skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think the premise is a bit wrong. You build loyalty; rewarding it is a byproduct of building it.

Back in the early days of Starbucks in Chicago, regulars were recognized by the staff. There'd be some chitchat. Apparently, cost accounting was not yet so anal retentive, and a staff member would occasionally comp you your drink or something else. If there was a dispute, "the customer is always right".

Regulars really seemed to respond to that. Starbucks was not just about the coffee (or the mocha and sugar). It was a daily social experience.

You might call the comping rewarding loyalty. I'd call the social interaction and comping building loyalty. It made Starbucks a place customers wanted to be. Not just for the coffee; for the larger experience.

In a technical world, I think building loyalty has to do with offering a quality product and making product and knowledge acquisition as easy and streamlined as possible. For the social component, an active and informative community is hard to beat. Such communities need leaders. You can offer the leadership -- Look and PG and the moderators' effect here. Hopefully a community with coalesce.

As for product and information, there has been a lot of discussion here. Minimize sign up hassles and make sign up a late-binding feature in your flows. Use a site design that organizes, is easy to read/view, and otherwise gets out of the way.

Don't make your clients/customers jump through hoops. Don't make me solicit a friend in order to get a benefit. If I truly value your site, I'm going to tell my friend about it, regardless. What are you offering? Do that as well as possible. I'll keep coming back. And make sure you understand what you are offering. E.g. Are you just selling coffee? Or are you giving your customers a daily social routine?

Another example: Amazon, NewEgg, and some of the other, better online retailers. Is it just the product, price, shipping? Or is it also all the peer reviews and tips? Also, for me Amazon means worrying less about my credit card information. Their inclusion of third party sellers works well for me in this regard, in that I can order while having trust in the payment system.

In this case, I'd argue they are selling security (and convenience in ordering) as much as the product itself.

Free shipping is a nice perk (and I know shipping is just merged into the price, anyway). But it's the previous things that keep my coming back to Amazon.

It's not about rewards; it's about the original product. Really understanding what that is, and delivering it as well as possible.
They did have gambling back then. The roulette wheel came about in the 1800's, or they could have shuffled playing cards and drew some out of the deck, or thrown dice.

These aren't "natural" as in "from the earth", but they are trivial ways to calculate random numbers without assistance from a powered machine.

To answer your question though, I'd just flip a coin and calculate a random number in whatever range you want using binary.
Either. We're keeping the whole thing rather open ended, at least to start. That said, we're happy to answer any questions and we'll add a FAQ to the site sometime soon. Also, for those in the Boston area, we'll host an information session at BetaHouse in a couple weeks.
I agree. And he's been selling post-relational stuff for a while-- this is not a new observation on his part.

I'm not going to form an opinion on his word alone, but he's got big enough chops in my book to warrant taking what he says seriously, even if he has a vested interest.
End of that very same paragraph:

My conviction, having taught for some years, is that what the American school system asks children to do is not groundbreaking intellectual work. One of the reasons self-discipline is so incredibly important is that almost anybody really can do the work if they want to, though, of course, not all children want to.
congrats on my part, too!

I had a look at the code (http://chyrp.net/code/files/includes/common-php.html) and after I clicked on "Blog" in the navigation on that page I got a 404 (seems like all links in the navigation point to an old version of the page, but the other links work). naturally it's nothing serious, I wanted only to inform you about this one :)
In the online transaction processing (OLTP) market, a lightweight main memory DBMS beats a row store by a factor of 50.

I'm confused -- what does main memory vs. row store have to do with relational vs. non-relational?
Looks very nice. I wonder why it matters that it is built on PHP and SQL enough to put that in the front of the marketing blurb. Is the audience primarily PHP developers? I'd generally prefer marketing text focused on features rather than technology stack.
The source code for that page is most definitely not awesome. :(
The speculative froth of summer 2008 aside, the average cost of oil is not skyrocketing (http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/steo/pub/fsheets/real_prices.htm... and http://inflationdata.com/inflation/images/charts/Oil/Inflati...). Of course, this may be because people haven't yet realized that Peak Oil has happened and a massive correction is imminent.

