skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The problem with mobile apps is that I often don't have a clear idea of the value I will receive. I've bought apps in the past that I have literally never used.

At $1 this doesn't really matter because I will also occasionally buy a $1 app which gives me way more than $1 in value. So really I may have paid $10 for that useful app, but the problem is that the person who wrote that useful app only gets 1/10 of the money. The other 9/10 is distributed among those who developed the useless (to me) apps.

The answer as you suggest is to demonstrate the value before purchase. I think the problem here is that the app store model is often not conductive to that, you often just get a couple of bad screenshots and 1 paragraph of text.

On the other hand I will usually do more research when buying desktop software, simply because doing research on a desktop computer is less painful (I have a big screen and a proper keyboard).
We don't know for certain that several governments have archived stored copies of all cloud based email in existence, it's hazy as to what they do and do not have access to, what isn't hazy is that they have the right to demand the content of any given gmail account with effectively zero recourse available.

The very fact that they actually do make these demands indicates on balance of probability, they don't actually just have an archived permanent copy of the content of every gmail account in existence. Why ask for what you already have?

Of course, that's an assumption and it may be incorrect. However on the downside if it is incorrect, you're back in the exact same position you started in and you've lost nothing anyway. And as previously stated, it might get people in the habit of understanding how PGP works if mailvelope and products like it see wider adoption.

In a network of correspondents where everyone is running something similar to mailvelope + phoneme, it becomes an obvious thing to do to simply implement proper end to end PGP, so I also hope it might be a solution to the chicken and egg problem which has plagued PGP deployment for so long.

It can never hurt to fight, even if you might lose, especially when if you don't fight, you'll definitely lose.
Pierre Borghi: How I gave the Taliban the slip
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remailer
Trusting anonymous protest groups that are not transparent, lack accountability and seem 100% driven by social media (Reddit / Facebook) is a bad idea. Especially if they use media that is eminently traceable, is known to be data mined and is hosted by unfriendly sources (which Reddit and Facebook BOTH are, don't kid yourself: just because Advanced Publications aren't directly working with the NSA doesn't mean they're not using the data in other ways. And trust me, you're product on Reddit, 100%).

This is not what grassroots organizations look like, this is what astroturf looks like.

And no, I don't care if you're politically different than the Tea Party, manufactured dissent is a terrible abuse of Democratic principles. Shame, Shame, Shame on you.

It seems America, in the age of Kony2012, has totally lost the plot when it comes to effective protest. "Restore the 4th" is the vaguely socially progressive Kony2012, well done.
How ARM’s Business Model Works
> Indeed, all the libraries listed look avoidable.

Not on an enterprise context, like it or not, most consulting projects on the enterprise world require interaction with them.
This was my exact thought too. Makes me wonder if there isn't something else going on as it seems like such an obvious explanation.
Hey today it's actually an anniversary of Stonewall riots!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stonewall_riots
The main problem with this analysis - I think - is that each language rank as 1, regardless of actual speaker size and history. There is a reason why some languages are much larger than others (mostly historical and political), and these larger languages (like English) has thus evolved towards a more simplified version of its former self.

English is thus - for all intends and purposes - not weird.

A more interesting approach would be to take larger languages, like English, Mandarin, Spanish, etc. and value their features higher than languages spoken by tribes or very few people, and thus you could determine a more accurate 'weirdness' index out of that.
Thank you very much for your great work, I've found both the SSL Labs test and the best practice guide quite useful!
Self siphoning beads (video)
Most of us do the best we can, with what we have

No, all of us do, that's one of the things you can say about anyone and anything. And a "snap binary judgement" is better than even that, sometimes (don't mistake your false dichotomy for a "snap" "binary" judgement, either)

You see, if the author did accuse that particular father wrongly, it was with the best intentions for the kid. Surely that father would appreciate it.

Or are you saying that accusing someone of being abusive when they aren't, is worse than looking the other way when they are, so it's better err on the side of assuming everybody wants the best for their kids and surely there is a rational explanation for even the most cold and brutal behaviour blah blah blah? Fuck statistics, fuck research, let's go by how we want to view ourselves, and project that on all other parents as well?
I read a similar article about 3 months ago and decided to give it a try. Raising price gave me less total income. Here are the details:

I have a product called Attic Manager (guacosoft.com/attic) which is a home inventory software with unique feature on the market - it is able to import database from all versions Quicken Home Inventory programs. Currently, it is only product on the market that does that (probably because it is not so easy to do, I spent months reverse engineering their custom file format).

I used to sell it for $19.99 and got about 30 orders per month consistently in the past 3 years. That's around $600 per month gross (my actuall earnings are lower, because of payment gateway cut, but that is irrelevant here because it's fixed percentage of gross price anyway).

