skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Roku's Amazon interface is terrible with pricing. In the browse view the CTA I get is "Purchase from $2.99!"

But when you click into detail, it's actually: rent in SD for $2.99, rent in HD for $4.99, buy for $19.99.

I don't really care that much, but I can see how it comes off as scammy. If it wasn't Amazon doing it, I think a lot more people would have a problem with it.
I agree that Steam succeeds because it's easier than piracy, but I disagree about some of the details in that statement. I think you're overplaying the threats involved today. I pirated stuff when I was a kid, and it was relatively easy for someone who understood that scene to look for warning posts first. Today it's even easier given robust user rating and the camaraderie of pirate culture. It's very much an "us vs them" mentality, and it's hardly a solved problem.

It seems that pirates are increasingly looking to provide a better service, whereas publishers seem intent on bad practices that either directly hurt, or can be used to hurt, legitimate users. In fact, many people pirate today because they don't want DRM or required connectivity. (The next SimCity will suffer from this, but I expect pirates to not have to worry about it after a few weeks.) In the case of Assassin's Creed II pirates couple play fine, but legitimate players couldn't due to DDOS attacks on servers required to let you play even single player. And in a hilarious example, an Ubisoft developer was even found to use a hack by a release group in an official patch: http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2008/07/ubisoft-drm-snafu-remi...

Given the relatively equal ease of piracy versus purchase, I would give the edge to the fact that developers are insanely integrated into the game buying community at every level. They've been blogging for years, they talk on Twitter, they visit 4chan and talk games, they even visit piracy sites themselves. Gamers like developers, and want them to succeed.

But yes, I do think Steam even has a chance because it's as easy and (mostly) as useful as piracy. Ease and use are a large part of why Napster succeeded, and why Kazaa was so popular, but it's also the reason iTunes succeeds, though people associate it mostly with music. Google Play... I don't know many who even use it.

Now, UltraVoilet is a wonderful digital attempt by film studios, on paper, but they cut their nose off to spite their face by making pack-ins that come with DVDs/Blu-Rays only guaranteed to last a year. And you can't buy from the studios, but instead a few other services that the common consumer has never heard of. Film companies really are still stuck in the past. Others have learned how to make their mediums work on the Internet, and these people have ignored the lessons.

/edit: Been looking into UV more. It's actually an even better idea than I first thought. It seems that it's the bigger stores (Google, Apple, Amazon) that don't want to go along with it. That's a shame for us as customers.
You misunderstand my use of the term "specialised". A 3D printer can print anything, barring some of the limitations outlined in the article. Most machines are intended to serve much more specific functions, and do so with great efficiency: I can print a hole in any shape I like, but if all I want is a hole, why shouldn't I just use a drill press?
Great distinction. You expressed what I was trying to say much more eloquently.
NYC Techies’ New Year’s Resolutions
Simple ATM cards being declined
Show HN: An online community with modern forum I made in 2 weeks
We have the parking light indicator thing here too. San Jose, Santana Row...
If you use a 2 week schedule, you can make it a 26 hour day. Arranging a nice schedule is harder, but it is possible.

I experimented a lot with sleep when I was younger. 26 hour days, 28 hour days, uberman. Now that I'm middle aged, I have no problems with sleep. I attribute this to several changes I made:

1) stopping my caffeine habit

2) no screen time before bed. reading fiction on a phone is OK, but no more than that.

3) getting old made waking up early a lot easier

4) My uberman experimentation gave me the ability of an infantry man to fall asleep quickly whenever and wherever I want
Do you need a BS in CS to land job?
I began working for my fathers computer business when I was 8 years old. I started by working in the shop building computers after school and on weekends.
Since then I have grown to a lot more responsibilities running the shop. I am 26 and I have been selling service contracts, setting up networks(2-100+ computers), Server 2000/2003/2008 with Active Directory Domains, MSSQL Management, and design internal network apps in PHP and Python (around 20+ satisfied customers using apps), along with the general computer repair tasks. (Virus removal, upgrades, network security, etc...)

My question to the gurus in the biz, even though I skipped college but still have certifications, would I still be able to get a job in IT at a small to large company without a BS in computer science if things went sour? Everything I see online says a BS is a must. However we have had people working for us who have MORE than that, who I have had to train myself.

Footnote in case: I am MSCE, MCSA, A+, Network+, Security+, and Linux+ certified.
> It is the moral responsibility of a citizen to disobey laws they believe are unjust.

Oh, come on. We're not talking about summary execution of Muslims or cutting off a child's hand for stealing bread; we're talking about twenty bucks for a movie.
His point is that you won't build something past the next local optimum if you overtrain on your customers' immediate actions.

