skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Reasonable hypothesis. If you reduce distribution costs for academic materials the price should follow. There's even a diagram in there that shows 32.2% of textbooks prices come from printing costs.

But here's the thing: the full "printing cost" category includes "paper, printing, editorial costs." I'd wager, like most physical media of our day, the manufacturing costs are just a sliver of the actual margin. The value does not come from the grade of plastic on your DVD, it's the content, obviously. In other words, "editorial costs."

These include things like office rent in Manhattan, employee salaries and stuff that's not going to be affected a single bit by the distribution channel. So I wouldn't hold my breath for price wars spurred by the Kindle revolution.

Now, used textbook sales on the other hand, that's a true margin killer.
Visualizing the U.S. Senate Social Graph, 1991 - 2009 [Part 1]
And goddammit, I write code by flipping toggle switches on the front panel of my Nova 1220 minicomputer, as God intended it to be done.

Now get off my lawn!
Not in this economy. Seriously, Universities looking to cut corners everywhere are going to look at this.

Plus, it's not like there's a good case for having a dozen different textbooks for teaching linear algebra. Also, if they're digitized, the changes a teacher wants can be made on a course-by-course basis.
I don't think this is true - I was in there three years ago and one of the guys who helped me out was an african-american. It's possible that he was jewish, but I am pretty sure he wasn't Hasidic.
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I expected someone to finally explain why my Mac sucks. Instead it is the usual anecdotal evidence from a faulty machine (or faulty user). How did this manage to get so high?
Apple computers are consistently more reliable than average, and historically (at least the last 10 years) they've frequently been top ranked in reliability rankings (consumer reports, RescueCom, etc).

"Sample size of 1 office but it's enough for me to steer clear of their hardware."

That doesn't make a lot of sense considering minimal research would have revealed that this is not representative of the situation overall.
Hmm? Click photo. Click 'Email' button. Choose the size you'd like, 'Small (Faster Downloading)'/'Medium'/'Large (Higher Quality)' or 'Actual Size (Full Quality)'. Seems pretty straight forward to me...

Did you want to mention your other issues so we can clear those up for you as well? :)
Great, more completely disingenuous link-bait from 37signals. The original article on "discovery-driven growth" that 37s twisted to come up with the idea that planning is a waste of time is worth a read; this bit of shallow drivel is not. Flagged.

http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm?articleid=222...

Edit: within a couple minutes of posting this, it appears that someone went down the line of all my comments over the last day or two and down-voted them. Hopefully just a coincidence...if not, pathetic.
The coder behind the mortgage mess
I'd be curious to see if Facebook and the rest use similar strategies to reduce the intra-datacenter processing and bandwidth, and if the savings achieved are worth anything significant.
This is my just deserts: yesterday I took someone to task for not being clear because they were being ironic (or possibly not); and today I am being ironic, and my meaning was not understood.

From my point of view, I can't see how you (and 6 net upvoters) could possibly have misunderstood me when I follow it by spamming the forum and add "just making a point".... and that's the essential communication problem of irony. Lesson learnt. HackerNews, I salute you for requiring my principled integrity.
Wait... does anyone know of a startup other than Caspio that is looking to target the Access market?

Rails isn't quite right for it. The world really does need an access-like product.
One wonders if the user who deleted the article was sufficiently jealous of Fravia's reputation that s/he would rather delete the article than improve it. Though poorly sourced, the deleted material hardly qualifies as 'fanboyism'.
I don't like that 37signals always seems to deal in absolutes. "The only plan" is bullshit. If it works for your company, great. But do not assume what works for one works for all.
IANAL, but I believe that those policies are copyrighted by the respective websites. This means its illegal to just copy and paste them.

I've known people that have gotten sued for large sums because they just copied and pasted those kinds of things.
They appear to be 1 to me... Did anyone upvote it?
What To Do When Brutus - Your Best Man Weighs 800 lbs
That got us thinking what kind of challenges you might run into considering Brutus is weighing in at a hefty 800 lbs.
Minimal research from a perspective of hands on usage would be both time and cost prohibitive. It's acceptable to gain an opinion of hardware or OS by hands on usage but I wouldn't want to invest that much money in systems that I've watched fail on a regular basis.
So I just found out about this place from somebody telling me my rant is on ycombinator. Cool? I dunno.

Anyways, thanks for the thoughts. Answer some questions: I was mad at Vista and so I figured I'd date Apple instead to get back at Microsoft for the crap that is vista. After forcing myself to learn all the cool mac stuff I realized how screwed I was.

I have no clue who posted this here. This was just really for friends and so on. But your welcome to read and all that. Its the internets.. go crazy. -- boy I hope I dont have to make an account after I typed all this.

