skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Wouldn't selling BCC to the school as an enterprise software (rather than for an individual teacher) bring more revenue?

Yes. I could sell BCC to a school district for maybe $250. For the same amount of work, I might be able to sell a hospital system AR for $10,000. A month. (Six years ago, when I started selling BCC, enterprise sales wasn't an option -- I could never make a phone call with customers and didn't know how to even get started with it.)

Also, maybe a 5$ / month to get the "best bingo card of the month" would be useful for them.

If I were starting the business from scratch today, I would certainly build in a recurring revenue component. It doesn't make sense today, as growing BCC revenues is not the path forward for the business, and the development and CS headaches associated with it swamp the marginal revenue.

Lastly, why not cut the price a little if the teacher recommends it to a couple colleagues?

My experiments with getting teachers to recommend BCC to other teachers have, in general, been crashing failures. For example, I implemented "3 free cards for you and a friend if you refer that friend to BCC", along the lines of the Dropbox two-sided referral incentive model. That was a crashing failure -- it generated very few trials (probably since I didn't work on the UX for the viral spread nearly enough and probably because the market isn't really optimal for it) and of those marginal trials only 2 ever upgraded to the paid version.
It's nice to have numbers to compare against. I'm in the same boat (also selling my own software) and comparing Patrick's numbers to mine gives me confidence that I don't suck terribly at the business stuff.

Also knowing the numbers you can classify his blog posts better. There are many software marketing gurus who tell you how to run your business while they only make $5k year with their flag ship product. At least I know that when Patrick says that something 'was a big increase in sales' he's not talking about making $20 more.
It still means listening in on calls every once in a while, which is far slower than email.
When you actually know anything about the subject Ferris is writing about, his books come off as superficial, sloppy, and stunningly self absorbed.
First of all, congrats Nathan! Cheers bro :)

At the same time, while all this sounds so promising, in my humble opinion, I would say this wouldn't apply to everyone. Whether you know it or not, Nathan seems to have a solid plan - 'This is what I should do. This is how I should do it. And this is how much what I do might generate.'

I see a lot of people quitting their jobs just because it's become more of a cool factor now and most importantly because they think they could become like Nathan easily or rather quickly (like it's some get-rich-quick scheme). You should understand that Nathan has put in some significant, rock-solid hardwork (like developing his own apps, writing some quality books, etc.) into all this. If you just quit your job dreaming of cash flowing in the very next minute, that might not happen.

FYI - I quit my day job too. I wrote some apps too, dreaming of becoming someone like Nathan someday. Here I am, commenting here on Nathan's success story instead. Life ain't that easy dudes :D
No, actually, Darcs is not, it only looks like it is.

I think that's a little unfair. Darcs does store what actually changed between the files, at least at the points they were committed, in a qualitatively different way to the flattening effect of cumulative commits in a system like say Git.

Of course, you can defeat even that approach if your edits from one commit to the next are ambiguous, for example if you have two verbatim copies of something next to each other where you had only one before, and this will subsequently lead to ambiguity if you try to merge a change from someone else to the original copy since the merge has no way to determine whether the first or second duplicate (or both) should be modified.

It sounds like you want something that is directly tied into your editor, so it is aware of changes between commits, or perhaps something that has semantic understanding so that instead of recording half a dozen text edits, it records "variable foo was renamed to bar". Tools that worked on that level would be fantastic to work with, but until you've swapped a text file representation of code for some sort of database-backed semantic model and your edits/refactorings can all be expressed in terms of that model, I don't see how any VCS could possibly achieve it.
Life isn't about having amazing experiences.
It's about making mediocre experiences look amazing on Facebook.

I've taken to hiding most updates ("only important" or none) of people who constantly try to show how cool they are, where they travel, and who they know. A little of that is ok - I do it sometimes - but if someone repeatedly makes me feel like I'm missing out, they're hidden. I feel much better about Facebook since then. It takes discipline, because you feel like you'll be missing out on something, but in the end you're realize you notice more interesting posts instead.

I'm sure some people hide me. That's ok. I travel constantly and always look like I'm having fun. I do try to keep it to a dull roar on facebook though.
Svbtle uses Freight Sans for the headings and Proxima Nova for body.

In contrast, OP's blog uses sans-serif for everything which is why most users probably see it with Arial or Helvetica.

Proxima Sans is a great font, but not free. The most similar free fonts would probably be either Lato or Open Sans.
You can but for some unknown reason (expired cookies ?) it gets reverted on a regular basis for me.
OP here. I don't think I'm depressed - but suddenly seeing a flurry of "Jetting off on holiday" and "Just got a jetpack for xmas" made me a bit grumpy. The feeling took me by surprise - until I realised that I was getting a distorted view and, luckily, I'm off to Vegas in the new year.