Even "4 steps to the epiphany" began with the vision of the founders. That part of the message seems to get lost in the rhetoric.
But if they had a crappy product for Android is it any wonder that their uptake ratio was so out of kilter? If they had platform feature parity at launch your argument would be valid but they didn't so you cannot draw the conclusion you have drawn.
I think the relative merits of Microsoft Office vs. other solutions is something that's been hashed out many, many times. But I do find interesting the request on Microsoft's part for a face-to-face meeting. They don't specifically say a "private" face-to-face meeting, but that seems implied.

Presumably if they want to give discounts or special deals they don't want to do it publicly where everybody (including competitors and future potential customers) can see, but I wonder if this sort of tactic is something that's even tenable going forward? With so many of these contracts coming into the open, will they be able to continue giving discounts on a customer-by-customer basis?
Android is Open Source, so it belongs to everyone. Content producers need to do their part alongside developers to make it great, even if that means putting in more investment than supporting a propriety platform like iOS.
I think you are mixing up Guy Kawasaki (The Art of the Start and other books like the ones given away free here) with Robert Kiyosaki (Rich Dad, Poor Dad)
Not sure why you are being downvoted, as anyone who deals with computers will be well aware that anti-virus software exists mostly as security theater. It can be useful against certain types of viruses, especially those who are widespread, but it is a very dangerous thing in and of itself because it states that the user's system is "protected," causing most people to gain a false sense of security and drop their guard.
They're printed in advance to allow for distribution. Also, usually the date is 'the week of'.
Yeah, that's what tripped me up, the actual speed of the bullet in real life. Thanks.
So it's a paysponge then. Somewhat porous rather than brick solid. A news squeegee if you will.
Isn't the reason you have a cell phone so people can reach you when you are out (for safety, for example)? Besides, if he can't take it to school, how can she geo-locate him?
Myth busters did this a few years back with a basket ball in an air cannon tied to the back of a truck going 55 mph and the cannon set to fire the basket ball at exactly 55 mph. The ball goes no where as one relative force cancels out the other.
What are these pain points related to the rise in surveillance you mention. This seems to be an article of faith on HN: that lack of privacy protections, increasing amounts of personal data being aggregated, and intensifying surveillance is creating a perfect storm of bad consequence for civilians at large.

But I never hear about what the harm is except for the exceptional cases. Anecdotally, none of my aquaintances has had a single adverse life event that can be attributed to these trends.

On the other hand, adverse events related to money/jobs, health issues, issues with intimacy and social isolation, being too busy: these are daily occurrences.

I'm bringing this up here just because your post reminded me I wanted to run this question by the HN community.
Client-Side Separation of Concerns: Are We Doing It Wrong?
No, but you do need to be able to use the indefinite article.
Nonlinear compromises in software engineering
TLER really isn't a problem with software raid which the drobo and all other home NAS's that I know of use.
People don't like to face the truth.

No worries, downvoting, upvoting, I couldn't give a shit one way or the other. It's just a silly number.
I have an application out for Android & iPhone both with same exact functionality. The Android version sells maybe 10 a day max while iPhone constantly sells 10x that. I'm becoming more and more convinced the Android market is just not that attractive.
Study shows space travel is harmful to the brain
Ask HN: Charging for Training for an App?
I develop paid iOS apps that are mostly focused on the business and legal markets. These apps are all less than $30 US per download so they are not cost prohibitive for these types of customers.

Now I'm looking to develop some advanced training packages that include videos, PDFs, sample files, and other types of media that will help customers take full advantage of the apps.

I'd like to offer different training packages at different various points but I'm afraid of alienating customers by charging for training rather than providing it for free.

Have you ever encountered a similar situation and do you have any advice regarding this matter? I'd be curious to learn how others have dealt with this before. Thanks in advance.
It's not really my conclusion - it's the conclusion from the TWN piece. That said, even though it's not a controlled experiment, the fact that they didn't have feature parity doesn't completely invalidate their experience. 80-1 is a high ratio particularly for a free product that people presumably would have expected to improve over time if they had been interested.

See Zaheer's comment on this thread too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4991585
True, but false claims in a post-mortem from Netflix make me wonder if I should retain the service. What they should be offering is credit to those affected. Their excuse that people don't watch too many streams on XMas eve is lame even by big company standards and makes no sense. My family was spending time together and we wanted to wind down with a movie. It was close to midnight (EST).
The benchmark the GP offered was "just another wikipedia entry".
My suggestion for ideas - make simple tools for team/organizing for normal people. Not yet another collaboration/project management suite but apps to help teachers, baseball coaches, and scout leaders. My free tool http://chir.ag/projects/team-maker/ gets over 10k hits per month, mostly via Google search and a single MakeUseOf post. I did no advertising and yet I get emails every other day from someone trying to do more with the tool and offering me money to build a pro version.