After reading that "you should charge more", I upped the price to $29.99, a 50% increase. The experiment is still going on, but in the past 3 months I got only 42 orders. That's 14/month. 14*$30 is $420 per month, or 43% less than before.

So, all the "you should raise you prices" is just an idea to consider and maybe test, but I wouldn't trust it blindly.
Indeed, I've played with it a bit to demonstrate: http://s3.amazonaws.com/clouds-reverse-engineered/index.html
Dev budget? Marketing budget? Purchases by people who don't ever play demos? Purchases in areas the demo wasn't available? Analysis of whether studios always do demos, or only for certain games? Weighting by external review scores?

Any number of things you could take into account.
Clojure uses STM and has persistant datastructures by default. This makes it pretty safe when it comes to concurrency. Clojure also has good support for paralellism through pmap and reducers. Making something run in paralell is often just changing the name of a function or importing a diffrent namespace.

I don't know Scala that well, but actors in scala still shares state, and doesn't give the same level of protection when it comes to changing state. Actors also introduce some overhead in case you just want to read a single variable from a datastructure safely. You have to send a command and receive a message, wheras in clojure you just retrieve the value you want. Actors however are, to my knowledge, easier to scale across machines as actors doesn't necessarily have to be in the same process, or even on the same machine.
but, but, but... this _IS_ the definition of a filter bubble
Nice write up. I think many people face the same problems me included. The problem for me is that I have never had a chance working in a team with more experienced developers. Which would teach a mindset, or bring some insights, of successful developer, which is implement the feature then return and improve as needed. Also solving so called "complex" problems brings rush of pleasure. So you start solving complex problems instead of getting the stuff done.
Class Profile – Stanford Graduate School of Business
What about the trial? You can try it out for 15 minutes, at least on Android.
Just a feed back: For me, I click on HTML(1) in the menu on the left, and it expands below the page. There seems to be a thin scroll bar to the right to scroll down, but I cant grab it to scroll down. Only arrow keys and mouse wheel work. IMHO, scroll bar needs some work.

Edit: (1)Correction
I click on HTML, then HTML5. Then the list goes below the bottom of the browser, then I cant grab the scroll bar.

Sorry for any confusion.
Spot on!

I am surprised this isn’t mentioned more often, but there likely is a strong correlation between the price and lack of trials.
Only 3 Days Left to Enter CGTrader’s 3D Printing Competition
chrome still collects that data
Homemade Eggplant Parmesan Pizza Recipe
Sure but it seems far less content. Maybe speed will suffer as content increases. Sites like this, IMHO, are about content, not speed.
I'm not going to comment on the quality of the article. It's certainly not exhaustive research and is only a small insight into some sales numbers. But it does make a kind of intuitive sense.

Personally, if I play a game and see how its core game mechanics work then I am much less likely to purchase it.

A lot of my game purchases are impulsive — I see something cool in the trailer and want to try it. Once I've tried it I lose interest. Demos give me the opportunity to lose interest without purchasing the game.

When I know I really want to play a game all the way through I will always purchase it without trying the demo (if available). So in my limited gaming experience demos have never been a step to a sale.
Why? Static languages ensure type safety (which are uncovered in unit tests anyway) and to ensure this type safety, they need more information from you, the developer. Clojure allows you to write less code which, depending on who you talk to, equals faster development time.

Static languages are also usually faster, so I guess the tradeoff stands between raw performance and code size.

There are numerous succesfull projects using dynamic languages. Github, as far as I know, uses Ruby.
You'd be surprised how many people follow politics as if it were sports. The politic tactics surrounding the story are an angle that their readers are interested in, and they have real consequences as well. I think you'd have to consider all their coverage of the story as a whole to analyze their slant (which is Democratic, of course.)
If a star explodes and its system that has no life, is it "deadly"?
Well, one of the selling points of NewsBlur is showing the content with the design of the original site.

That said, most of my feeds use bland or generic themes. I really just care about their content.
MIT researchers can see through walls using 'Wi-Vi'
I think the notion of operation serializability is important in this context. From what I understand, in the broadest possible strokes, "concurrency" means "it doesn't matter in what order the sequence of operations happens and how their execution is reshuffled as long as the dependency invariants are maintained".
But only with fraction of content...
15 minutes isn't really long enough. Especially since you often need that long just to download an update.

15 minutes might be ok for a $1 app, but it should scale with price. If I'm going to pay $100 I probably want a month trial.
http://gigaom.com/2011/04/21/the-average-ios-app-publisher-i...

So, the magic numbers seem to be $5.99, and $8.99 for games, and $5.99 or $6.99 for non-games.

That's old data from 2011; but it makes sense. "A few bucks" has a similar transaction cost (is it worth actually paying for?) as a $0.99 game, when you compare them to "free". Though I bet if you charge any money (even 0.99) for a game with IAP, you've already convinced them to open their wallets.

