skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I just can't memorise everything I use so sparingly. If I did I'd still remember useless VBscript (or VB for Applications,) or Pascal. When I'm in X mode (be it Go, Python, Javascript or CSS) I only need to look up things in the first few hours, after a while it's in working memory for a few days. Then it slowly fades, although I usually remember pretty well the general way to do X or at least, what to look for for what I'm interested in.
My data is better than their data. There may be less of it, but it's mine, so it's better.
I see nothing new here, just confirmations of the obvious, and a call to investigate vicarious emotions. But the real question all along has been, why do we enjoy sad or otherwise "unhappy" vicarious emotions. This study does nothing to answer that.
Yeah, the majority of my app's revenue is from bulk-credit orders, so people drop $20-40 at a time to buy in bulk. Most of them don't use all their credits actually, and I'd guess this is probably in my favor in the long run vs. getting them to keep coming back since that is essentially all profit. (If credits expire.)

Here's the thing though. If you assume that you need to give someone a free card, which I'm all but certain of, it doesn't really matter how easy your app is to use, how many features it has, or anything like that. All those things control is your conversion rate of people who get to the point of sending a free card. (In my case, I was getting about 33% conversion rate here, which I think is pretty great.) So, 1 in 3 people who downloaded the app got all the way to the point of sending a free card.

The catch is who comes back and spends money? It's this conversion rate that determines the fate of the business. You don't have a lot of wiggle room here. You can spam them. You can try to improve the design and fullfillment of the cards so they get positive feedback from the recipient. You can give the recipient a way to notify them they enjoyed the card. You can even get people who receive the cards to pay for credits for them. I did all this. But beyond that, what else can you really do to entice users to come back and spend money? This isn't about improving the flow of the app, the use cases, qr codes, or whatever, it's about taking someone who experienced the product for free to decide to pay for more. It's all about sales.

There aren't many levers here at this point in the funnel, and in my experience this conversion rate I was getting (about 1 out of 8 people) is so low it's fairly hopeless when you consider sunk costs for free cards and not to mention marketing costs. You've spent money to send 8 free cards, which came from 24 installs, and you have one person left who is paying you for more. Ballpark you spent about $15-20 to find this one person. The margin on this person's purchases needs to pay for this plus server costs, employees, support, etc. Depending on your pricing they'll need to send (or buy up front) probably around 10 postcards on average per paid user. You have like no margin of safety here.

You'd really need it to be more like 1 out of 2 or 3 for it to be worth the "lets raise $1m and get to the top of the App Store to reduce marketing costs to zero" case. Also don't forget I was in a highly vertical market where there is a real obvious need (grandparents receiving pictures of grandkids.) Good luck to those guys :) The only way I could see it working is if you are at the top of the app store and you leverage the fact that a large % of your credits go unspent, and you can realize this as a profit. This isn't a business though, it's a ponzi scheme. It might be how Postagram has stayed afloat while they try to make the product solvent.
Textiles are not "thriving": Why the U.S Still Needs A Production Economy
Socialists, I love you. Please don't ever change.
I find some of the new transitions annoying, too, but it simply doesn't make any sense to say that they are "to hide choppy performance."

We know this because the transitions are very smoothly-rendered. Which takes processing power; the animations and such would not be smooth if there was a CPU issue they were trying to cover up.

It's an intentional decision. There's plenty of performance under the hood, or they wouldn't be able to afford the extra CPU cycles to draw fancy animations.

That being said, I hope they shorten some of these transitions, as well. In many ways, iOS 7 is faster and more responsive, and so it'd be nice if it were faster in this way, too.
Not to mention the walk around.
iTunes on Windows can still do Airplay. I think a hacky solution would be to start an audio streaming server on localhost, add that source in iTunes and airplay it, and send all system audio to this local audio streaming server.
I've never been treated that much nicer at credit unions than banks. My last story with a credit union - I had been with them for years, but when I have a story as soon as I ran in to hard times. I was 62 days overdue on my credit card (which was also with the credit union), and I was told the credit card department I'd deposit a check on Friday and make a payment. Meanwhile, the checking department closed my check account, and took the $10 there and applied it to my credit card. Since I had written a rent check before putting a check in the bank and finding the account was closed, it messed me up even more.

I'm about to be in difficulties with a current credit union, we'll see how they treat me as my clients keep their outstanding debts to me just a little more outstanding.
W3Schools has countless inaccuracies and contains multiple utter falsehoods based on conjecture from using IE6 and not from reading specs.
It is a way to give vent to sadness and depression, apart from tears and dejected face
This is excellent, how on earth did you manage it?
There is absolutely demand for affordable housing in desirable parts of the city. It's not that people want denser living, they want to live in a nice part of the city. Way out east of the river is not a great place to live or work for a variety of reasons.

