skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think Patrick McKenzie / patio11 once threw out a recommendation for The Strategy and Tactics of Pricing. I'll add my voice, it's one of the better business books I've ever read.

I reviewed it at my blog -- http://chester.id.au/2012/09/12/review-the-strategy-and-tact...

Essentially, the core insight is as per the blog post. Identify what you are worth to the customer, prove it, then charge based on that. In the book Nagle, Hogan and Zale give examples of quite dramatic price changes where the customer agreed with the reassessment of value. The sellers could prove that a new product would quintuple productivity, so asking for a doubled price was damn near an act of charity, not highway robbery.

Also useful was their treatment of calculating the cash effect of pricing changes. Financial accounting 101 calculations can sometimes be misleading about the best pricing scheme.
I think that's where we're headed. Theaters are learning to appeal to distinct audiences. The Alamo Drafthouse, for example, takes pride in kicking out noisy people, and they don't allow children at most screenings. They also have special screenings where infants and children are welcome, so they're already specializing for more than one audience. Some theaters achieve a similar specialization through their location and their programming. In the long run, I don't think the commodification of blockbusters will kill movies for the minority who want something different, any more than McDonald's makes it hard to find great food. Formulaic, standardized mediocrity will be a choice. A popular one, to the frustration and grief of progressive people everywhere, but still a choice that can be declined by those who prefer something else. And the internet will come to the rescue of those poor souls who in the past would have been limited to whatever showed up at their local two-screen theater.

There may be a couple of drawbacks to this future, though. It may mean that big franchises like Star Trek and Superman are doomed to be mutilated on this 15-beat bed of Procrustes, because a producer who intends to produce an industry-standard movie to tight tolerances can outbid anybody who wants to do something creative with it. And it may mean that most "mainstream" theaters give up on the idea of watching a movie quietly in the dark, simply because they don't have the will or the means to enforce it. I can see movie theaters turning up the lights a little bit, moving the concessions into the theaters, and changing the seating to make it easier for people to move around like they're in a club. I think the outcry against that would be a big screaming silence, because people who don't like hearing teenagers talking on their cell phones or noisily sucking face have already stopped going to big cineplexes, at least in places where there's an alternative. I call it a drawback only because I'd hate to see most of the country deprived (via price or distance) of the experience of being immersed in the big screen and transported for an hour or two into a movie, even a bad one. But there may be enough demand for such an experience to keep "quiet" theaters running even in small cities.
Nate Silver isn't some weird Neo like figure who strides alone dispensing Truth via a college-level understanding of statistics -- his brand of analysis is not unique or even particularly remarkable save that it is rare in the mainstream media.

Too, it's a bit rich to be badmouthing sports on Hacker News, home of perhaps the most solipsistic conversations on the internet. Sports is a very important part of many people's lives; surely that alone lends it sufficient heft to be a defensible use of Silver's talent?

As for why, Silver got started in sabermetrics, and going back to working on sports stats is almost certainly because he likes it. And I imagine ESPN backed up the proverbial dump truck, too.
10/15% revenue share, discounts and a free shoe, depending on the quantity you sell
From how I read it, he did that after the experience, when it wasn't under surveillance anymore (well, at least not from inside the datacenter), as a sort of atonement.
I think that the folks questioning the reasoning/wisdom of Nate's move to ESPN are missing something ...

Think of this not as a deal with ESPN but a deal with Disney, the parent company.

It's not just Nate able to do more sports. Disney enables 538 to get its content onto multiple "channels" - sports (ESPN), news (ABC), A&E - on cable, radio, books with much greater international exposure.
Smart customers have their own method of pricing to compete with the value-based pricing suggested in the post. It's called market-based pricing. Even if my programming work will make the client $100,000, if the client is convinced he can get that programming work done for $5,000, he will pick that over my $20,000 quote.

I've read these several posts along these lines. The one huge assumption they make is that you have good clients who aren't on a budget and won't go shopping. Those clients are much harder to find as a freelancer.
Reportlab – All About Fonts
UK schools to teach robotics, 3D printing
I find it a bit surprising that he chose the role of working in media over working for a sports organization. The Memphis Grizzlies recently hired John Hollinger, who was ESPN's resident statistician the past few years, as their VP of basketball operations. Nate Silver likely could have a found an even better job. Perhaps not with the ability to dedicate large swaths of time to analyzing politics, though.
Neutrino 'flavour' flip confirmed
I was gona come comment how cool I thought it was - perhaps because I lost interest in the actual article though :-)
"developers, developer, developers" could be called a "behavior smell". Something is very wrong when CEOs are jumping that way.))
> Lots of Lisps have been backwards-incompatible with previous Lisps. Scheme, Common Lisp, Emacs Lisp, and even MACLISP and LISP 1.5 were all significantly backwards-incompatible with their predecessors.