Another free app of mine that does great is https://zetabee.com/icaljs/ - it's a simple calendar that takes an iCal feed and inserts it into your website via JS and lets you style it with CSS. People have written me many times to make that into a more feature-rich app and charge $x/mo for it. I'm still busy with my KType project (that we emailed each other about a while ago) so I'm not in a good place to build these apps but you might be in a much better position, especially with your awesome marketing skills. Patio11's found success with apps for normal users too. So definitely consider "simple tools to make someone's life super-easy" as a viable candidate.
Backing up to an external drive isn't enough if your really worried about the data. If your house burns down, or the single backup drive fails, your out of luck.

Synology's devices support automatic backup to S3, use it.
doing exercise on 5:15am does harm to health, doesn't it?
Understand physiology and the body's response to training stimulus.

A rowing machine is cardio (and it's good cardio), but, other than some very modest strength and hypertrophy response, you're not going to do much muscle development. My experience with it and kettlebell swings suggests that they may help with activation, particularly doing high-tension sets (damper set to 10, 20-40 pulls). Rowing pretty much is "the anti-desk", with the exception that you're performing the activity in a seated position. The main target is improving your cardiovascular performance, capability, and endurance.

What strength training does specifically is recruit muscle motor units (bundles of muscle cells). These are differentiated largely by size and response time, and activating a given bundle requires triggering its controlling nerve. Higher loads trigger larger motor units. Stimulus is usually classified by sets, reps, percent of one rep maximum load (1RM), "tempo" (how long you take raising and lowering the weight), and power vs. strength lifts ("Olympic" lifts are, confusingly, based on power, "powerlifts" are, confusingly, based on strength).

The strength training concept of "specificity" (also given as "SAID": specific adaptation to imposed demand) says that you'll get a training response that corresponds to the training stimulus. This means both the specific muscles, and type of lift determine the training response. If you want stronger legs, do squats, not bicep curls. If you want to get stronger, lift heavier (80-95% 1RM) weights for fewer reps. If you want endurance, lighter (30-50% 1RM) weights for more reps (15-20 or so). Hypertrophy (increased mass) is maximized by moderate resistance and reps maximizing time under tension.

Wikipedia's Strength Training article summarizes this nicely: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strength_training#Realization_o...
Yes, I agree. You must build not only for "the cloud" (whatever that means) but for your specific "cloud" provider like AWS. Then you're stuck with them. You can (and should) of course build a bridge to such services but there are some managers that just don't believe in bridges or anything rational at all. Bezos is a brilliant CEO, especially now that he's stopped pixel-pushing.

It wasn't always like this, but I'm just here to collect a paycheck. The fact that I'm really good at what I do is incidental and hardly comes into play as it's not usually called upon. Sad but true.
CPU is a limiting factor for a lot of applications. And EC2's offerings are paltry until you get into the really expensive VMs. But it's not just CPU, it's the overall performance. Engineers want to run on hardware for many more reasons than CPU. And for most apps it's the rational choice. After all, you can build your own data center for the price you pay to rent some virtual machines.

tl;dr: With cloud services you pay thousands a month for _renting software_.
Who was the game changer of the 2000s?
> Content producers need to do their part alongside developers to make it great

Uh...why? Why should they "do their part" for a platform where they have no users and don't see a likely growth of them?

I am an Android user and developer, but I am also realistic.
Yeah, I tried that but it didn't work for me.
Seriously. Especially after all the Chaos monkey articles. Their Chaos monkey doesn't have enough Chaos apparently or is too stupid to hit load balancers? Shit, that's the first thing I'd knock out!
"There are known programmers who are really good (USA Computing Olympiad)"

So, maybe this will come as a shock, but "computing olympiad" success doesn't correlate with success as a professional programmer. There's so much more than raw intellectual horsepower to being a good team engineer that it can't be captured with any one test.

Which is to say, the parent is right. Identifying good programmers is a hard problem. Harder than identifying people who do well at coding contests.
I doubt that would change things.

iOS users are not price sensitive and Apple doesn't make any pretense that content is free. People who buy into the Apple world are choosing to buy into an ecosystem where they are going to have to buy content from a collection of proprietary 'Stores'. Apple is well known for the iTunes store and the App store so it's a conscious choice for their users.

Most Android devices (obviously not the highest end ones) are sold on price, and Google as a brand is known for providing free, advertising supported content. It's no great surprise that people who choose that ecosystem expect to get free stuff and don't want to be buying a lot of digital content.

If they'd wanted that they'd have bought an iOS device.
> He said it to say "shut the fuck up". Instead, he ended up quitting his job and doing the comic full time.