And even though no more dinosaur juice is being made (nobody seems to think the abiogenic theory is worth anything) we certainly could have the use of more oil: if the right Fischer Tropsch catalyst is found and/or if we figure out how to drill deeper and/or get more out of the existing fields.
Coincidentally, those parts of the world (especially China and Japan) have higher-than-expected life expectancy than most parts of the West

This factoid is taken for granted in these arguments, but if you look it up, it's not true. Japan has a higher life expectancy, but the other white rice eating areas have a lower life expectancy, or are maybe tied. For example, China is 5 years lower than the USA and UK.
"Here be chaotic bits"

I love the idea of this. Commodity hardware + smarts = awesome
The reason you see these articles is that RDBMses are ill suited to take advantage of opportunities created by cloud computing.
Apple isn't quite in the same position of power as Wal-Mart. Without inventory (which in this case is unique) Apple wouldn't have a store. This gives more control to the labels who can 'hold out' until they get the deal they want. If Apple says "screw off" to Sony/BMG or any of the big boys that's a huge gaping hole in their inventory that can't be replaced.

Wal-Mart on the other hand can stock underwear or TV's or food from pretty much anyone, so they hold all the cards and can pretty much write their own deal.

Still, Apple has some control as they basically own digital music market so I would imagine at this point, the labels don't have a viable 'plan b'.
The actual article was already on here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=680881
Oops, you're right, sorry, forgot that workers are female.
How do I get in on the contributing group? [kirubakaran@gmail.com]
I found his paper "Fully homomorphic encryption using ideal lattices" at http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1536414.1536440
The schizo-politics of The Pirate Bay, Inc.
Talented or not, if you boost their self-esteem without making them earn it, why would they bother putting in the effort?

Someone who's quick on his feet and unusually coordinated would be worthless on a tennis court if they don't bother to practice, learn good technique and strategy, and practice.

What will happen is worse than rewarding those who don't show talent -- it encourages those who DO have talent to not bother to develop it.
That's because the empowerment you speak of is only in theory ... the reality is that even though it's possible to sell on your own, you can't make it big (or even a good living) without getting your way into a very closed, selective and exploitative market controlled by a handful of big media companies (Apple included).
Can you have 5000 share-holders in an LLC?
OECD Data Visualization
I can say that if this had the double-intention of functioning as marketing for Betahouse, it definitely worked on me. I have every intention of keeping track of your events, etc, from here on out.
Seems like a great way to get people to give you tons of ideas on what to do yourself ;)

I'm not saying this is what's happening here of course...
:set guioptions+=mT
Yes, you are absolutely right. The best way to have a low budget production is to find a film and drama school in a place where there is no union. You can get a crew for next to nothing. They get screen credits which matter more than you think, and you can provide food. You can rent a cheap digital camera like Red One with lenses for about 600 Euros per day, a set of HMI lights and electricity for another 1,000 or so - clothes and props... you can make a movie for 50,000 Euro if you want (typical shooting schedule is about 20-25 days).

However, that wont bring your movie nowhere. You can seek a distributor, which get tons of proposals and probably wont even look at your film (NDAs and lots of proposals mostly). Think of distributors as VC companies and each movie as a startup, because it is. Distributor has enough money to market the film.

Another option, which almost every indie production takes is festival run. Festivals are great because if you win an award, distributor hears about you, distributor might see you there with your movie and there are usually market palces associated with festivals where distributors and TV houses shop for movies and series (I work in animation and biggest is Annecy in France).

Some of you might think, why not go viral with the movie? Why not let it go on the internet, market it around reddit, digg, whatnot - it could be a festival like cycle, no? Well, no. You see, I would be the first one to do so, but if you want your flick to be eligible for any kind of festival award (from Annecy to Sundance to Oscars) it works in a funny kind of way. In order to make your flick run in a festival, requirements to do so usually mean that it had to already run on several festivals (Oscar eligibility for example) and almost always there is a strict rule that your film is not publicly available (online or distribution), which gives festivals a sort of premiere in their region.