Right. That's what I'm saying. Clojure does not care to be backwards compatible with Lisp.

> Your taxonomy of immutability and persistence is interesting

That's not mine.

Clojure took its base data structures from Haskell and modern ML.

Not Lisp.

See:

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rwh/theses/okasaki.pdf

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

The book comes with examples in ML and Haskell.

http://www.amazon.com/Purely-Functional-Structures-Chris-Oka...
Someone more knowledgeable than I should confirm or deny this, but my understanding was that TOR should be resilient to a single point attack like that. On the other hand, if they can watch packet timing on a significant fraction of intermediate nodes, there is a problem.

And, hypothetically, the FISA authorized box was only getting traffic from the one site, and not the entirety of network traffic. The room 641A attack is far more problematic.
It could easily have been a community association or other similar group. A group of gardeners? Well, they could be eco-terrorists. A bunch of software enthusiasts? Why, these open-source people are borderline commies, better check them out.

This is routine activity for police authorities, unfortunately.
Okay then yeah, I agree. I once had a discussion with someone who claimed Aliens could be analyzed in terms of the three act structure, and I didn't disagree - but it turned out we disagreed on where the three acts actually were, which in my opinion negated the claim that such analysis had any predictive power.

But the original article is talking about a formula that is apparently much more prescriptive than the three act structure.
This post is clickbait with basically zero content. The story of Nissan.com is well known to anyone who's been around the web for long. After all the battle started in the '90s.

This article is saying "The web is important! Nissan Motor Company wants to own nissan.com!"

No shit.
Yes, JavaScript is a Lisp
That every major telecom/ISP charges for wiretaps and other information pulls has long been public knowledge. Reimbursing them for government requests is a line-item in our public federal budget.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2012/04/03/these-a...
This is akin to the argument Thomas Paine made in "Common Sense" http://bit.ly/168gJkB that fired up the colonists in early 1776. "We consent ourselves to be governed" and if we select one or more among us to carry out our business, those folks don't have rights that the rest of us don't.

However, even at the time, there were "elites" among the colonists who wouldn't have agreed. And so its been ever since. The rhetoric of a democratic republic used to sway and motivate regular folks in order to protect the power and interests of a few.
>>The Supreme Court has been very reluctant to create categorical rules in terms of patentability<<

I wouldn't say very reluctant. There were four votes for a rule putting software and business methods outside patentability in Diehr (450 U.S. 175 (1981)) and again in Bilsky (561 U.S. ? (2010)). If Obama gets a chance to replace one of the pro-software patent justices (Roberts, Alito, Kennedy, Thomas, Scalia), the result could be different next time.

Note that in both those cases, the justices that were skeptical of software patents were those typically classified as the "left"-wing justices. I have no idea why that happens. Dr. Lessig had a theory in Eldred v. Ashcroft that he could win over "right"-wing justices for textual literalist copyright reform but it was only the "left" justices that finally agreed with reason in that case; even then it was only the most avid patent reformers he won over: Stevens and Breyer.
I haven't been keeping up with this (I don't use Tumblr myself) so I can't really give an educated opinion one way or the other.
All the people who go to "nissan.com" looking for info about their car and having to spend more time finding the site, while small for each person, add up to a lot of wasted time in total. All for an insurance ad. Taking the web owners rights out of the equation, it seems like a misuse of the domain. Yes, I get how he bought it first, but it just seems wrong.
Hawai'i is flat-out fascinating. I'm lucky in that over the last 20 years, my pop has been moving in slow motion to the Big Island, so I spend a lot of time there.
Because he is also a sports nut?
You could probably paste the code into greasemonkey without any changes.
It would be really interesting to know how much revenue this site earns him.
You Won't Believe What Happens When You Light These Chemicals on Fire
It has always been.
Do you have any evidence for that?

The employees getting the pensions are not the same ones doing the negotiating. By your theory, government employees would always get what they wanted and therefore never strike, but that's demonstrably not the ase.
In the same way that I only see Nate Silver's decision from my own perspective, I'm interested in why he might have picked to go to ESPN, because I'm sure that he has his own internal reason for doing so, like I do for traveling. So I'm interested in what that is and why he might have chosen it.

From my perspective, I don't think so. Gaining experience about how the world works and learning about other perspectives and cultures is (and has been) useful for expanding my world view.