You're quite right about adding everyone you ever knew - thankfully I grew out of that phase fairly quickly.
"evil" isn't an explanation, it's a label given in disgust to someone that is beyond redemption. To focus on something smaller and simpler, I would say that most serial killers, as in separate premeditated incidents over an extended period, are "evil". The reason why is probably some warped mentality likely tied into mental illness, but mental illness is not an excuse either. And it's possible you could cure them, make then a fundamentally different person, and they would no longer be evil. But in the end the word evil is a label, not a reason to stop analysing.
Speak for yourself. Facebook doesn't make me feel depressed. I meet my friends there. (I don't know how Facebook will ever monetize enough to satisfy its investors, but using it at the current per-user price is satisfying to me as a channel for grouping together people whose only commonality is that they are all my friends.) I have several friends who have figured out ways to share tough problems on Facebook and to get a lot of help from our mutual Facebook friend networks. I've been in various online networks since 1992, and Facebook is just like any other online network in that some of its characteristics derive from how you use it. I gain support and encouragement and information through Facebook, perhaps because I attempt to share support and encouragement and information through Facebook.
Hysterical exploitation of the "first true superstorm" meme sticks out like a sore thumb. I stopped reading there, and will be reluctant to visit that site again.
That is indeed the case. I've however seen ray checks used effectively to prevent "tunneling" of objects cheaply since often exact solutions aren't as valuable as something more pragmatic, which solves the most noticeable portion of the problem -- Objects passing straight through walls.
Facebook was not obviously identified as an "establishment". It was "ours". We don't expect much from the government: we even know that some security measures are part of it's job. But Facebook was supposed to be cool, friendly, the dorm friend next door.
How's that? Just use UTF-8 for your strings and you're on par with JSON, no?
Good point. I'm using wp-svbtl https://github.com/gravityonmars/wp-svbtle
I'll see if there's anything can be done to improve the fonts.
how much tax you paying ?
Sounds like you could totally automate that!
I personally would use gists a lot more if they were indexed by google. As it is I feel like I'm putting code down a black hole when I create a gist.
You don't want people to blog about failure. You don't want people to blog about success. You don't want people to blog about any endeavors which could be tainted by luck (all of them).

I'm not sure where your extreme negativity stems from, but reading things doesn't seem to be something you enjoy. Maybe pick up a different hobby?
There is an attitude common amongst the more radical 2nd amendment supporters: that trying to keep the government in check is a lost cause, and they're merely biding their time until "the sheeple" finally open their eyes and get fed up, at which time they can have their uprising.

Like most views espoused by radicals on any subject, it is a load of crap that left rational thinking behind a long time ago, but it does help explain why you see an inconsistency in behavior.
It's a little thing called "The Missing Tile Syndrome." No matter how good things are for someone, their instinct is to focus on what's missing.
Yep, I'm serious mate. Not joking. And I'd love to have a conversation with you too, I mean it. Do you have an e-mail or website address where I can contact you?
You're essentially asking why someone would write a compiler. Why wouldn't someone consume target language X directly instead of using a compiler to generate output in target language X. We want our programs to wind up as machine language, so why not write opcodes for the host ISA instead of writing in, say, any other language?
God said 640x480 way back in 2004. I promised. It's written in stone. It is good. I can explain -- uniformity for all software and because drivers for GPUs are impossible, so not enough CPU power for 3D graphics at 60Hz without GPU.

I took advantage of my situation and dug-in. I do multicore graphics -- impossible with GPU and I do hardcoded color names cause only 16 and I do stuff like graphicAPI symmetry feature and panning and zooming, probably difficult if I used GPU.

You can define a line of symmetry and all graphics are drawn with or without mirror image.

In my "struggles" song, hand is done symmetrically. In RAWHIDE, cows and horses can be flipped in direction. In BIGGUNS the barrel can be flipped from side to side. In WARGAME the soldiers can be made facing one way or the other.

Other places too.
I'm reading more about it now. I'm a runner and definitely interested in this. I would say that ultra marathon isn't impressive as everyone thinks and is more about finishing. I would like to see someone win a marathon on a low carb diet.

My concern is performance. But a lot of ultras aren't very competitive. It just depends who shows up.
Laconic History of the World
SPIN Selling by Neil Rackham. Basically the opposite of used car hucksters, and really useful for professionals, founders, and enterprise sales.
Oh yes, you should read Kate's blog http://spacekate.com/
Basically, she's on a mission to blag her way into space :-)
I don't think you've got #4 correct. If you look at the beginnings of mass public education, it corresponded to the needs of the industrial revolution to have a workforce that would be content doing repetitive tasks in an authoritarian environment for many hours a day.

As I watch my kids go through school (my oldest started college this year), it was clear since 6th grade that education is about finding your path to a career. The only way that works is if the education people are receiving is of value to businesses.