(And, obviously, there are tall office buildings in Rosslyn just over the bridge from DC.)
I don't understand why the author didn't just do his canvas drawing in a resolution independent (or quasi-independent) way. Just choose a unit relative to the size of the canvas, and do everything in those units, transforming your coordinates to fit the width of the canvas element, which is resized to fit the device.
The W3C have explicitly asked them to disavow any connection to them, multiple times. W3Schools have, obviously, refused.
I'm still wondering how the camera which seems to be held in his hand and then it shows him using two hands to do one check, and it looks like it's in front of his face not held by someone else off to the side; Google Glass?

edit: I'm seeing things it was just one hand.
One could argue that's the #1 priority they should be focused on. One that any advertising company would consider very critical. But I guess use any emerging buzzword like "deep learning", and people will find it news-worthy.
Its only misleading if you know what w3c is. And those who do know what it is probably figure out the difference quickly.
"Thanks, Netflix"? www.ted.com
I think that we, as the human population, should actively move toward more efficient, less destructive industry on principle

That's definitely a must. But I'm not sure if it's doable, seeing the global population just keeps on growing: as long as industry is destructive and always more of it is needed, the net result still is destructive. Might sound bold, but a lot of problems would be solved by combining clean industry with a _lot_ less people to serve.
If I remember the story correctly Stallman saw the new features of the Symbolics software, re-coded them and handed them to Lisp Machines Inc.

So I guess your thesis is that by allowing LMI to maintain feature parity, that fragmented the market meaning neither company could survive? (We're ignoring the Xerox and Texas Instruments lisp machines obviously)

But this is ignoring the point that while this was happening the Mac and the PC were already in the market at a tenth of the price of any of the lisp machines and were selling by the bucket load. Essentially the PC revolution was already well underway before Stallman even started his hacking.

Lisp machines failed because they were selling high end limited use hardware running software that was good for a narrow range of highly specialised uses, but far too resource heavy to be economically viable for most users. The VAX for example was a far better machine for nearly every real world task except at running a single niche programming language.

If you really think single programmer stopped a $70,000 single user machine from derailing the PC revolution and kick-starting whole new world of computing heaven then you and I have a very different definition of "cheap" and without cheap computing we wouldn't be 50 years ahead, we'd be 40 years behind.
I really wish there was some possibility of making any statement having to do with global warming without the polarizing positions: There aren't camps. You don't get to wear a jersey with the team colors.

Or at least there shouldn't be.

Science is very imperfect (does this really need to be stated?). Scientists are people. People are fallible, and people are quadruple fallible in groups.

In the face of an avalanche of information, history has shown over, and over, and over again that people have a tendency to essentially select data that fits the narrative, and to grossly overestimate the confidence of one's understanding of complex systems (we're seeing this already as the model of global warming veers wildly from what is actually happening with the world. This model was used, with high confidence, to pitch massive economic restructuring world-wide, but it has become evident that we as a species know less about how to model a world climate system than we imagine).

As someone else pointed out, this very submission has the egregious mistake that it compares granular data with 350-year smoothed data (which itself is taken from derived sources) -- being in the financial industry, I've seen countless cases where such shenanigans are used for very fraudulent purposes, but this is science because it fits the accepted narrative.

I'm not a "climate change denier", as an aside, though it's unfortunate that some cannot rationally reply to anything without such absolutism. I am naturally skeptical, however.
You're right Bill Gates and Warren Buffet will survive.
You might be right. I'm not 100% sure what the solution is. But I am sure it's not telling someone "no I won't sell you the high markup item you want".
I don't think he's implying social networking will go out of fashion, but that social networking companies themselves can be fashionable. For instance the progression of "cool" social networking sites seems to progress pretty rapidly e.g. myspace -> facebook -> twitter -> instagram -> snapchat.

To put it in Steve Blank terminology he likes to invest in companies that face invention rather than market risk.
Please no.

While I can't possibly speak for Github, why does it need "regular" people? It is a place for geeks by geeks, and that's one of the best things about it. Aiming for mass adoption more often than not dilutes a product, vision, and any meaning something has.

Someone ELSE should a more general tool for "collaboration". Github is for code.
The meat of this article, hidden underneath all the fluff, is simply that fees are higher and poor people end up paying more of them.

Honestly though, they probably deserve that. I've never in my life been charged an overdraft fee because it doesn't take much to just track the payments you make and never go over.

Of course, an inability to plan is probably why they're poor in the first place...
In my experience, I was never able to get FF to work well on Gentoo; it always ran like a dog with three legs.

No matter what tweaks I tried, the binary builds from Moz always ran better.
Why You Should Care About Twitter
I should clarify that it is fine in a local context, when you know that originally it is a non-const variable. Otherwise, the result is undefined.

