Bad News
I founded a product called Planscope (https://planscope.io). I'm the only person involved. I develop, design, support, and handle all the marketing.

* I don't pitch 50% of the time (0% is more accurate)

* The lights are on. With more than 200 paying customers and 20% growth month-to-month, they should stay on for quite some time.

* I know most of my customers, and tailor the product around what I learn in talking with them. Thus, customer development.

* Me, myself, and I all agree about our company's vision.

* I keep tabs on my industry by asking my customer's about their business — and it helps that I eat my own dogfood.

* I do take all responsibility.

* And I handle all support