skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
$5 a year is a ridiculously low income when compared to advertising. I seriously doubt google would still be around if they had tried to charge users to search the web. Altavista wasn't that bad.

I'm simply pointing out that some services don't really work too well as a 'paid' model.

Also you've got the fact that some of your competition is going to be free. If you want to now charge users directly, you have to be at least 10 times as good, or be offering something seriously different to make them pay.

I'm still firmly in the freemium camp.

1. Make something, get people to use it

2. Grow, make profit from advertising (Stay lean, keep costs low)

3. Once you're big enough, some subset of your users will be willing to pay for extra features

If you instead go for paid only, I don't think you can reach anywhere near the same audience.
V8 and FastCGI, Exploring an Idea
Why don't browsers order bookmarks by least recently/frequently visited?
This would remind you of sites that you found interesting but probably forgot about.
I also prefer written text to video. But I'm prepared to admit that there are certain things that come through better on video, that there are quite a few learners who learn better via video, and that great lectures have a wonderful charm that complements written material nicely.

Feynman's transcribed lectures are great, but videos of Feynman's live delivery are extra great. The Long Island accent alone is worth the price of admission. Feynman sounds like a human being, a guy who lives down the street, not like some disembodied Platonic ideal of genius.

I've also been in quite a few classes where the textbook was simply useless but the lecturer saved the day. [1] (And the opposite, as well.)

And your ideas all sound great. Obviously there will be lots of room for experimentation. It's going to take many years to fully explore our new genres.

---

[1] I would pay cash money for a video of Neil Ashcroft's graduate stat mech lectures. Or Roald Hoffmann on the band structure of solids -- although his textbook, written by him, isn't bad either; they complement each other perfectly, by design.
Oh it was a little funny. Lighten up.
Warren Buffett says economy fell off a cliff
First: "IPv6 is hard, let's go shopping" is exactly what happened on the Internet. Several hundred billion dollars later, nobody much cares about IPv6.

Second, when you make an point like "NAT may or may not be good enough", the onus is on you to support that point with evidence. Most of the problems NAT-unfriendly technologies were supposed to solve have instead been solved by brute force; HD movies move just fine over inefficient HTTP CDNs.

The rest of your comment just ignores my argument, which is that individuals don't need routable IP addresses for the Internet to work. Many of us never even use routable IP addresses. 6 billion, 10 billion, 20 billions --- as long as the next YouTube can get reachable servers online, what do I care whether my iPencil has a 1918 address?

Networking technologies are "hacks" when they challenge the greybeard orthodoxy, and they're "sound engineering" when they don't. It's funny how quickly we forgot that the Internet itself was a pragmatic reaction to OSI standards. You want to see a "hack"? How about, the NSF decides that commercial entities shouldn't connect to the NSF backbone, and the entire Internet splits in two, and I can't get to University sites from Ripco in Chicago? Guess how long ago that happened? Sorry if I can't get all worked up over whether my phone can talk to your phone over direct BitTorrent.
I've been thinking about your comment for 20 minutes now, and still don't understand what you mean — what do google/apple, and 37signals/twitter, have in common (business model wise)?

And with the "mom & pop" stuff, I was just referring to it being a pretty low risk model — you make something, end-users pay you, you use that income to pay your costs (compared to building something, hopefully having tons of users, and then wondering how the hell you're going to support it, never mind profit from it.)

I'm not saying "mom&pop"/paid model is bad, quite the opposite, it's my favorite…but I can see why a lot of sites decide not to use it
Introducing the ProjectSearch Rails plugin:
I too, would like to see this discussed. There certainly is a PHYSICAL upper bound - that is the number of people living on the planet. What would the world be like if every man, woman, and child were an entrepreneur (maybe better put - a free agent)? It is certainly something to think about. Would we move to a barter system?
Right. It just needs to be a generic payment system. Much as we had premium rate dial up ISPs for a while to access porn (Apparently).