But what I meant in the above comment is that you can't accidentally type "const_cast". So when you type it, you're on your own. And there is nothing wrong with it in C++ world - if you explicitly state that you want to shoot yourself in the foot, the compiler will just listen to your orders (maybe with some warnings).
You can use document fragments for this and get a similar performance boost without resorting to string concatenation.
an interview where Cheriton expresses some opinion on future of US economy http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-13936930
This is until Obama bomb or drone the island...
For me it's not only web development, is most of the CS stuff I need when coding.

Probably it is due to my training as a mathematician, but I usually just keep an index of what I know and what it's used for, but I don't remember the specific details. I.e. Implicit Function Theorem can be used for proofs involving X, Y and Z under hypotheses H, unless you are fancy and go for H2 and more work. I just know what I need and where I can look it up – Nirenberg for fancy, any basic Differential Analysis text for the others, that Russian book on my shelf for a neat simple proof, Moser's for a simple proof and application, the list goes on with 6 or more 7 items. Well, this is actually stretching it a little thin, I could prove the basic differential versions without much trouble, and some functional versions given enough hypotheses.

When coding I'm more or less the same. I know there's a Javascript function that returns true or false when matching against a regexp, I just don't remember its name. Since it's kind of shelved in my mind as regexp test, I just look for this, and it's hole in one. Once I learn something I may not remember it exactly, but I have a pretty good "indexed memory" in the fact that I know that piece of knowledge exists and I've seen it, so I only need a few moments to dig it up.

Of course, I'd rather remember all CSS selectors and rules, or most of the Javascript machinery and the Go standard library. But I'm not doing this every day, so I just use it, every time I do a little more sticks to memory and the rest is easily found. If it got me more than 1 minute to look something up, I'd stick a big post-it in front of me until it sank, so far I have not needed it.
There are risks we should be concerned about, and risks we should not be concerned about. If you stuff money under your matress, the risk of losing it to a house fire or robbery are several orders of magnitude greater than losing it in a bank run.

Assuming your account is under the FDIC limit, how could you lose money on an insured account? Suppose there's a massive bank run and the Fed has to print oodles of cash to repay depositors. This leads to runaway inflation that occurs over a very short period. If you could have otherwise exchanged your cash on hand for a different currency, sure you would have lost money.

Compared with the actual risks of being unbanked, this is a hallucinatory concern.
A couple points:

1) CO2 concentration has a long half-life in the atmosphere, so even if we immediately stopped emitting every molecule of fossil fuel-derived CO2 into it, we'd still see the effects of what we've done for the past century for at least another couple centuries.

2) People mostly hope to lower the rate at which our CO2 emissions rate increases, and maybe in certain countries make it negative. Both of those, however, are derivatives of the relevant value for purposes of the greenhouse effect and ocean acidification: the absolute level in the atmosphere. Which has zero chance of decrease even under the most aggressive conceivable prevention efforts.

3) The graph doesn't even cover the last major glaciation event: the last glacial maximum was around 20k years ago.

4) Biggest issue: the people who will be most adversely effected by climate change are people who don't have the resources to adapt. I don't dismiss the idea out of hand that it might be cheaper to put efforts into mitigation than prevention: we're definitely going to have to do some mitigation work. But you are not going to convince Western countries to spend trillions of dollars building levees in Bangladesh.
* Renamed following a $25 000 000 donation
Ah, I'm speaking from a UK perspective there. I'd forgotten they were doing TV stuff in the US. I don't think that's available here.
I am not buying this; I agree that poor people not using banks is an issue, and I appreciate a number of interesting reasons why this is the case (the list iterated by patio11's comment is amazing): I do not, however, think it is because banks are turning into impersonal institutions with which you never interact with a person.

Sure: this author doesn't generally interact with her bank. She doesn't see the need to, so she isn't choosing to; but, the bank she is using does have a branch she went to, and if she actually went there at all often the people there would get to know her. The building might be "impersonal", but the people are still people.

This doesn't even just apply to small banks (a friend of mine has always used local banks): I use the Bank of America, and almost everyone at my local branch knows me because I go there often and actually talk to them. I seriously look forward to making a wire transfer because I enjoy the interaction with the people I know there.

Corporations with local offices are still made out of people; like, while I prefer automated payments, if I end up in a situation where I need to write a check, somehow that's on the other side of "I may as well drive to your office and hand-deliver it"; this meant for a long time I even knew the people who worked at my car insurer ;P.
I wasn't aware that this was even supposed to be a hit piece. I kept scrolling down, increasing the building height limits, and always preferred the tallest variants with the largest footprints...
But we don't know that those potentiating mutations didn't have some kind of benefit on their own, so that doesn't do much for the question of how proto-feathers provide enough benefit to stick around and spread long enough for the next several million mutations to arrive and turn them into feathers. Is insulation adequate for that?
Warren Buffett compares US Fed to a hedge fund
Could you expand more on why its absolutely vital to give one out for free?