Movie business is a strict business with a lot of rules and even more egos. Each and every movie is run exactly like a startup that operates on milestones and further funding.
Reentrancy comes up with recursion and signal handling as well, both of which can come up in nominally single threaded programs (nominal because signals usually but don't always come from out of process).
Google App Engine Broken For 4 Hours And Counting
http://www.the-numbers.com/movies/records/allbudgets.php

A lot of films with budget below 1 mil. (although some of them are very old and you have to take inflation into account)
That's hardly the case. In Jeff's words, I dare you, double dog dare you to count the number of Linux distributions. Each version satisfies a different customer target, same as each version of Basecamp satisfies a different type of company.
The problem with this simplification os the problem-space is that ACID properties cannot be maintained (see CAP) when you start moving to a distributed model.

That assumes you need the system to remain available in the presence of partitions. How often is that really true?
XFS is always dog-slow at deletions, and is pathologically slow[1] in the most common use case -- "rm -R". It has a huge amount of synchronization overhead for deletions, made much worse by the fact that rm is listing directories while it deletes things, and XFS is trying to do these things in parallel.

If you build the list of files to delete up-front, it is almost normal.

[1] I have repeatedly run into cases where it takes much longer to delete something than it does to write it, especially when your disk has bad latency spikes.
The kicker here is that OP of this thread appears to be Mac Cowell, one of the Awesome Foundation members. http://awesomefoundation.org/controls/whois
It's not that simple. Yes, counterfeiters are being crooked, but they can not simply compete on merit because they don't have a branding and advertising machine available to them.

I'm not talking about the existing brand strength Apple has a result of their past efforts, but about the resources available with which to launch a product, which can eclipse the development costs. I would buy a phone from Obscuro Corp if the price was right and the physical quality felt good, I'm willing to take a risk on a new market entrant if it won't cost too much. But Obscuro Corp doesn't have the resources to tell me about their smartphone, get equal display space in retailers etc, so it's easier to surf on an existing brand instead.

I have a friend that used to sell handbags, both knockoffs and original designs (usually from the same manufacturer). The quality of the knockoffs was very very good, as was the quality of the originals, and of course the price for the latter was much lower. But his customers almost exclusively wanted the knockoffs - and although it went unspoken, they knew perfectly well that they weren't real Louis Vuitton or Coach handbags. People are generally not that stupid as to think you can get a real Rolex or LV purse for $50 from some guy on the street.

In cases like this, the desire to make a powerful social statement by carrying something which is superficially indistinguishable from the expensive brand is more important to the buyer than the actual value. Some buyers are victims of deception, to be sure. But a great many would rather pay $200 for a low-functioning fake iPhone than $150 for the exact same device minus the branding (even if it's good value at that price).

So if you have the equipment, skills and capital to make a 'miPhone' but nobody is interested because you're a nonentity, what other options do you have? I'm not endorsing the practice, but I do think it's an inevitable response to the power of the branding industry. This kind of thing happens in nature all the time, look at the angler fish.
And no more API keys!
5 Years After: Portugal's Drug Decriminalization Policy Shows Positive Results
Microsoft discoverings prospective IE 8 users may dislike vomiting.
That's why it's a protip. If you want to avoid the hassle that come with outsourcing some of your core infrastructure, like having to deal with waiting for bugs to be fixed, then self-managed hosting is the only option. But you're just trading one set of hassles for another. And if you're interested in running some niche blogging software, good luck finding a service that will do that. If you want to outsource to a service, you're limited to what services are providing, which is usually those that are popular.
can we please stop using the word "awesome" already?

:)
Did Steve Jobs steal your liver?
SO what is the main differentiating factor between Chyrp and Blogger/Wordpress.com/Tumblr/Posterous?
Let's just look at the list of Ubuntu editions, since that's comparable directly to Windows or Mac OS X.