Perhaps my question could have been more carefully worded.
Sports are what he did before politics. He's returning to his specialty. Sports and gambling are very typical inspirations for career statisticians.
While I haven't exercised this functionality yet my understanding is yes that is possible. You can specify the number of days to store history. (defaults to 30)
Wait. They show you the warrant requiring your compliance. But you don't get to keep a copy of that paper?

How do you later prove that you were required by law to make the actions that you did? How do you ensure that you comply completely with the instruction if you can't compare your action to the original warrant?

That seems strange.
It's not actually a bad choice at all, though, considering their CalDAV support is best-in-class.
I'm wondering why they started MVCLI instead of using Thor - https://github.com/erikhuda/thor
Dude, sales is revenue. Maybe you're thinking of net earnings or profit?
It is awesome. I have 6 of them in my bathroom (they release 1 per year)
$24 million over a year period paid to AT&T doesn't fit my definition of 'get paid a lot.'

AT&T had profits of (approximately) $7 billion on revenue of $31 B in 2012. So these reimbursements amount to something like 0.015% of revenue, or 0.1% of profits. For a firm that size, there are much greater incentives to lobby for favorable rules on employee health benefits, spectrum allocation, or consumer relations. I mean, over that time period the CEO of AT&T earned about $100 m, so in theory he could afford to take the hit for all that fee revenue personally and still make more money in a year than most people see in a lifetime.

I'm not expressing support for the NSA's activity here, I think this sort of data vacuuming is quite dangerous. But viewed in the context of actual corporate revenues, I don't think it's realistic to say the government is bribing big business here, because the amount they're paying is trivial, and thus largely reflective of the change in the actual operating cost of the corporate data centers.
Nate Silver's intelligence is much better spent being a spokesman for statistics than it is on doing statistics. Not that I can critique his statistics - but he's certainly not alone in being able to do standard Bayesian probability and apply it to elections or sports. What he is alone at (so far) is in capturing people's attention and getting many, many more people to think about stats and how it relates to real things than would normal do.

He is a replaceable statistician. He is a complete unique spokesman.
I recall cricket was the cheapest. Can I just get a line item on my phone bill for NSA surveillance instead of paying it through my taxes? :)
Not in my experience.

I did one contract for a state government long ago. A friend of a friend brought me in because she knew I'd be unable to comprehend the normal pace of government work, and would therefore cluelessly batter my way though institutional inertia to get things done in time to meet certain goals.

I am definitely not suited for large organization, private or public. And there certainly were people who were just punching a clock. But a lot of people were, despite decades of service, still coming in every day determined to make things better.

As far as I can tell, it's the same thing with the teachers I know. It is a hard job, much more difficult than I could ever do. But despite that, most teachers I've met are doing the work because they really like teaching, and they care about what happens.

It blows my mind, really. My short attention span and desire to stir up trouble mean I'm well suited for startups, but could never spend 40 years doing the same thing. That, however, is exactly what we want out of government: stability, reliability, predictability.
While I can't find myself living without push, it's not like ActiveSync is the silver bullet. Contacts in Exchange, for example, are a ridiculous and horrible mess with a limit of three on everything and no custom synced fields.
That's truly impressive to work 19 days and made over $200,000. I wonder what's the story.
The idea that Fortune 1000 companies or startups funded and guided by well-connected VC firms are unsophisticated consumers that are unwittingly paying $500+/hour for paralegal work is laughable.
It makes sense to ask the government to cover your costs when you're doing something on a court order, and by god you aren't going to lowball it. On the other hand, it should hurt to participate in something like this, and a corporation of any significant size doesn't have a conscience to pain it (no matter what the feelings of the people animating it.) If the government reimburses companies for a generous estimate of the costs, they won't have to worry about the industry lobbying against this kind of coerced cooperation in domestic surveillance.
> How do you later prove that you were required by law to make the actions that you did?

The gag order attached to it prevents you from telling anyone but your attorney that you received the court order. Having the paper wouldn't help you prove anything when you are not allowed to acknowledge its existence.
Exactly. My first thought whenever this topic comes up is why a company that big simply can't make him an offer he couldn't refuse. Maybe he's stubborn or something but I have to take the little guy's side here.

Maybe they should get nissan.co lmao. Wait, nissan.co leads to Mazda. Hmm, it's not immediately clear to me what the relationship between nissan and mazda is.