(Crap I do)
Louise Hendy Day, a Celebration of Realtime Marketing
Create online UML diagrams in seconds
It's a palindrome and I'm going to use it as a document mirroring service, not finished yet so not posting the name.
Publishers would be much better off building a business model now rather than repeating the RIAA's mistakes.

But as always, existing players mostly seek to preserve income streams, rather than create new ones, even when an unbiased look will show that the existing ones are doomed.

The only publisher I know, offhand, which isn't falling into this trap is Baen Books, and they don't do textbooks. Yet. :)
What did any of those articles have to do with Hackintosh netbooks? It seems like all of the complaints (except the wifi issue) was caused by the netbook itself, not the OS it was running.
I think it's very possible – if you have another source of income to pay for rent, computers, food etc..

My development has going strong with no extra investment on my part, other than time.
i seriously think you guys make some of this up....i work all day in vista too, but it doesn't crash, or stutter...or anything. i don't use any antivirus programs, haven't had any problems in a long time due to excellent use of common sense. my machines go faster since i upgraded to vista from xp. my family is mostly computer illiterate but they don't run into that many problems either - even though my dad keeps forgetting where 'my documents' is.

outside of driver problems, which can happen on any machine and why you should get good hardware - and badly developed 3rd party apps that you shouldn't run anyway - windows has been pretty stable since win2000. not as stable as my freebsd boxes, but considering how much work i do - very stable. my desktop reboots on tuesday nights for windows updates and thats about it. all my windows 2008 machines are doing fine too, just like my ubuntu servers.

vista crashing, stutering, awful ... i read these but i have a suspicion your all exagerrating
It only started a few days ago.

And of course, when people see a 0 for no reason, they throw it an upvote, which then makes it look normal.
Piracy comes with its own set of hassles. What's the video quality? What language(s) does it have? How fast can you download it? How many seeds and other peers are there? What's your upload bandwidth? Does your firewall allow others to connect to you?

The amazing thing about DRM is that it manages to be even less convenient. People would pay for a simple just-download-the-high-quality-file system.
Cheap Round Stickers Printing
RailsConf 2009 Notes and Liveblogging
screwdriver manufacturer makes the best screwdrivers.

For values of "screwdriver" that include electric screwdrivers, aka "drills", I think they do.
Yahoo's homepage has always been of the portal style. When I see people's homepages (friends, family) they're never Google but some sort of portal (whether it's a social news aggregator (Digg, reddit), an actual news network or one of the 'classic' web portals (MSN, Yahoo)). I think this is because when people start up their browser they're looking for new stuff.

Sure, while Google certainly profits from keeping its homepage clean (it can serve it much faster than any other search engine) I don't think that these ongoing comparisons between the two sites are worthwhile. One is aiming to be a search engine, one is aiming to be a portal (yes, with a search utility), at the end of the day they both follow completely different design routes.
[2001] John Freyer catalogued and sold nearly everything that he owned, from his kitchen cutlery to his personal hygiene products, his Star Wars sheets and finally even the domain name Allmylifeforsale.com itself.

I didn't realize he sold the site, too; now that's surjective.
Part of it is because of the cost of capital. It's very high for startups and much lower for others, particularly busines customers, although the concept also applies to consumers who buy things like magazines. Clever startups can capitalize on this difference in capital cost by discounting the price enough to incentivize the customer to take the prepay, but not so much that it's not worth the boost in liquidity.

But yes, it means the customer takes the risk and doesn't get paid for it the same way a VC would, which in my book is a good thing for the startup.
Fax Machine Not Required But Can Send Fax To Anywhere
Probably. They were at 0 earlier.
I used this for financing a new landscaping company. 15% of my customers prepaid their maintenance fees for the year at a 10% discount. Purchased tools, equipment and paid lease downpayment on a truck with the money and still had some leftover for hiring two helpers.
I've seen (haven't used though) Privacy Policy / Terms Of Service Generators all over the web. For example:

http://www.bennadel.com/coldfusion/privacy-policy-generator....

I don't know how good these really are, but I assume they suffice for starters if you don't want to pay a lawyer.
Free chicken for hungry hackers (and everyone else)
"I wouldn't want to invest that much money in systems that I've watched fail on a regular basis"

So, according to the decision model you are using, if you saw your friend win the lottery, you'd start playing every day and expect to win, since the statistical likelihood of something happening is less reliable to you than your anecdotal experience.
Software doesn't just stop working because you refused to upgrade your OS. Likely what happened is that you upgraded your software not realizing that the newer version requires a newer OS. That's your fault for not reading the requirements. I've been on 10.4 Tiger since I bought my MBP back in 2006 and haven't had any existing software "stop working" because I didn't upgrade to Leopard. 3 years on an OS and it still works like the day I bought it. Still haven't reinstalled the OS which was a biannual thing with Windows.
MIT Sloan Talk on Sports Analytics w/ Mark Cuban and others
He's holding bad third party software against Apple and OS/X.