So, while it is certainly possible for an individual to pursue an education for its own sake, the educational system is a training center for businesses.
You just read the title and didn't read the article didn't you? The article is fully written in the first person and he only speaks for himself. The post subject is misleading and should be corrected.
Choice is a good thing.. do you use a fork, to open doors, eat,scratch your foot, kill flies, start a fire, just because you have to use the one-and-ultimate tool ?

json are not the best for every scenario, as also msgpack does not have the best fitness for everything..

Nature is pretty wise on that matter, it "launch" several possibilities, cause the environment is always changing.. so in a particular giver scenario, one of the possibilities (biological agents) can succed..

but that one that succeded in a particular scenario, will fail in another, where now, another subject who has failed is the better option, adaptation..

so.. choise is a good thing.. why people are so lazy, and dont like to think? everything must be ready..

its our duty to choose the best tool to solve a given problem.. its cool that i can even use something "obsolet" from the 1800´s to solve a 2012 problem..

So if we keep thinking.. "oh that old unwanted thing from the past", we will never see it..

Winners are only winners in a given scenario.. its good to have choice, even against all boards and standards
i prefer to decide from myself, than to have others to do that decision for me..

This is technology, not fashion.
That's one of those things where the medium is itself the interesting part of the art, not the final product.

It's 'good art' precisely because the artist is so hindered by the iPad.
You write that people have a number of different learning styles. What do you mean by learning styles? What kinds are there?
Very good point. Having any at all can slow down the benefits. The major effect I noticed is that I NEVER feel groggy after a meal. Used to happen all the time.
There are a ton of interesting tech things going on in NYC. General Assembly runs events and classes, AlleyNYC similar, WeWork Labs has cheap office space for startups, New Work Labs has a free night, NY Gaming Meetup, multiple competing Java Meetups with technical presentations; group coding; networking, NY Tech meetup, User Experience Meetup, iPhone meetup with tons of people advertising gigs and looking, ad startups offering above even NYC rates to get people into a distasteful subject - and those are just the things I've encountered personally.

Honestly, if someone going to school meets a more established opportunity to work at a real startup or with a real company with a production product, then I think that's a good distraction anyway, since they'll move on to the real deal, instead of just working on educational open source projects, and really start their career.
The Beauty of Mathematics & What's Wrong With How We Teach It
Big pharma is already makes billions of dollars off of amphetamines. It's used responsibly my millions of people.

It hasn't stopped people from abusing them even though they are illegal without a prescription.

I'm not sure that's the pharma companies responsible if individuals choose to abuse something that has legitimate uses and strong demand. If the government can't stop it, does that mean the pharma companies have a moral obligation to not sell it?

This is an important question with drugs, tobacco, guns, finance and lots of other industries.

Individual responsibility vs societal control.
I find it shocking to hear that people get depressed by watching their friends have good times. How about enjoying it and feeling happy for their accomplishments and success?
What Is an iPhone?
Robo Finger: for Amputees, Made in Chennai
"No, there's a distinction between a code translation and a code compilation." [citation needed]
Microsoft can't win no matter what they do. If they don't lock down the boot loader like Apple does they'll end up with root kit viruses and people will say "Oh, you should get an iPad so Russian mobsters don't clean out your bank account".

On the other hand, if they do lock it down there are articles like this one.
Still a fraction of the amount sent abroad. Free software allows all the money to stay in Greece.
200k in income puts him in the top 3% of earners in the US. If the 97th percentile is "moderate," then I guess few people will ever achieve anything close to "moderate success." (Myself included.)
Yes, I worked with Tim during the 4-Hour Chef, and we are very good friends. He did not outsource it
You can delude yourself into being more objective, but you can't actually be so. I therefore submit it's best to be aware of it being subjective.

Objectively, the heat death of the universe trumps any and all considerations, ever.

Also you are now claiming the exact opposite of what you said earlier:

Evil is a BS theological notion. ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4982366 )

But now you want to tell me what is objectively wrong? I dare you go ahead and try, haha..
> Not necessarily at all. It takes a profound lack of imagination to believe that's the only way to handle business logic ++ persistence.

It is a stretch to say that there is an idiomatic way to avoid classes as domain objects in most languages. Imagine in $classBasedLanguage you used static functions and key/value arrays..do you think that's a good idea? That's all I was saying.

> Furthermore, freeing yourself from the constraints of the persistence side..

If you're making an ERD, a lot of what you're doing is deciding entity relationships and just naming your data. None of that is impossible with classes.
Imagine a blind and drunken rat placed in a very complicated maze with cheese at the end, then take away his keen sense of smell. It looks sort of like that, except the rat can at least write software.