Edit: nevermind, it seems to take you to a random car related destination. After checking it out further the dntx.com domain takes you to mazda first, then some other car search site, then finally a site with an empty template.
Exactly, I'd go into CYA mode and try my hardest to get a copy.
I think the only reasonable thing to do would be to somehow encourage (without directly encouraging) people to try a variety of "test traffic" on your box, with the subtly-concealed intention of rooting the fed's box with traffic addressed to your own box (and thus not "intentional", and done by other people anyway). For a "hacking contest" or something.
> his brand of analysis is not unique or even particularly remarkable save that it is rare in the mainstream media.

Ah, so he's good, but it seems like he's doing something totally unique because of the bias that he gets mainstream media attention and most other statisticians don't?

> Sports is a very important part of many people's lives; surely that alone lends it sufficient heft to be a defensible use of Silver's talent?

Sure does.
There are two different classifications, NSFW and Adult. NSFW is opt-in by the creator of the blog, and still allows the blog to be indexed by search engines. Adult is an automatic classification applied by Tumblr (previously the blog creator could also opt in to it, but in this announcement they say that will no longer be the case), and prevents the blog from being indexed by search engines.

See this table for details: http://www.tumblr.com/docs/en/nsfw
Hadn't heard about it until now. I've been around the web for, I dunno, two decades. Seems interesting enough.
SaaS are not immune too.

Example:

http://www.ca.com/ca/en/news/Press-Releases/na/2013/CA-Techn...

"... seeking ... an injunction against AppDynamics prohibiting the infringement of CA Technologies patents"

In case CA wins, the court will prohibit AppDynamics to sell any product that violate CA's patents.

Yes, one may host the company in Canada. How to sell to US customers though? VISA, MC and AMEX all have US presence and will comply with the court order (CA's lawyers will undoubtfully provide a copy). Paypal and other various Stripes are just facades to the very same VISA et all.

Without ability to charge for the product, where the business is going to be?
Yes - we have seen language contorted into meaninglessness by by lawyers and courts. "Waterboarding is not torture." "Data recordings are not data collection." "Drones cause one civilian casualty per hundreds known dead terrorists."

I am a fervent believer in the power of government to do enormous good - but is necessary that those actions be public or they will invariably be abused. Whenever you contemplate government acting in secret, you must weigh that against the cost of that action being abused - because at some point it will be.

I'm angry and will let you imagine a link to foaas.com.
Nothing is secure if you discount the rule of law.

http://xkcd.com/538/
Those are some good points. The point about mana screw is really important because it's a big turn off for players. Orbs has no mana flooding or mana screw, because there's no dedicated resource card. Instead, once per turn, any card may be discarded for one energy of its color, and this energy regenerates each turn.

Being a digital CCG is a big advantage, actually. There's huge opportunity in the digital CCG market right now, and five years from now I think we'll say 2013 was the year that DCCGs started taking off. If not 2012, even: look at how well Rage of Bahamut did (technically a card battler, but still relevant). Rage of Bahamut is falling off the charts now, but I believe that if a digital CCG were balanced and had a pro community (for e-sports), it could be evergreen, where you come out with new sets regularly. Magic, for instance, is on its 20th year.

I think one macro reason DCCGs are taking off now is that virtual goods games are more acceptable to Western audiences. It used to be people didn't want to pay real money for virtual goods, whereas now it's pretty much expected in most games.
I think the next Xbox is going to be the thing that finally takes him out. Not one gamer I know wants one, and the 360 works just fine for the family. They managed to derail what was one success story he could actually point to... It's going to be an epic bellyflop. I say he's out after the sales figures come in next year.
This is exactly how FISA worked from its inception in 1978 to 2001 and the USAPATRIOT Act, when all these legal shenanigans first started.

The idea is that while the investigation is ongoing, of course it's going to be classified. When the subject is finally arrested and taken to court, or when the investigation was over, then the wire-tapping became unclassified as a matter of governmental record (as it should be imo).

What the government has been trying to argue or promote is the idea of a NEVER ENDING investigation, such that from the moment these systems are in place and turned on, subjects are "investigated" probably for the rest of their lives.

This is the TIA/Carnivore system that was hastily put aside due to massive public outrage, but the promoters of this new omnipresent surveillance state simply went back and developed their shaky legal framework to justify it instead.

Do not believe them, none of this is legal, prudent, or necessary. It exists to create an omnipresent surveillance state in which guilt is assumed and most of us will never be truly free.
I think it was related to ELF/environmental activism/terrorism. I'm not sure where I saw that, though.
It's just an example of what sort of agreement could exist between a service provider and user. I chose the example of ads because a) Yahoo now owns Tumblr, and Yahoo's major source of revenue is ads, so that could happen in future; and b) in contract law, you typically have no rights to a free service but if you there is some exchange such as their putting ads on your log then a commercial exchange wouldbe taking place.