Really, you can stop reading right there.
My favorite thought on planning is 'a plan is merely a basis for change'.

It is a communication tool, so that when the people who set out to execute the plan start doing something different to the plan (as they inevitably do), then those differences can be easily communicated to all the other people involved, in terms that are already understood.

As Eisenhower put it, "I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable"
Ow, my eyes!

Seriously, red text on yellow? And she's a graphic designer?
New CCIE R&S: v4.0
What browser do you use that is current and works on an old version of OSX?
id like to add this, it's different from your normal pc vs mac stuff:

if apple at any point does take the majority of the personal computing market, we're all in trouble. at least when MS was being more punky and cornering OSs and productivity software, they didn't have the hardware too. an apple world is a scary world. apple fans used to wear those shirts with gates as the borg saying ms will assimilate us, as if apple was the savior and bringer of liberation. apple has ms beat when it comes to being restrictive

sure it's got the mach kernel and nix support, and you can run free software on it...all within their proprietary giant gui (the greatest gui for nix ever built, what the nix community has wanted for so long, something better than gnome....), but they didn't so much contribute to the free software as much as they just leveraged it.

take this phone in my pocket as an example. the iphone is the best phone on the market, no doubt. it has all the features i want, it was popular, got lots of developers, and now has even more apps. this phone, this fascist in my pocket, it's apps, it's services are all controlled, filtered and judged by a central authority named Apple, a private commercial interest, and it's a good thing that other companies are still interested in making phones and will keep challenging them to open up some more (such as pushing them to get past the "you cant even discuss development with other developers" phase, but that's really just one layer of their giant stack of stinky lock-ins and authoritative control ), and keep real development marching on.

it's poetic that the company started with wozniak and that advertisement of the hammer going into the big face of IBM, this liberation from the terminal machines controlled by big companies to personal computers you could mess with yourself, build yourself, hack at...... poetic, but doesn't change the fact of where apple is today. jobs gives me the impression he'd dictate what color underwear you wear when you use -his- products, if he had the chance.

beware an apple world.beware.

edit: on the plus side, im not worried because i heavily doubt that it will happen. for apple to ever gain majority, it would need to change in radical ways.
It's certainly an interesting idea that is related to the sea change in how people interact with media that has been ongoing for the last half a decade or so. As far as getting something for your own purposes, I think building something on top of MythTV is probably fastest - avoids the annoying reinventing the wheel stuff. I have shied (sp?) away from video work because it is inherently computationally and bandwidth expensive - so most of my personal work has focused on text based stuff, which is much cheaper to make scalable (:
I'm sure you're right, that users like it less. But you can't say a good domain is requires for success, given theirs.
Consumer reports seems to have rankings, but you have to register to view them. Fortunately, I found them (maybe) on google images:

http://cache.consumerist.com/assets/resources/2006/10/laptop...

My anecdotal experience is also that macs are a little bit unreliable, but this is obviously a subject on which we should trust the data (which says that macs are slightly above average.)
The Interplay between Climate Change and Peak Oil
Automattic (Wordpress) put their documents under a creative commons license:

TOS: http://en.wordpress.com/tos/
Privacy Policy: http://automattic.com/privacy/

And everyone seems to use the same DMCA document, but I'm not sure who created it:

http://secondlife.com/corporate/dmca.php

IANAL either, but I've used these on userscripts.org
"Two or three redbulls" sounds a bit extreme to me but the principle itself is sound[1]. The idea is that a short nap helps you feel refreshed if you can keep it just that: a short nap. Caffeine also can help you keep alert, but it takes a while to absorb it when taken orally, just the amount of time as a short nap. So when the caffeine wakes you up you are ready to go.

1. With the caveat that 45 minutes sounds too long to me. It should only take 15 minutes or so for the caffeine to get through your digestive tract. Also, sleeping longer than 15-20 minutes probably results in significant grogginess.
Maybe, but if Amazon can help them kill used textbooks then it might become profitable enough to drop the price. I imagine there is a lot of money lost on students turning over their books each semester.
The last crash I had on my mac was related to the networking drivers. They fixed it in 10.3. Of course, I don't have problems with crashing on my WinXP, Vista, or any MAJOR crashes on Windows 7.
Blogspam: http://monty-says.blogspot.com/2009/04/to-be-free-or-not-to-...

And a repeat at that.
Maybe you might want to add a bit to the duplicate detection algorithm to remove the "www." before checking if it is a dupe. I only say this because an article was submitted by two different people with exactly the same title. The only thing that differs is the "www." prefix on the url.