No, seriously speaking:

Most inbound leads are through organic SEO. Customers generally have a few questions to ask me about e.g. pricing, features, or compatability with other stuff they're doing. I answer them either over the phone with the decisionmaker (followed by an email), or directly over email. My main competitive advantages are that I'm reasonably priced, that I have an easily accessible online demo (a surprisingly powerful win) and other scalable sales stuff, and that while I suck at "sales" I'm fairly good at talking about the product in the context of the customer's needs because, to quote a nurse directly responsible for the biggest deal going through, "It is his baby. You take care of your baby!", in a way which is difficult for a sales guy angling for a $500 commission at one of the larger competitors to justify.

If they sound like they're a good fit, I ask if they want a formal quote. If they do, I ask them what I can do to help them move the purchase along. Some number of steps later, money arrives.

There is very little "process" worthy of the name here, hence why I'm hoping to improve on that going forward.
I'm curious about your view as a German who has formed a strong opinion on WW2...

Someone once said the following, what do you think of it?

Quote -

History is always written by the victors.

Considering the absolute defeat of Germany during WW2 (and complete victor control of it afterwards), I would argue that the last place you'll find an accurate, unbiased, and neutral depiction of what really caused and transpired during WW2 would be in Germany - due to the total absorption of the Allied P.O.V. thrust into the country, into movies, into the news, and into the collective mind-set of the world.

No, I'm not denying the Holocaust or embracing Neo-Nazism, or whatever it is that people first think when they read the above. Bad and terrible things did happen.

But what I am doing is questioning History itself when it's so polluted with agendas, revisionism, redactions, and downright lies.

Hitler's War - First WW2 Documentary Ever From German Perspective
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lBIoJc4k1uE

- End Quote
Paying Greek translators to do the job (if there is a job to do) would probably be cheaper than the licencing costs alone.
Did you read beyond the first couple of paragraphs?

He starts out all "I this, I that", but soon moves on to "our mental health", "your friends", "you now have to keep up with everyone you've ever met", etc., and for grand generalization, "it's just that perhaps we, as a species, aren't yet used to dealing with a constant flood of our friends' successes".
So my colleage recommended we look into spark, which looks pretty neat, but said a caveat would be that we would need to learn scala. My first impression of your bare minimum is "holy crap that's a lot of boilerplate for a bare minimum project". While I expected there to be some code necessary to get thing up and running, my mind spun at that 400loc build script. What the heck is that for if you are not actually doing anything? Also, I have some experience with lisp as a functional language...What are all this crazy symbols doing in your main scala file? :Unit=\n ?? I hate to be critical, but what on earth is going on here? It's not exactly welcoming, by any means.
The ability to disable secure boot only applies to x86, and even there your stance has issues.

I wish people would stop repeating this like its some kind of iron clad gaurentee, Microsoft only changed the reqirement to begin with after there was a public outcry, and are free to change it again any time. (they likely will after more systems support secure boot)

also please consider the fact that how you should be able to disable secure boot is entirely unspecified. If early models are any indication, its going to be buggy and error prone on tons of systems.
Android malware takes advantage of the same social "hole" that makes Windows so prone to malware: security is practically impossible when the OEM doesn't care, the OS maker's hands are tied, and the end user doesn't have any other option.

I believe Cyanogenmod users have a much better security track record for the same social reasons that Desktop Linux users have better security. Case in point: the exynos root exploit was patched quickly for Cyanogenmod users [1]. It may never be patched for "the rest of us."

[1] http://androidheadlines.com/2012/12/cyanogenmod-team-introdu...
It's still interesting though, what did you make? What was your plan, what failed? Did you after a few months decide to go back to work for someone again?
And it has been that way so long that I've started to doubt that it is just an unsolved bug.
Deathbed theory dreamt by a maths genius is finally proved correct
It's not the competitiveness I am talking about. It's the pure performance in general. I took your scepticism being about how to "burn" on no carb (or extreme low < 50 g day) and I used tri-athlon and ultra maratons as an example.

That being said, I DO AGREE with carbs being rocket fuel. But 99% of the population does not need rocket fuel. 40x25 meter swimming works perfectly fine with no carbs. I did that for four weeks, just eggs and butter twice a day and vitamin shots for missing nutritional values.

5000 IU's of Vitamin D (as we have no sun in Sweden :-) )

Hit me up on Twitter if you want to do some more research, I'd gladly help you out.

There is this talk from a 50 year old ultra marathon runner where he just ran on cream. Unfortunately it's in Swedish.

But it debunks "carb loading" for long running performance, as he was just running on fat.
That's what even I am saying : It is about personal choice. If you like C++ use C++ nobody is stopping you. But that doesn't mean all other languages are bad or are pathetic.

"Enlightening" was for realizing that debate can never end but realization can come that both languages are good in their own space. None is like superior than other at least in case of C and C++.