It could just be a very simple setup:

1. webapp notices you're on ISP A
2. webapp asks ISP A to bill you $3/month
3. you get an email from your ISP asking for authorization
4. you click the link and it's added to your bill
At a good institution, you'll learn considerably more than you get examined on. The fact that you learned enough on your own to pass exams doesn't mean that you learned as much as a normal student.
It's also really nice that git can often coexist with an existing VCS in the same working directory structure, and then you just delete the .git directory when you're done.

I started using git this way - I had a svn project that I had to go offline with for about a week, so I setup a git repository so I wouldn't lose my work, and then just checked the final state in and deleted the .git directory afterwards. And I currently have to use Perforce at work, but I'll frequently setup a quick git repository to checkpoint large changelists while I'm working on them.
Google has over 128MM users. Assume Google just gets the "really amazing product" conversation rate of 10%; at $5/year, that's a recurring revenue stream of $64MM/yr, at the lowest conceivable price point you can come up with for a good product.

"But $64MM is fuck-all compared to the billions it makes now!" Of course that's true, but that's besides the point. Almost any product company number is going to suck compared to what Google can post now. I'm not arguing that Google should be a free service. I'm saying they had options, and it wasn't necessarily between "free or die".
Packing algorithms could save the planet
I've been using s3sync.rb combined with a cron job and shell script. Working great for me.

Good to see a PHP-based alternative I suppose.
Well its still a good inspiration story and it may fly in the face of rising unemployment and horrific economic playground happening out there right now.

Major props for laying the story down, not enough people do that.

Overall I still feel you need 1 or 2 more bankable deals under the table to help you pay off the debt and getting back into the green of things.

Luckily you got into the ad model biz when you did because that is a dying model of profit. Covering operating costs and groceries is good but you should probably try to weave it into a sale or use it as a spring board to get a consultancy gig. Meanwhile the book keeps you a bit above water but well.. you're outa ammo.. start working on book 2 asap and get some additional green in that door or the stress of debt will eat the love of your life.
If they did that, a competitor would quickly emerge that was free and of comparable quality, and ad supported.

The fact is though, they make far more from advertising than they could ever hope to make charging.
Actually computing equilibria in even toy mathematical models of social collaboration is horribly intractible even at a single time step. So what you wind up being best off doing is randomly choose your initial location and just follow the local gradient of fun, then iterating this a few times and choosing the best one.
Install Boxee on Apple TV
The figure of 10% conversion rate seems pretty high to me. I'd expect something more like 0.1%. People expect things like 'search the web' to be free.
These are pretty standard demographic classifications in Britain, used in marketing and such-like:

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

In, for example, the media you'll quite regularly come across such things as "Over 50% of our audience are ABC1s".
> Instead darcs knows with 100% certainty where the right place to apply your patch is.

> Being able to apply and unapply patches precisely means that we can merge changes all we want -- we know that darcs will always preserve user intent...

As brought up in the discussion of Git, how can the software perfectly 100% of merge cases, and how does it always know exact user intent? Do es it really know exactly what the right action is when you try to merge a patch with a renamed and modified file with a patch deleting that same file? I'd seriously like to know how they handle those sorts of conflicts, and how the computer "guessing" on an ambiguous merge is better than letting me handle it explicitly; yes, I know it's not really "guessing" because it has a notion of patch theory, but can it possibly understand my exact intent in every possible case?

> There used to be conflicts issues, but they are
mostly solved. There are performance problems, but they only affect large repositories and they are getting better.

So, while Git has arguably the best performance of any major VCS available, and has deterministic merges (it asks you for anything ambiguous) without any exponential blowup, I should really choose Darcs because it uses patch theory?

