skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
“So do you raise the price, knowing they’re going to lower it, so that the price will then appear closer to what you need it to be?"

So, Amazon is paying the publisher the wholesale price regardless. Amazon's discounts cut into Amazon's profits, not the publishers -- or even result in Amazon taking a loss.

I think this publisher quoted has to tell us why he "needs" the price on Amazon to be a certain amount, when it does not effect how much he gets paid per copy -- the initial naive interpretation would be that if Amazon wants to cut their profits, so presumably more copies sell, while the publisher is still making the same amount per copy -- this would be good for the publisher, no?

It is a weird market (with Amazon appearing to routinely sell books at a loss), and is dominated by Amazon, which indeed isn't great for a healthy diverse bookselling market.

But publishers are saying some weird stuff, without explaining themselves.
It's hard to see this piece as more than a disrupted industry, frankly, whining over their diminished power in the new reality. I'm to believe that it's bad for anyone but publishers that books are cheap? Because people might buy books for the wrong reasons? Oh, humanity. ("it sends a confusing message that good books are worth less, and because it encourages buying based on something other than the quality of the book")

This bit is particularly disingenuous: "The hippie, black and women’s movements of the 1960s would not have been so successful in challenging authority without the bookstores, which made their ideas widely available and sympathetic in a way that television, for instance, did not."

Seriously? I mean, really, seriously, you just wrote that on a technology (wait for it) BLOG? The analogous movements of today has unprecedented access to spreading their ideas through blogs and websites and social media and petition sites and collaboration services and who knows what else - most of it available instantly and almost or entirely free. I don't think that if the occupy/tea party/anonymous/truther/conspiracy/pick-your-revolution-of-week movements have struggled for five minutes to make their ideas available, it was because of the lack of bookstores.
One of my favorite CNN quotes from the day: "Video taken soon after the crash and posted on YouTube showed dark gray smoke rising from the plane, which appeared to be upright. That smoke later became white, even as fire crews continued to douse the plane."

Uh... that's what happens when you put water on fire... you get steam, which condenses into white clouds.

That's a basic rule of firefighting... black bad, white good (and when it comes to structural firefighting, brown really bad).
In watching how this news has been better (i.e. more acuratly and faster, and also rapidly self correcting) reported on HN then any other news source I'd have to say that HN itself is the relevant on topic idea that good hackers would find interesting. I do.

HN is better at news reporting and sifting. I'd like to know why and see if it could be reproduced for the larger public.
You did nothing wrong. People post older material all the time. Those are some of the best posts. And the GP was being a jerk, which actually does violate the site guidelines.
Heck even Windows 8 started siphoning local desktop searches to its servers. Sure in both the cases it can be turned off but it is sad to see all OSes converging to a point where privacy is no longer a top priority.
Peak in 2005 and than a linear decline: "Linux firefox". http://www.google.com/trends/correlate/search?e=id%3AI9yHeUP...
Dissecting a bad oneliner:

ls *.jpg|while read i;do gm convert $i -resize "900x" -unsharp 2x0.5+0.5+0 -quality 98 `basename $i .jpg`_s.jpg;done

The part I take issue with is the unnecessary invocation of `ls`. The shell does the glob expansion. A `for` loop is better suited for this. Also, if using bash,* we can get rid of basename.

for file in *.jpg; do gm convert $file -resize "900x" -unsharp 2x0.5+0.5+0 -quality 98 ${file%.jpg}_s.jpg; done

* zsh fans, I'm sure it works there too.
It's an obvious tragedy of the commons problem. Everyone would get off fastest if they brought no bags. But taking YOUR bag only slows down debarking a tiny amount, and it saves you weeks of hassle. Clearly the rational choice is to bring your bag. But when everyone brings their bag, possibly half the flight dies due to smoke inhalation from not getting off the plane quickly. But even then, it's STILL the right choice to bring your bag. Your exit speed is determined by whether everyone else brings their bag, a choice which you cannot affect.