I sorta see two different customers here. One looking for a free postcard to send real quick (the non converters) and the others that are just out there searching for something like this and pay. Are the numbers that much worse not including a free postcard?
Toilet paper was a precious rarity in 1980s Bulgaria. Those ignoring the lessons of history are doomed to carefully collect yesterday's newspapers and stack them in the bathroom.
Sick post, brah-ski.

In all seriousness, great work here. I especially like the point you make about not fighting back. Too often the HN hivemind will try to take someone down just for submitting something opinionated ("Why would I learn PostgreSQL so late into my web development stream?!??!"). Let people say what they have to say and stay your ground.

Keep it up!
Agree. The blog post spews a lot of hatred for a resource that is meant to "help" people.
I love it. "Do some free work for us and maybe we'll hire you!"
The article mentions this iTunes gift card strategy, in the paragraph starting with “But if a shopper insists on buying music from iTunes exclusively…”
So I had to create a throwaway account since this is kind of a sensitive subject, but:

Why do so many people in the Western hemisphere use toilet paper? If you had fecal matter on your hand, would you wash it, or just wipe it with some paper and call it good? I've never actually understood this, and it leads to questionable personal hygiene. (Let's just say I put a finger somewhere during..um..and it didn't exactly come out clean.)

The ideal way to wash is with water, and maybe afterwards pat down with some TP to dry off. That's what a lot of South Asian countries and the Japanese do. I hope the American and European people learn to do this simple trick some day. Might help decrease the use of this ridiculous anachronism and save some trees.
It's been known for year that some birds navigate using stars (see Stephen Emlen's research). What is different here is that an insect is doing it and using the "stripe of light" that is the milky way, not individual stars.
Wow, that's absurd. I can't imagine having to ask permission from my bank to withdraw money.

c. June 2011 I got quite involved in the Bitcoin scene and arranged to meet up with a guy at a local establishment and buy a large quantity of BTC from him. I walked into the bank and asked for $11k in cash and there were only two (small) things out of the ordinary: 1) the teller explained that she didn't have that much cash at her station and it would be a few minutes while she went to get it, and 2) a quick, non-invasive question about my intentions in an attempt to make sure I wasn't about to be the victim of a scam.
Thanks for the feedback. It was such a crazy day yesterday and at one point I did make some mistakes. I think it's really important to remember that people probably aren't trying to ruin your life if they give you criticism - just roll with it!
I get a broken link on my mobile device. This link seems to work, though:

http://mobile.businessweek.com/articles/2013-09-19/how-germa...
Racine Ripple
The Game is On... Get in the Game that Rewards your Ripple!
Yes, in my experiments removing the free card basically killed the conversion funnel, so your marketing costs per paid user skyrocket. Not only that, but the people who did convert paid for a single postcard instead of bulk credits, obviously, since they wanted to try it out first before spending big bucks. Bulk credits are essential for the business to even have a chance since you need to get your paid users to send (or at least pay for) at least 10 or so postcards for you to break even as I mentioned above.

edit: The 10 postcard number here is more of a guess if you assume that by removing the free cards you've increased your overall marketing costs per paid user to offset that cost anyway. That said this model can work better if you assume marketing costs are zero, such as if you get to the top of the app store. In the real world they aren't but in theory Postagram (who is at the top) could turn off free cards and start eeking out a legitimate (read: not based upon credit expiration) but small profit.
I've wondered about that. Take your PO to the bank, and they'll be more than accommodating in setting you up with a revolving line of credit. Why give up equity? Sometimes they do say "go away, you don't need me", but other times they snap the company up.
I had the same thing happen several years ago when I moved. I changed banks and left my "old" account open with ~$18 in it. I completely forgot about it until a few years later when I received a letter telling me they had closed the account and I owed them $9.
I don't remember which source it was, but I remember they did claim to have (partially) sequenced it, and found that it's nearest living relative was chickens.
There is no innate rule that warm=bad. Your analogy is too broken to be useful.
Does anyone watch "The Profit" on NBC?

I love the few episodes I've seen so far.
Disappointed this didn't link to w3schools and this is not the owner of the site talking...
In this case, treat a bank like you would a family member; let them know that you will be out of the country for a period of time and they will make a note of it on your account. Whenever any transactions occur it may cause an automatic tripping of a flag on your account, but a human will be able to read the note. This has helped me greatly in the past.

PS: This can also (and should also) be done on your credit card accounts.