Ubuntu

Kubuntu

Edubuntu

Xubuntu

Lubuntu

Fluxbuntu

Mythbuntu

Ubuntu JeOS

Ubuntu MID

Ubuntu Netbook Remix

Ubuntu Studio
As the author of said source I certainly agree, I put it together in about an hour. If you're referring to the fact it was running super slow for a bit that had more to do with overall just not anticipating how good my colleagues are at publicity, dreamhost shared servers, and some environment settings.
Ouch. No one got the Simpsons reference?
Cloud outages may not be frequent, but they sure are noticeable.
Heck, thanks to github, OSS spawns a new "edition" as fast as someone can click the fork button.

Not that I'm complaining! It's nice to be able to find a project abandoned by the original dev, but picked up by a 1/2 dozen other people.
The point is that features in a Linux distribution are not cut out because of "consumer surplus". They are customized to make certain tasks easier for some people ... but the various distributions don't have artificial limitations.

Say you are tired of KDE in Kubuntu, you just "apt-get install gnome-desktop". You are tired of Apache, then "apt-get install lighttpd". Defaults are not limitations.

And seriously, most people pick one distribution and stick with it. I'm using Debian for everything ... work servers, laptop, home station. OK, to be honest the home station has Ubuntu on it, but that's still 95% Debian.

And, if there's a feature missing (like hardware limitations), you are most likely to fix it with a kernel upgrade, or with a patch someone on the mailing list gives you for free.
This is worse than the 8-hr outage of S3 sometime ago... most apps could still respond without S3 static assets. If your entire app is hosted on AppEngine, you're screwed for 4 hrs and counting...
It would be excellent if that were to happen, unfortunately, I do not think that is the logical outcome at least for the majority of individuals.

I think that when I were in high school if I cared nothing for my grade, I would pay rapt attention in those classes that interested me personally (for me it was math and physics). I would almost completely ignore the other classes and in best case I would spend that class time reading about physics, but more likely daydreaming.

Putting the focus on the subject I think would work quite nicely when it is intinsicly interesting to that student, but for all other subjects I believe there needs to be some form of external motivator.

If the students see grades as important (because their self esteem and pride is at least partially involved for instance, or because they fear not getting into their chosen college) then that can be the external motivator. Otherwise some other reason will need to be fabricated.
But AFAIK they all cost the same price?
I upvoted you because we really should stop, but I still can't bring myself to remove "awesome" from my vocabulary. Modern slang has made it the apotheosis of coolness; its appeal is irresistible to me.

In my own defense, whenever I say "This terrifying thunderstorm is awesome," I mean it in the classic sense as well as the colloquial. :->
For the free market beacon the US projects, it has one of the least competitive mobile markets in the entire world. How are contracts such as Apple-AT&T not against consumer choice? Why do I have to have a ridiculously priced contract with AT&T to use this model of a phone?

Basically, the current iphone model in the US tells me to either go on ebay to get an iphone or buy it in another country. Why?
multi-tenant architectures are the geocities of cloud computing. This is the main problem with something like gae, if they have an internal problem it takes down their entire cloud and all the apps with it.
Production yes, can be done for "little" money - distribution (which most big budget titles account for) no.
Oh god! We're being watched now :)
I concur, my blog on App Engine is down.
"risk of failure" -> "rate of failure", of course.
We're (currently) at a fixed number, BUT we are hoping that other people soon spin off their own Awesome Foundations (in a barcamp like manner). We'll be in touch though soon.
really? what's wrong with it?
I strongly agree... I think the OP of this threads' contention is not in the same spirit as Mr. Atwood's. I think this Coding Horror post was lamenting the existence / necessity of the "pricing tiers" common in commercial software.

Linux distributions, and even versions of Ubuntu itself, are not organized in a "tier" layout, where Tier N has X more features than Tier N - 1, or Tier N's features have X more capacity.