The people who brought their bags off the plane today have their clothes, laptops and passports tonight; they can go to work tomorrow. The people who didn't are locked up in a customs holding cell, wearing the same underwear, for a few days until someone can issue them a passport. They'll never get their bag back and the airline will, after filing dozens of forms, compensate them about $50 for it.
And how would you like to pay, sir – cash, credit card, or Bitcoin?
He's only a few centuries late. There's already a character for that; it's called "eth" and looks like ð in lower case, Ð in upper case.
the front section of the plane is theoretically the most dangerous part of the plane; survivors in plane crashes are most likely to come from just behind the wing.
It's been a couple of years, but I used to work at a place that published a number of books.

Usualy wholesale price was %40 off retail. Amazon demanded 55% at the time or they wouldn't sell the books. I can imagine some publishers would raise their prices accordingly so that they would still reach the minimum wholesale price they wanted/needed.
> If we obey stubborn users set in their ways, user interfaces would never advance and evolve.

But neither would they catch genetic defects - the mutation rate would just go to 0. To be an advocate for evolution, at least to be one that I'll listen to, you need to point me to strong selection pressures in favour of a desirable outcome. How does this improve information management, how does it improve workflow? That sort of thing. What are you using to vet? And I'm not seeing that with unity.

Some hand waving about how it's 'largely ineffable' just isn't going to cut it. Let's be honest here: They stuck the launcher, which other OSes allow you to move anyway, on left hand side of the screen. I can get all my options on the same side of the screen just by dragging the launcher there. And yet... most people don't choose to keep their launcher on the side of the screen when given the option.

Talking that up as some big advantage is just... yeah. Not buying it. It seems to me like forcing a way of using the computer on people that they've elected not to use and that there are the capabilities that it ought to have naturally arisen as the way they'd use it if it was superior.

HUD's a nice idea, mind.
At Least Two Dead in San Francisco Plane Crash
I'm on my second quest to understand, really understand, how AngularJS fits together. Forensically decomposing the documentation. It's quite slow going, actually; I find myself relying on the code to explain the documentation about as much as the documentation describes the code.

My current suspicion is that directives do not get the central billing that they deserve. If you come from other backgrounds, the first thing you wonder about is the whole MVC thing.

But then you look at compile phase, link phase and runtime loop. They are dominated by directives and the code that directives set up.

It seems to me that a big design step in AngularJS is to extend HTML into the DSL you wish existed. This is done with directives.

I'm still going through this process so it might well turn out that when I get to other parts of the manual my perspective will change entirely.
I've also switched to Mint with xfce. My laptop got slow terribly slow somewhere between 11.04 and 12.04 and I just couldn't stand waiting for Unity anymore. The same laptop is blazing fast again.
Not everyone is a pro. A lot of Bootstrap users are still learning the front end. Beyond that, I'm pretty advanced with LESS, SASS, and CSS and the first time I looked at Boostrap's LESS files I got overwhelmed. There's just a ton of stuff going on there.

I'm the kind of developer who can appreciate reusable front end code and even have my own framework for it (which is my most and only popular GitHub repo) but Bootstrap is just enormous. I'm of the opinion that if you can't confine your reusable modules to a set of about 4 files and customize each by changing just a couple lines of code, mostly variables, then your best bet is to either admit you're going to make your site look like Bootstrap, fight the framework, or just roll your own. If you want to go with options one and two then this post is definitely helpful. The source can only get you so far.
One obvious improvement, if your analysis is correct, is to apply some kind of more-sane treatment to undocumented immigrants who are undocumented due to an obviously anomalous situation, such as surviving a plane crash. If people really believe that the U.S. will treat them well if they do the right thing, they may be more inclined to do the right thing.
Why Do We Endlessly Retweet Tragedy?
I don't like that you can't move the unity launcher to the bottom. Vertical space is not as import as horizontal space.

I don't like how I have to click the small window that is not near the top and then go to the top to access the File menu etc.

I don't like that unity doesn't have snap to the right and left side.
This is from the realm of mathematical physics, but Noether's Theorem (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noether%27s_theorem) is quite possibly the most beautiful result that I can think of:

Briefly, "Any differentiable symmetry of the action of a physical system has a corresponding conservation law".