I can understand it being a great project to work on when developing Haskell skills/experience/kudos, but I don't see how it can compare to Git as a stable, fast, and reliable DVCS...
Thanks! I don't know Ruby/have never played around with it, but I saw s3sync and it looks interesting. I'll have to check it out.
Axis 212 PTZ Network Camera
Axis 212 Frontier PC Canada specializes in rapid delivery of IT hardware and software products to Canadian business and government clients through our national warehouses located in Vancouver BC, Toronto ON, Calgary AB, Montreal PQ,Richmond BC and Halifax NS.
Either wrap long text to fit in fixed-width buttons, or let me specify \n and \\ to break the lines manually.
i know it is for all of you to downvote - but no fixed income, 2 houses, credit card debts, looking for investment , ppl find it inspirational...

i just don't feel like filing taxes this year
If you're telling me you wouldn't pay 40 cents a month to use Google instead of Altavista, I'm telling you that I do not believe you.
Missile-throwing chimp plots attacks on tourists
Hey, please add me to your iMob too! 156957047
Dreamhost doesn't support ASP.NET that I know of, but you can create CNAME records to point elsewhere.
Illusion of transparency = zap! The text as written is ambiguous: I haven't yet tested out of a bachelor's degree, but expect that I could do so easily enough if required to earn a PhD - the bachelor's itself just isn't worth the time to me, even to test out of.

If anyone out there happens to be a professor of analytical philosophy or decision theory who's willing to let me come in and just do my PhD thesis on an elegant general solution to Newcomblike problems, give me a ring (see http://yudkowsky.net/ for contact info). But if I also have to show up for classes I can't test out of, just to prove that I was there - then I'm sorry, but I can't.
I might pay that if the small problem of micropayments (IMHO managed by your ISP) was solved. But it's not.
Slide the old button image vertically and put the new one in its place. I'd like to be able to compare the before and after. Also, while it's sliding, I'm distracted from waiting for the new one, but don't make me wait for the slide to finish if the new image is ready to display.
"So, while many applications might have very high fixed costs (like paying people to create wonderful applications like those in 37signals portfolio)"

This isn't a fixed cost. Consider apps A and B. Both are exactly the same featurewise. A has 100k users and B has 100 million. B costs a hell of a lot more to create and maintain.
IT agenda items for the first U.S. CIO
this is Sofa King awesome for us developer designer hybrids. It's excellent. My only feedback is that maybe the hue/angle popups could be sliders and the color popup could be one of those WSIWYG color pickers.

Also, maybe showcase some really nice ones that are preset to give people some ideas. I guess for a future release people could submit their schemes or post them.
> The marginal cost of printing another copy of the WSJ is low relative to the SG&A costs of running a newsroom

The concept of "free" and "eyeball economy" probably came from newspapers, because that's the paperless version of the newspaper business model: Newspapers are in the business of putting ads and classifieds in front of your eyes, not delivering news to paying customers.

Now, I can't find the reference, but I read recently that the subscription of a major newspaper (might have been WaPo or NYT) doesn't even cover the paper it's printed on, much less the delivery or the newsroom.

I don't understand how Facebook isn't running a billion-dollar ultra-segmented advertisement business, I would think they had the user data for it. Probably a privacy issue.
It's easy to find exceptional cases to anything, and it means nothing.
"Should their owners refuse service to any customers that they believe to be at risk of alcoholism? Should pharmacies do background checks on customers purchasing Tylenol to determine whether or not they are addicted to painkillers?"

Yes. We can establish some clear legal standard and create systems to enforce this. For example, if somebody is brought in for alcohol overdose 3 or more times, they get a skull and cross-bone tattooed on their right arm and selling alcohol to them is a criminal offense. You can switch that to some federal database if the social stigma of a tattoo is a problem for you (though to me, its a feature, not a bug).

"I think this argument boils down to legality, not morality."

We are talking about laws here. Morals have no place in the discussion except for determining the end goal of the laws. After that, its an engineering process to determine exactly what laws and enforcement policies will get us closes to our moral ideal. In that sense, your statement is right but rather trivially so.

"I think the point originally being made was that a significant portion of drug dealers are NOT intentionally enabling people into addiction. Certainly this varies by drug dealer, and there is a big difference between selling marijuana and selling heroin or crack. A lot of these dealers are simply supplying people with a product that they are purchasing for personal use because they think it makes their life better."