Does this story continue? Getting a bunch of money from a one-time plea or stunt is drastically different than a recurring revenue stream; I'd love to hear how well he did after he started doing it full time (and how he chose to monetize; still donations?).
I just thought listing them out like that would save valuable reading space. I don't want to bore anyone.
Uhh. This is quite catastrophic actually. Not being able to access your funds at all really blows.
> if you really cared about the hardest problems you could find why isn’t addressing civic and social problems on your list?

Yes. As someone who also grapples with applying technology to public policy issues, I think part of the reason that more people from the tech sector don't dive into civic issues is that the challenge there is frequently 10% tech and 90% organizational/personal. Like you said though, those that can revolutionize business process (and I would add have excellent people skills) can add a lot to government.

I definitely wish you luck in your next endeavor and would love to connect as you're making the switch to the private sector (I have been contemplating a switch of my own).
On the one hand, he must be facetious. Viruses existed long before Windows as an operating system was even conceptualized. Therefore it is ridiculous to claim that anti-virus software exists because of Windows alone.

On the other hand, it is true that anti-virus software became a lot more popular as Windows gained market-share. The reason is simple: as we all know, for a long time Microsoft did not take security very seriously. They essentially followed what seems to be Adobe's current philosophy, which is "release first, secure later." Remember that it was only relatively recently that they started to rigorously plug holes on a very short turnaround (mostly weekly if not shorter). So it is not difficult to conceive of a perspective where anti-virus software existed (and still does) mostly to overcome some of the shortcomings of the OS.
The point is not how provincal or remote we are; the point is that this would establish a legal precedent. It's common for legal precedents to be cited across the border between the UK and Ireland; and if this showed up in the UK, it's now able to spread to a lot of other places.

And that'd be just fine for certain well-funded lobbying groups...
It may only mention libraries in passing, but I seemed to remember that many of the techniques were used in jQuery (where applicable). I don't mean any offense by relating that to memoirs; rather, it was very helpful to see many of your examples in real-life code that I was using every day -- and finally understanding both the how and the why.

Thanks for the reply, and good luck with the book! I do plan to check it out.
Given [the fact that the federal government exists and has immense powers, and state and local governments exist and have immense powers], I think we're presented with two choices. We can either try to make government work better or we can ignore it.

I hear this argument a lot, and for some reason, I always think of slavery in the US.

Imagine you are a slave. You don't like it, and wish slavery would end. Another slave tells you:

"Given the fact that slavery exists and slave owners have immense power, I think we're presented with two choices. We can either try to make slave owners better or we can ignore slavery."

Put in that light, the suggestion seems absurd: empower slave owners to be even better at slavery? Really? How does that help us not be slaves? And how does ignoring slavery help?

And why are these the only two options? I can see why the slave owners would want these to be the only two options, but you're a slave, too. Surely, surely, ending slavery has to be an option too?

-----

My favorite slavery thought experiment concerns democratic slavery:

One day, a slave notices that his owner is, well, something of a dictator. He's the only guy in charge, and hey, who picked him anyway?

So the slaves get together and demand the right to vote to choose their slave owner. (The possibility that slavery might be wrong, in and of itself, does not occur to them.)

Two different slave owner "parties" arise (let's call them the Rs and Ds), and every four years, the slaves are given the opportunity to vote for the slave owner candidate from the R party, the D party, and usually one (or sometimes two) fringe candidates not associated with either party.

The slaves do a great "get out the vote" effort to choose their slave owner for the next four years, but still, less than half of the slaves vote.

Those slaves that don't vote for a new slave owner are told to STFU about slavery, since they didn't vote, by the slaves who did vote.

Now replace "slavery" with "government", "slave owners" with "politicians", and "citizen" with "slave".

At the very least, it should be clear that the act of voting doesn't legitimize government, just like voting doesn't legitimize slavery (which is not the same as saying government is illegitimate, it may be, or may not be, but voting doesn't make it so).

Voting also doesn't confer any moral benefit over those that choose not to vote, for similar reasons -- those telling non-voters to STFU are, in fact, wrong to do so.

-----

All of this is to say that, it seems to me, the mere existence of a thing, regardless of its "immense" power, doesn't mean anything with regard to whether we should attempt to prop it up further, ignore it, or tear it down.

And as with the democratically-elected slave owners, even the presence of things like 'voting' and 'elections' is no guarantee that the system (slavery) is in any way moral -- voting slaves are still slaves, after all.

IMO no one should feel obligated to help an entity they believe is actively hostile to their own, or others, interests -- regardless of the current power and/or respect said entity has with their peers -- government included.
Really? I was just using aws to run some load testing bots against our game servers and found the CPUs even in High CPU instances pitiful for the price.

The worst part about it is that the performance is so variable between instances. Some could comfortably run 1300 bots while others were slowing down so much after 750 that they started dropping bots.

Because of that, it's easier to just run 750 on each which is wasting resources.

My desktop PC can easily run 4000.