The extension of this theorem in QED, The Ward-Takahashi Identity, is also incredibly astounding, if a bit obtuse if you're not well versed in renormalizable field theories.
At the cost of privacy? No thanks, instead I will gladly donate to Canonical. Sending it to Amazon doesn't help either. Amazon is the Google of shopping. The more data they have, the better they can guess as to what you want. Search for X on Amazon while logged in and the next day you will receive an email recommending similar items. They have also admitted to storing your watching habits. Every play, pause, rewind and fast-forward is logged while watching a prime video. The higher the analytics, the better the recommendation.
I believe they considered parachutes and came to the conclusion that, since they are keeping the rocket engines, extra fuel and oxidizer are a better use for the mass. Parachutes large enough for slowing down the first stage along with the pyros needed to deploy them are heavy.
A nice and fresh collection of gadgets
KTVU was so bad that I had to take a screenshot of their website. A photo showed people walking away from an upright plane with the copy "after wobbling for a minute, the aircraft flipped upside down, coming to a stop on runway upside down."
https://twitter.com/pfreet/status/353599929039589376/photo/1

The death of journalism indeed.
They made other compatibility-breaking changes in Python 3, though. It'd be interesting to know why this particular feature was kept. I guess from another point of view it's simpler to have everything in the `def` line executed when that line is reached (which is when the function is defined).
Strange, in my case, it correlated with the NSA. Well, I may have drawn a bigger one.
If you build your supply landers (and your supplies, of course) capable of withstanding high g's you can probably crash-land large things on airbags. NASA hasn't done it because the rovers are somewhat delicate, but if you are shipping frozen-solid food containers, I believe it would be fine.
Cinnamon is in Ubuntu and has been at least since 12.10 - this is what I use at work. It's also in Debian unstable.
I started using Ubuntu because it was "Debian with a nice GUI". I started using Debian again when Ubuntu demonstrated that they don't care about privacy. I was pleasantly surprised to see how far a Debian Wheezy desktop has come. Out of the box, it seems as nice as Ubuntu nowadays.
I'm in exactly the same position, having switched to Ubuntu almost a decade ago.

There is just no way I can stick with a distro that a) abuses my privacy by selling my search strings by default, and without informing me, and b) thinks it is okay to sell advertising real-estate on my desktop in the first place.

For now I've switched to debian on my main machine, and am gradually migrating others.
Ubuntu were the folks who made a printer test page in colour that made giant filled boxes of colour - apparently whoever created it has never purchased printer ink.

It has (thankfully) regained some sanity.
has there been any work on this? it seems relatively straightforward to score a git branch in certain time scales

EDIT should have RTFA before commenting, gaze tracking stuff is very cool
Any chance of a link?
I've been bitten by that exactly once. In order to track it down, I had to tear out pieces of my program to issolate where it is, to the point where I was working with a single function that did nothing other than mutate a dict that was a default value and print said value; and code that called it twice.
Thank you. Amazing job. Was hard to understand the audio.
>Aren't Project Euler's exercises seem more likely maths exercises?

Project Euler does involve a math, but so does efficient programming.

Efficiency can seem a pretty abstract thing and it might not crop up right away in more typical programming tasks. Working a Euler problem and refining to a solution that runs in 1% or 0.001% of the time required for the most straightforward solution is a great demonstrator.

>It's kinda difficult for those who graduated from social sciences and tries to learn programming from scratch.

Sure, but the context of the question here isn't really from scatch. The OP has already completed at least the 296 exercises in the Python track at Codeacademy to establish a base.

Personally, I haven't graduated from anything and I treat the Euler exercises as an interesting way to practice/learn a bit of programming and math.
I haven't tried just using the basic cinnamon packages from an installed Ubuntu system, but I have tried it from an installed Xubuntu system and it definitely doesn't work as well as a full Mint install.