I have a problem buying that. Addiction is undeniably a part of the drugs business model. Quite a few dealers even adjust pricing for that purpose. That even companies in the legal truge trade (tobacco et al.) try to leverage addiction makes you statement seem ludicrous. Do you have any evidence to back this up?

"I think it's also important to recognize that morality is subjective, and that it's one of America's founding principles not to legislate morality. Your belief that something is immoral, or even the belief of the majority, is not significant justification for legislation."

Nice way of saying that anything goes. Not something that I think any reasonable person could agree with. Besides, my argument is not a moral one. My argument is that addiction is a serious market failure and when there are no mitigating circumstances (medical uses etc.), addictive drugs should be banned. I advocate the death penalty because that is the only thing that seems to work in this case -- If you are going to have some law, it should be enforced rigorously or removed from the books (and yes, I know that a lot of current laws fail this test. They should either be repealed if they are not worth the enforcement effort or strictly enforced with the penalties necessary to curb infractions. As I have stated previously, I think that anti-drug laws are worth the enforcement costs).
Remember my last settings when I return to the site. Provide a `reset to defaults' button if I want sanity to return.
I don't understand your argument, because you aren't being coherent. What's low-risk? Selling time tracking software and clearing $20k a year? Or selling bookkeeping software and being Intuit? Where's the zillions of users? Being Aviary and doing free online vector editing? Or selling Photoshop and being Adobe?

The echo chamber thing is crazy here. We have a hard time finding success stories in pay services. That's because all we're considering is the ASP model. The ASP model is relatively new and heavily influenced by the San Francisco Startup model, where VC funded companies trade revenue for uptake because they will either get acquired or BK.
You have it backwards. There are far more examples of companies that charge, but they don't make headlines because they sold for billions of dollars.
The WSJ paper edition is profitable. The for-pay WSJ online edition is more profitable. The core Trib paper edition is profitable. The point isn't that online is better than paper; the point is, plenty of businesses with low marginal costs charge high market-based prices. The marginal cost of a few more ground coffee beans is infinitessimal; the marginal cost of servicing one more customer at a Starbucks that is open anyways is very, very low, but Starbucks doesn't give away a loss-leader coffee product to gain share, and neither do its competitors.
A lack of a reply does not mean we don't care about your issue
Brave New World was scary, obviously "bad", and clearly unsustainable but that doesn't mean that it does not apply.

Hell, the pervasive drug use and sexual anarchy can be observed in our society today.
Shakespeare is perhaps the most over-rated play write ever. Sure he wrote a few good plays - 'Hamlet', 'Othello', a few other tragedies of note. But most of his stuff was pretty mediocre - 'Measure for Measure' for instance - or outright sucked - 'Romeo and Juliet' perhaps being one of the worst plays ever conceived.

Compared to say, Sophocles of old, or, in our time, people like Harold Pinter or Edward Albee, Shakespeare was a hack pulp fiction paperback play write who wrote a small number of adequate plays and a large number of really poor plays. Even his best, 'Hamlet', was itself meandering and hard to decipher - Hamlet is crazy, but one thinks he is just pretending to be crazy, however, after a few viewings (or readings) one figures out he is actually in point of fact crazy (insane). But this point could have been made with more clarity and brevity which is why although the play is a great play, we cannot call its author a particularly great writer - good, to be sure, but not great, again, not compared to the really great ones of our day like Pinter.

The real tragedy is that high school students are forced to suffer through this hack's tortuous and obfuscated attempts at drama and pathos. Now that is a tragedy.
You're being a message board geek, axod. If you have to pick your poison, and it's signing up for recurring credit card charge versus using Altavista instead of Google, I already know what your answer is. Google didn't have to be free; they chose to be, because given a spectacular product, they had spectacular freedom to find the best way to make money.
Educational Forex: Build Your Trading Skill
I am starting to think that ads based websites are just urban legends.
Ever stopped to consider that maybe that is because of anti-drug laws?
Hmm do you think they would have gotten so big if they hadn't been free from the start?
How would they have got the message out that they are better? Free trials? :/

Things that are "paid only" don't seem to scale quite as well.