I'd love to see more recent data, but I can't see how "undercutting" the competition is worth it.

Unless there's a network effect (spamming friends) ... why would you want 3X the sales, and half the revenue?
I would love an interface like this for MDN's JS documentation.
That's not very imaginative. "Tired of having a man's body? Get a woman's!"
Here's an opinion by Terence Tao along the same lines that I found insightful:

http://terrytao.wordpress.com/career-advice/there%E2%80%99s-...

The “post-rigorous” stage, in which one has grown comfortable with all the rigorous foundations of one’s chosen field, and is now ready to revisit and refine one’s pre-rigorous intuition on the subject, but this time with the intuition solidly buttressed by rigorous theory. (For instance, in this stage one would be able to quickly and accurately perform computations in vector calculus by using analogies with scalar calculus, or informal and semi-rigorous use of infinitesimals, big-O notation, and so forth, and be able to convert all such calculations into a rigorous argument whenever required.) The emphasis is now on applications, intuition, and the “big picture”. This stage usually occupies the late graduate years and beyond.
I tried googling V Rao and didn't really see a book. Is it a book or an article ? Could you provide a link please ?
Journalist Michael Hastings, 33, Dies in a Car Crash
I agree that 15 minutes isn't very long, but you also aren't paying $100 for an Android app, so it's probably long enough.
Thank you for the clarification, David.

I also had a problem getting the app to upload: "appcfg.py update" would hang during the build phase (may be Windows-specific):
https://code.google.com/p/googleappengine/issues/detail?id=9...
Hint: lack of imagination is seldom considered a positive trait in creative fields.
Thank you. It kind of confirms what I was thinking, that parents who abuse kids ultimately need a hug themselves, and that just attacking them for it can't be the solution... if only seeing things like this tends to make my blood boil so fast. This will take conscious effort and practice.
I'm with you on the type checking (although this particular library doesn't seem to offer much in that space). That said, I'd argue that modern tooling (e.g. IDEA, and by association the static analysis toolchain in Teamcity) are capable of identifying and validating embedded SQL, particularly when provided with database metadata.

Essentially, I'm deeply uneasy about embedding translators from one language into another. As an example, not many people like using BigDecimal to describe arithmetic operations, despite it having a fluent syntax and improved type safety (e.g. around implicit conversions) compared to just writing an expression.
Interesting, though mostly because of our gut reactions, not because there's anything terribly complicated or new about the moral repercussions, etc.. It's not much different from normal organ donation in most respects.

From the article:

I have not addressed the ethical aspects of HEAVEN. In Thomas Mann's "'The Transposed Heads," two friends, the intellectual Shridaman and the earthy Nanda, behead themselves. Magically, their severed heads are restored - but to the wrong body, and Shridaman's wife, Sita, is unable to decide which combination represents her real husband. The story is further complicated by the fact that Sita happens to be in love with both men. This short story highlights the ethical dilemma that must be faced: The HEAVEN created "chimera" would carry the mind of the recipient but, should he or she reproduce, the offspring would carry the genetic inheritance of the donor.

However, it is equally clear that horrible conditions without a hint of hope of improvement cannot be relegated to the dark corner of medicine. This paper lays out the groundwork for the first successful human head transplant.
'Corkscrew' light could turbocharge the Internet
How do you find these clients ? Also do you do this on the side or is this kind of work your full time job ?
Never underestimate the importance of responsiveness in user interfaces, especially when those interfaces are used look something up.
I would call these more "caveats" than "problems" -- anything with a title like "weirdest languages" is going to be incredibly subjective, and there will be no doubt no shortage of people who disagree with specific choices, but as long as the reasoning is clear it can still be interesting/useful.

> This could explain the result for Hindi - it is a standard language that 'averages' a large number of other Indian languages.

I think this is a little misleading; a lot of Indian languages come from a completely different language family to Hindi (Hindi is Indo-European, but a lot of Indian languages are Dravidian, e.g. Tamil and Urdu), though I'm not qualified to speak about this.
Here's a lengthy discussion on the topic:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5922667
Is that the IT equivalent of legally requiring a man with a red flag to run sixty yards ahead of the car?
Over the years Scala has adopted some of the concurrency primitives from clojure, now I think if you compare the two there isn't much of a difference between them, however when you start to add in third party libraries I think Scala is actually pulling ahead of clojure. With Akka not only does it do single node concurrency well it also does multinode concurrency with two or three extra lines of code.
_I Will Fear No Evil_ was one of Heinlein's odder novels.
Windows 8.1: 5 Cool New Features
Sublime Text 3 Public Beta
Price discovery is an outcome of demand-supply situation and information asymmetry. Optimum price x can be derived by optimizing function f(x*n) where x is the price and n is the number of users willing to pay that price. So the approaches are:

1) Experiment with a sample population to determine 'x'
2) Use heuristics about existing similar software to reach a price point

The point is many developers are just not looking at maximizing their earning potential.
Ballmer's latest pitch to the faithful (Build 2013)
Microsoft files patent for switching visuals on the fly in game remakes
A model in science is a mathematical description that maps inputs to outputs. Science is an iterative process that first hypothesises a model then tests it through experimentation. Over time a model may be refined or perhaps superceeded by a superior model with different foundations. A model then is never considered 100% accurate for all cases, there is always the potential for new observations to lie outside the model.
I might pay $100 for an app though , if I had confidence that it was worth the $100.