At any rate they're all ubuntus in the end, but the whole package of Mint+Cinnamon is what I was referring to.
This problem is older than hills. Remember 9/11 coverage? No matter how fast information moves, speculation will move faster.

The article also mentions how airplane travel is safe. It's not a question about the inherent safety or non-safety of travel. It's about trying to stop the most preventable deaths possible. It's not like society can only concentrate on one thing at once. It's the same fallacy for arguing against trying to prevent terrorist attacks. Why wouldn't we want to minimize the risk of having some (more or less) random event killing a large group of people at once?

Nevermind the fact that things going wrong on an airplane can have much worse consequences than things going wrong in a car. A wing breaking off is a lot worse than a car wheel falling off.
> Actually we do have a overall decrease in the number of states over the past few centuries.

It doesn't really affect my argument(if all states didn't collapse into one over past couple of centuries, then multi-government system is quite stable), but I am quite interested in the source(out of pure curiousity).

> The USSR is a special case because it was actually based on ideology and not just strength

Almost all states utilize some sort of ideology. In fact, I agree that ideological component was really strong in the USSR, but the USSR did use raw power - it annexed baltic states for example.

Also, there are other examples: Czechoslovakia, South & North Sudan.

> We can equally ask why, if your libertarian philosophy is so naturally stable, it has not emerged into the world yet?

I would define stable as "won't collapse once established". The problem of stability is orthogonal to the problem of establishing. It is not easy to organize a market anarchy when all territory is occupied by the state(note: you cannot easily organize another state either, though existing states are relatively stable). In past there were more or less "anarcho-capitalist" societies which lasted for thousands of years: medieval iceland, medieval ireland.

Iceland: http://wiki.mises.org/wiki/Iceland#Medieval_Iceland_and_Anar...

Ireland: http://pucksmith.blogspot.ru/2013/02/libertarian-ancient-ire...
With products where you pay for them in advance, you are the customer. So the companies making money off you tend to try and please you. In apple's case, sometimes they make decisions for the good of the user base, and those can annoy users with specific needs, but at the end of the day spying on their users is counter productive to being a profitable business.

With ad/search sponsored products ie. google and now canonical, the business has 2 customers. The consumer and the people they are selling ads to. And they aren't even making money off you directly, so it doesn't take much logic to work out where the balance of interests lie.
AVHerald.com report, which will be kept updated and also will eventually get NTSB reports:

http://avherald.com/h?article=464ef64f&opt=0
It's got the price tag of a war. It trivializes the notion of being at war.
Rarely am I so torn about a project's name. The play on PHP's name makes me cringe, but the (not sure if intentional?) play on the California Highway Patrol's acronym makes me thumbs-up.
Now for homebrew next hopefully :D
I notice a tendency with new interfaces that you need to know "secrets" in order to use them effectively. Things that aren't visible in the user interface. E.g., in unity, to open two instances of an application, you need to shift-click the launcher. It seems to me that the more minimalistic the interface tries to become, the more you need to know to be able to use it.

It also seems to take more effort to get what you want. It's easier to pick a program from a menu that to open a search panel, type the name, if you remember it, and find it in the search results.

I use xfce on Ubuntu. The particular dislikes I have for Unity include the shifting of window toolbars so that the buttons are nowhere near the window that they relate to, and the launcher that doesn't function well as either a launcher (it doesn't have every program I may want to use) nor a way to quickly switch between open windows (without combining mouse clicks with keyboard modifiers).
Is anyone here planning an implementation ?
If you follow recent articles, HN'ers don't watch the news channels.
This is great write up, thanks for the explanation.

I've studied physics in undergrad but I still made the mistake you describe in your last paragraph. The Grasshopper intuitively feels dynamically like an inverted pendulum but even harder because all you have are rockets at the bottom and you can adjust their rotation (I assume?).

On the other hand, there is no fixed pivot point around which you get torque, is this what the difference comes down to?