Linux distros and Ubuntu versions, on the other hand, are organized horizontally: They don't have better features (per se), but different features.
No, he hacked a very poorly designed system. In this case the moral responsibility resides with those culpable for the shameful system, not for people who need organs.
Blogger:

- Feathers
- Self-hosted
- More flexible templating (though I haven't used Blogger in ages)
- Extensible

WordPress:

- Feathers
- Good code (ok, that's not really a feature, but I think it's worth noting as it's the only self-hosted one listed, despite it being a low blow)
- Better templating (not just straight PHP, a custom engine similar to Jinja/Django)

Tumblr:

- Self-hosted
- Easier to extend/theme
- Ability to manage content types (Feathers), not locked down the same 6 or 7

Posterous:
Not sure, never used it.

-----------

There are many other differences obviously, but these are the major feature differences I can name off the top of my head. Also, I haven't used either of those in ages aside from making sure importing works so I may be off a bit.
Not only that, if you select the wrong edition, switching to the correct edition costs less with Linux than with Windows.
You have an advantage with a distributed system -- it's totally feasible to migrate between filesystems / tunings after you get started.

I highly recommend using netboot and an NFS root filesystem for the storage nodes.

RHEL4 is going to be a thorn in your side if you ever want to try ext4 or btrfs. Even if you stick with the mature filesystems, VFS improvements in newer kernels will give you a performance boost.
pagehtml.replace(RegExp(/\<p\>/,g), 'bigfatmonkeydick');

Huh?
Applying the googlenomics concept I just read in Wired, aren't auctions the next step in pricing's natural selection process?
Okay, send an email of exactly what you want to zackster/gmail/com. I'll think it through and we can work something out so you can have your killer app.
gotta love easter eggs right? to be fair that function isn't called.
What's the point of hosting in a cloud if there's still a single point of failure like this? I realize that it's currently free, but I thought one of the main advantages of moving to the cloud was redundancy and fault tolerance.
Zappos is holding a $5000 2 day boot camp.
Look at the price.
this is a bit like flying vs driving. If you're in the drivers seat you have control - you hope - and your destiny is in your own hands, if you're in a plane it is someone else driving (unless you are an airline pilot). The accident rate is lower for planes per mile flown but if it goes wrong then it usually does so in ways that make the headlines. Still, more people die driving than flying.

When the 'cloud' goes down (or at least some part of it) then you'll notice this immediately because of the large number of sites going down all at once. But when you compare it with the accumulated downtime of all those users had they not been 'cloud users' but hosted on their own kit then it is very well possible that the balance is still in favour of hosting in the cloud.
As someone said of Elvis, "good career move".
Me too. Donate button please. If you've got a 501(c)(3), even better.
It's something I'd want to know if I was looking for a blogging engine. Maybe mentioning SQL doesn't matter as much, though. It originally said MySQL, but it actually supports other databases as well, so I removed the "My". Now it doesn't really bear any importance (PHP+MySQL being a pseudo-category of software), so I'll just remove it.
Believe me, we're all far too busy to do our own ideas, let alone anyone else's. In fact if anyone wants to take stuff off my plate, please do :)
"so it's easier to surf on an existing brand instead" -- sure, but it's still unethical. Just because you can make a quick buck by impersonating someone else, doesn't mean you get carte blanche to do so.
atwood really likes that word
So your justification for illegally appropriating somebody else's brand is that "we're broke and can't afford to build our own brand"? And the further justification includes that deception is used in nature?

I'm not saying I don't understand why it happens, I'm saying it's not right to do it, because it does damage to Apple's brand, contrary to the OP's point that it was merely an "homage" with no harm done.

Sure, some people buy an iPhone lookalike knowing that it's a fake so they can make some kind of stupid fashion statement. But I hope, dear god I hope, that most people buying iPhones are doing so because they want a device that can make phone calls, browse the web, sync with iTunes, and do all the other fun stuff an iPhone can do. These devices don't do those things, not properly.