I think that google probably prefers that there be thousands of cheap apps rather than a small number of good ones.
Stringently, yes. To be "deadly" simply requires something to possess the ability to cause death. Actually causing death isn't a requirement.

(Non-exploding stars are plenty deadly, too.)
Gah! Now I understand how it works, it does not look nearly as cool as it did before!
SQL as a string is not composable. I cannot give you a small query and have you arbitrarily join against it - I have to give you bits of strings and you have to glue them together in the right way. Expressing SQL as its AST lets you write combinators between ASTs, and thus get at least some composability. The stronger your type system, the better guarantees you can get that the composition is sound (closure).
This seems to me a useful concept.

Having been immersed in Smalltalk for a long time, something that I'm very conscious of when approaching other languages* is just how little reading of code tends to be involved, and what we do read often tends to be small fragments in books and articles.

(* Perhaps I should say, "other development systems" - it's not strictly a language issue - but I'm going to use the word language anyway.)

Smalltalk systems tend to give you a view of your own code as just being a small part of a much larger whole (including standard things like the collection classes, and any other libraries or frameworks you've loaded), and which you are to some extent expected to go explore and read the implementation. Most other languages give you more a clean-slate view, where your own code is the only thing presented to you, at least by default.

I forget who said it, but I've heard a remark along the lines that, "When I write PHP, I've got 3 or 4 web browser tabs open on the documentation. When I write Smalltalk, I've got 3 or 4 class browser windows open [on the implementation]", and this is my experience as well. I gradually learnt to write clear, concise and (hopefully) well organised code through osmosis by these means, and while it was a valuable experience for me, it also took a lot of time.

Having clear examples of small-scale idiomatic code (as in this book) might well be a big help in shortening the learning process.

Which just leaves the other end of the scale:

- How do we give good examples of code organisation in the large?

- How best can we integrate them in to some sort of learning path?

- How do we classify such examples according to the problem space they're well suited for? (Code organisation appropriate for a web framework may not be appropriate for an OS kernel, etc.)
I'm hoping to start seeing projects in Go because Go gives them an advantage, not for the sake of it being in Go.
Well, when you add in third-party libraries, Clojure can use these too.

I wasn't aware Scala had incorporated Clojuires STM, I thought Scala was married to Actors/Akka?
The "we have policies" defense is complete horse manure for the reason you stated and also because if those policies are secret, as is the case with regards to wholesale surveillance state policies, there is no way to verify they're being followed or hold anyone accountable for violating those policies.

Additionally even when governments don't change the policies have an uncanny habit of not being followed whenever it's convenient to ignore them. That has happened time and time again.
Ice mass the size of Greenland overlooked in climate models
Please consider changing trigger point value for collapsing sidebar. Default Bootstrap trigger point value is an obstacle while browsing in full HD split-screen mode (two windows at once).

Feedly is also collapsing sidebar to early, this is a small thing, but causes a great deal of disruption in such use case.
Hmm, I'm not familiar with it. Is it good?
Awesome. I almost considered buying it. Almost.
I built something similar a few weeks ago: http://doks.io

(It supports all major languages and frameworks) (And it's open source !)
Hi, i wrote the code 3 days ago. I wasn't aware of jooq, it looks cool though.
They might have stub source files with a `//+build !appengine` in them
Rand Fishkin Swapping CEO Roles with Wil Reynolds of SEER
Wild stab in the dark, something from the Voyager 1 probably.
I still can't find a good reason to switch from Vim.
Yep. Still debating if the $70 price is right.
I often found that astonishing as well. It does not help that we do not have ivy league universities here in Germany. I have met hundreds of people here claiming to have studied "in Munich, Harvard and Oxford", because they attended some expensive two-week summer schools abroad...
Also, it happens quite often that people think of their alma mater as some kind of elitist, (I am looking at you, Munich, Karlsruhe and Mannheim...)even though it is not really hard to get in there, and curriculum is similar everywhere.

TLDR: It's hard to earn prestige by attending any university in Germany - but people hate that.
Encrypting your emails won't help at all, because what's being snooped is the header information. Who sent to whom, when and from where and where to.

You can't hide that information.

Don't send email and don't use the phone is the only alternative. Snail mail may be safe.
There is no way to ensure anything, ever. But there are directions to work in.