Do you happen to have any pointers to some articles that discuss this, and how difficult it is to balance? How does the wind affect things? What are the biggest challenges?
No jury in the world ...
Ask HN: How did HN start?
Hi,
I was wondering how Hacker News really started? How did it get initial traction? Are there any early users (besides PG) that are still active to this day?
Sincerely
Thanks! I wanted to say natural
numbers but thought that the
original quote was the integers.

No excuse! Should have at least
tried to Google the quote instead of
just typing quickly from undergraduate
school memory!
What is the caution?
That seems like a ridiculous implementation of a quite reasonable algorithm. Instead of spreading them out through time, you can spread the values out through space. Assume you know that you elements are all positive integers less than 100 (or can be mapped to such). Allocate an array of length 100. In O(n) time, you can read through your unsorted list, and copy each element to the appropriate location in the array. Then you can read through the array and print out the values in order.
Looks like Simple[1] is perfectly positioned for the future of banking.

1. http://simple.com
Ubuntu 13.04 is quite good. A bit buggy, but quite good. What I really want from Ubuntu is to be able to run it on my phone. I want Linux, real Linux, on my pocket computer.
A simple fix to the time/now example is also useful for demonstrating first-class functions:

def print_now(now=time.time):
print now()
There is only one universe, so it must be a constant, O(1)
No one quite knows, as no such system exists yet, though I imagine SpaceX has some internal numbers. You need enough to slow your mostly-empty (and thus fairly light) stage from its terminal velocity to 0, and however many seconds margin you need to be comfortable.

Let's do some very rough numbers to get a ballpark...

Say terminal velocity is 100 m/s, which is fairly fast, but a rocket is a skinny streamlined thing. (It could fall slower, maybe even 50 m/s, on its side or with parachutes, but parachutes are heavy and complicated, and falling sideways may be difficult to control, but seems quite possible.)

Say an F9 "1.1" first stage weighs 28,000 kg. The landing components mostly are already there: the engines are already gimballed and the additional software weighs nothing. Unless you're so awesome you can land in a cradle--which is not impossible--you need some landing gear, so let's add 3000kg, for a dry weight of 31,000 kg.

Amongst all its engines, our F9 has some 300,000kg of thrust. Just one engine is around 33,000kg thrust, so we'll probably only use one or two.

Two engines will get us easily about 10m/s slower per second, so we need to retro-fire for minimum 10 seconds. You probably want some margin over that; let's reserve 20 seconds fuel.

F9 1.1 stage 1 will have a burn time of 185s; our retro burn is only at about 25% capacity, so 20s of two engines is worth, oh, 5s of normal burn time. Say about 3% of the fuel.

Of course, it's not that simple, because (1) we've made the stage heavier with the landing gear, which requires more fuel and (2) to avoid losing performance we'll want to add enough fuel to add our extra burn time, which also requires more fuel, and (3) we need more fuel to lift all that fuel and mass we added. The rocket equation strikes again!

(Of course, it may not be that bad, because usually first stages have plenty of margin, and most payloads are not max. Maybe if you encounter a really heavy payload you just agree to throw away the rocket that time; use an old one or something.)

Most of my assumptions are pessimistic (I think) but in the real world they may turn out optimistic. I would guess you're looking at 3-5% of the fuel load for a recoverable VTOL stage. A lot depends on details, as with rockets weight scales very badly against performance.
Bash Extended Globbing
that font....
"Credible", likely yes. Likely
also awkward. To weasel out,
I just said we "want
completeness". When you look
at the alternatives, you may
conclude that you still want
completeness and, thus, are
stuck with the reals with no
alternative you "want"!
In Secret, Court Vastly Broadens Powers of N.S.A.
Sheryl Sandberg almost on flight that crashed - wtf?
Sure there can be an end. It'll end when enough people get fed up with it to demand an end, and the President follows through. As the memory of 9/11 fades in relevance and the wars in the Middle East die down, the public's tolerance for the war will wane. I can only hope it doesn't take as long as the War on Communism.
She tried. It was actually no problem, but didn't help. Apparently the lack of impact (i.e. "I'm gonna die and can't do anything about it") is exactly the point. In some ways it's hilariously similar to my social anxieties.