Of course if/when a decent micropayment model emerges from ISPs, then it'll likely change everything.
Это не северное сияние | picmania.ru
Is Dreamweaver being beaten by Drupal?
If anyone's curious, the title is typeset in Fertigo Pro, an awesome, free typeface from Jos Buivenga's exljbris foundry. You can grab it at http://www.josbuivenga.demon.nl/fertigo.html

Along with color schemes, keep typography in mind for your next design!

Of course, non-standard typefaces are still rather limited on the web, and sIFR isn't the solution. Nonetheless, exceptions can be made for wordmarks and logotypes. With luck, Webkit's expanding market share will finally bring font embedding to the web. Progressive enhancement, anyone?

Prediction: Jos Buivenga will become the implicit answer to John Gruber's dilemma of embedded typefaces: "The fonts you’re allowed to embed legally aren't worth using; the fonts that are worth using aren't embeddable."
Ask HN: How long until you became "ramen profitable"?
So you quit your job to run your own company. Would you please share how long it took you to become "ramen profitable"? I'd love to hear other details, like how many products you tried out, whether you decided to go back to working for someone else, or any other aspects of the experience that might be of interest.

I was inspired to ask the question after reading this "I Quit" 1-year anniversary post:
http://www.emadibrahim.com/2009/03/09/i-quit-1-year-anniversary/

Thanks!
Does Mriday have a future?
"Shakespeare is perhaps the most over-rated play write ever"

If you want your criticism of master craftsmen of the English language to be taken seriously, perhaps you should start by learning basic English spelling, grammar and punctuation.
Sure, if it was an iPhone app, then definitely - people pay for it - it's easy. You just click. I'd probably pay something for a google iPhone app if it was good enough.

The web doesn't have such luxuries. Payment on the web still pretty much sucks. Especially for low value recurring fees.

With iPhone apps, you can pretty much trust Apple. They'll take your money and pass it on. If there's an issue, you take it up with Apple. Apple are the only ones who have your credit card number. That's why it works so well.

We need something similar for the web, managed by the ISPs, if we're to make paid for content more viable.
Our own experiences are the best guide we have.

Although I can't say I didn't learn anything from Fifth Wheel.
I've created a number of social sites and I've come to the conclusion that down-voting should not generally be allowed/used. The reason is that 9 times out of 10 it's used as a way to say "I disagree with this" regardless of the quality or accuracy of the item in question. Usually based solely on political and religious world-views.

This effect is probably muted on SO which is primarily technical.
I've just passed my five year anniversary. I would do it again, but the financial instability is still extremely stressful, particularly as I enter my mid-thirties. It's always feast or famine.

My observations:

1. Pay off debt as quickly as you can. When you're broke again, you'll be grateful you did.

2. Never put all of your eggs in one basket. When you only have one or two major sources of revenue (or clients), you're as dependent as an employee, but considerably less secure.

3. No matter how unnecessary it may seem, have a real, legally binding contract for any work you commit to do. I thought I did. I was wrong.

4. Budget for marketing. You can't depend on viral marketing alone.

5. Have health insurance. It's expensive and you can't afford it, and I know you're young and healthy, but when your appendix decides it's time to come out, you'll be on the hook for about $22,000.

6. If you're working from home, set boundaries. I won't work past 8pm, and I try to take one day a week off.

Ideally, you'll have some brilliant idea, already live frugally, have no debt, and a craft a bulletproof plan. Realistically, nothing can prepare you for the experience.
Well, we kill everything the editors think is excessively lame. Downarrows would produce better results iff the userbase at large were better at deciding what was lame, which is probably not the case. Downvoting is often done reflexively, whereas killing something is a fairly momentous choice one thinks about first.