The two stories:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=594605

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=594525
The "Draw Diagram" tools need drawing tools...
No WYSIWYG editor? I'm not about to learn another markup language to write UML, which is itself a markup language.
Posterous (YC S08) launches group blogs that are also email lists
I tend to think that the netbook trend won't last very long. Even if you could get a nice OS like OSX to run smoothly, such small devices are ergonomically problematic. Aside from the noted difficulty simply typing, the small size encourages hunching over.

I have an Asus Eee running linux, and I like it, but about all I use it for is to stream radio, watch videos, or occasionally surf the web while in bed. My iPhone can do all this; the only advantage of the Eee is a slightly larger screen.
Not if you view it as an API.
I find it non-obvious that a newline isn't an acceptable delimiter between relationships, and I need to also include a comma at EOL.
Norway has historically had one of the lowest unemployment rates in Europe. In February 2009 there were 3.9% unemployed. This is an increase compared to previous years. In 2008 there were only 2.6% unemployed.

I look forward to seeing your statistics showing how this system encourages people to stay home.

For your information, there are terms and conditions that they have to follow to get money.
While this is pretty cool, I like these alternative web-based services listed below a lot better because they are easier to use:

http://www.gliffy.com

http://www.lovelycharts.com

*i'm not affiliated with them in any way.
I tried to avoid owning things for a while. I saw no benefit, because having "stuff" makes life easier than not having it. The key is to keep everything organized. That way you won't get stressed out by the clutter, you will be relaxed by the fact that you have a ton of useful tools, and you know where they all are.
Ask HN: Explain AWS
Ok, so I might be completely missing something here, but bear with me. I want to use AWS to build my service. But I am a bit perplexed when it comes to storage. If I have MySQL running where do the database files get stored? Does each EC2 instance come with a certain amount of storage? Would be glad if someone explained this for me :)
You're correct - that would not be an issue if it worked with Gmail (or at least she could see how it works with Gmail).

One of the other issues we have is that of file sharing - on her old windows laptop, we had a shared folder for images - when I copied the photos off our camera, I simply copied them over to her shared folder, so they were ready to go for her. On her new MacBook, I've SMB sharing setup on her images folder (as well as AFP), but I'm not able to connect to her "share" from my windows laptop. There's certainly a way to do this (or at least I think there should be), but it for sure doesn't "just work".

also, I just have to say that Finder (IMHO) just plain sucks. When I've navigated to a sub directory in an app (say via a "Open" dialog), it will remember that location for the next time it is opened. However, let's say you click "Open" again - you'll be dropped back in where you were (which is fine), but you have no way of going "up" a directory any more (since it's not in the current history). The only thing to do is change file views at this point so you can see the entire hierarchy, then click where you need go. I know how to do this, but my wife still hates it.

She also gets frustrated when an app is already running (she doesn't know that), and she clicks on the icon in the dock and it does not come to the front of other windows. She thinks the app is not responding, and gets frustrated.

I can go on if you want more...

Thanks!
Twitter can be seen as a slot machine.

"It was one of B.F Skinner's most important discoveries that behavior reinforced intermittently (as opposed to consistently) is the most difficult to extinguish. In other words, intermittent rewards beat predictable rewards. It's the basis of most animal training, but applies to humans as well... which is why slot machines are so appealing, and one needn't be addicted to feel it."

Read more in Kathy Sierra's post: Is Twitter TOO Good: http://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/2007/0...
That's a real bummer. Maybe your company should save up cash to buy googol.com and fix the situation.
"It's not about discussion" is accurate, but not because Twitter is a narcissist platform. I think it's more akin to sending UDP packets (with no guarantee of delivery to the recipients) than email (with its excessive guarantees). It's even less like mass emails when it's being used like a low-priority broadcast (like when I use Twitter to say I'm headed to a particular bar, my friends are implicitly invited, but with the need to arrange times or RSVP, etc.).

In another sense, Twitter is about delayed discussion. It can set up future conversations that bypass some of the introduction. A friend tweets that he bought a house, he closes on this date, and moves in on that date; the next time I see him we have the chance to jump into an interesting conversation about the house and the process instead of him having to repeat that information for the millionth time.

And there's something else Twitter's done that I'm not sure could have happened before. I wrote a tweet about being in the Salt Lake City airport, and a friend of mine calls me to say "Hey, me too. Let's grab a drink." We hadn't seen each other in a while and neither of us knew the other was traveling or where. That wouldn't have happened a year ago. We would have missed that chance.

(I went a little further than I expected here. But Twitter has some real use cases people are still figuring out, and they're different than email or text or IM or phone calls. People using Twitter for "Here I am! Here's what I think is important! Listen to me." are doing it wrong.)