skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In implying the penny gap can be eliminated, this article fails to account for mental transaction costs.

Seriously. Clay Shirky explained this 9 years ago: http://www.openp2p.com/pub/a/p2p/2000/12/19/micropayments.ht...

I can't believe someone is writing this in 2009. There's so much wrong with it I don't even know where to begin, but this paragraph stuck me as particularly wrong:

"Fair enough. But here’s one thing freemium fans can’t deny: in their model, a tiny minority of paid users subsidizes the service for everybody. It is this simple fact that makes the freemium model self-defeating, because, for the numbers to work, the price of the paid service must be set artificially high."

That's just pure mental confusion and abuse of language by the author.

Try this thought experiment: github launched as a micropayment service. It would already be dead. How do you calculate the "fair" price of something that doesn't exist?
cheers. it was more an interesting mind experiment than trying to imporove on the obvious answer (it beign such a small set). The question being: can I build a system that works for both 17 jobs and 1000 with reasonable speed.

Now I know why we ran against brick walls with the maths, thanks. (and actually a practical version of the NP-Complete issue helped me get my head round it better! many thanks).
Why Search Engine Marketing Is Proven To Send Your Website Free Traffic
Internet marketing, in other words, is also known as Search Engine Marketing or SEM in short. SEM can also be defined as the practice of buying paid search listings with the goal of obtaining better free search listings.
I like the idea of that law. :)

That being said, terms aren't buzzwords just because they're unfamiliar to you.
Periodic table gets a new element
Using iPhone at Work; It Just Keeps Getting Easier
Full Dancing Guy video - does it affect your analysis?
Does this mean that google was not an innovator?
Canada Rejects Business Method Patents
I usually hate replying to myself, but I just came across a longer video of the same guy and with a low view count and a different angle.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nU7dxkIz1Vs

It seems that Guy #1 had been dancing for awhile before it really caught on.
Gdgt Draws 4.7m Views During WWDC. Not Bad For A Site That Hasn’t Launched.
ha! where'd he say that? I'd like to see that in context. :)
A Cloning Breakthrough In Plants
org-mode is really useful, and you can start with a subset. I usually use

- headline hierarchies (lines starting with stars)

- itemized lists (starting with a dash) or with checkboxes (starting with '- [ ]')

- checkbox counters in headlines ('[/]' will be updated to show the percentage of complete checkbox items below that headline).

The DWIM keys C-c C-c, TAB and M-Return usually do the right thing.
What about the first post for someone selling their username on eBay?
Good list of startups, but I think more metrics are needed than just Alexa rank (who still uses the alexa toolbar?)
Isn't the model this article describes exactly what Amazon does with AWS?

Metered usage is not the same thing as micropayments. I may have skimmed the OP too quickly, but if metered usage was the proposal then the title is misleading. The use case for metered billing is rapid scaling in the face of unpredictable usage patterns.
I have yet to find the mythical "real estate you can own" I've leased/rented and even taken out a mortgage on my condominium, but if I don't pay my condo fees every month, the association threatens to take my condo away... And if you don't pay taxes on any real estate, house, condo, or land?...

Yeah, I hate the idea of having to pay each year for my domain names. It sucks, it feels like we pay too much, but it is probably cheaper than if you could pay once up front and never have to pay any infrastructure costs. Imaging the hording and domain name market under those conditions.

So since I can't do anything about it, and I want those domain names, I chalk it off to infrastructure costs.
It's getting a bit trite that every time Last.fm is mentioned (in good or bad light) that someone mentions libre.fm.

Don't get me wrong, it's a nice project, but it's as annoying as constantly plugging your startups alternative to a popular service, the fact it's open-source doesn't dull that.
All that's missing on the timeline (probably on Saturday morning, around lunch) is a blog post by Jason Calacanis about how he wants to buy the username from whoever got facebook.com/jason.
It's a way to find out what kind of person your 'opponent' is and to get to know them, as well as to have fun, thus creating an emotional bond with them - a reason to 'see' them again. A short, goofy game, akin to a Mario Party or Wario Ware video game, would be perfect for this, I think.
From Facebook TOS Section 4.7 (5/1/2009)

You will not transfer your account to anyone without first getting our written permission.

http://www.facebook.com/terms.php

Good luck with that.
Having just seen the longer video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nU7dxkIz1Vs), definitely guy #2 from the video Seth linked.

Guys were coming and going, but he was the one that stuck around and with such passion to get guy #3 to jump in.

Instead of copying/directly interacting with Guy #1, he instead made the idea of "Dancing on the hill" his own. That's when Guy #3 joins in, because he makes the dance his own aswell.

Perhaps there's a thought in there, about giving people the freedom to make something their own.
True, people won't check that, but there's another indicator: the relationship status. Nearly everyone keeps those up to date, especially if they actually use the site.
Funny and true. Going through the motions in the boring world of Web 2.0.
You may then just use those people as the source of energy for that same virtual reality. Hmmm...
Yeah, because ebay checks that.
You haven't spoken to many women about it have you?

Male perspective - bars + clubs = casual sex*

Female perspective - bars + clubs = for dating*

*There will obviously be outliers in both cases, but that's generally how it plays out.
Shirky was talking about micropayments for content in that article. An endless stream of little decisions. I agree with him.

However, as I pointed out in a comment above. The one-off mental transaction cost for agreeing to be micro-billed for a continuous service is less than that required to sign-up for a premium version of a service.

As to my supposed abuse of language, I don't understand what you mean.
most of what I have seen of venturebeat.com and slashdot.org and techmeme.com is the same story repeated everywhere. None of these are much of a blog sites anymore. They are news sites with some blogging.
I felt just the opposite. The writing was a mess. For example, he misused or misinterpreted Gandhi's quote. To see "Gandhi" misspelled for the billionth time on the internet was just a bonus.
This is far and away the best description of the attraction to starting up for me.

I don't want to retire young; I want to keep making things. I just want to do them on my terms.
Yahoo's Battle Hardened Hadoop Distro now on Github
With "Asian-American" I meant international students temporarily studying abroad, NOT Americans of Asian descent. I see no racism when referring to the first group, since the Chinese education system (I'm only familiar with the Chinese and Thai education system) is too a much larger extent composed around pure memorization of either language or math.

I'm very sorry if what I posted came out as racial slur. It was not my intention, since I certainly do not identify myself even remotely with that kind of arguments.
LightCloud adds support for Redis
Three choices: Preferred, Common, and debt.

Preferred stock is what investors typically get. It's got different rights (which vary) and usually a preference, which means common stock is subordinate at the payout time.

The nice part of preferred stock is that it's price can change independent of the common stock, which has significant tax implications for option holders on common stock.

Personally I don't like buying debt, as an angel. I won't do uncapped debt at all. I want to get my ownership (and take the risk) at the time I put the money down, not possibly a year or two later when someone else establishes the value.
Includes benchmarks of Redis vs. Tokyo Tyrant
I have friends and family... (really, all you need are a few collaborators.)
Announcing the Yahoo Distribution of Hadoop
"Also, domains we don't cover (see [1]) are prevented from being sent to us at all."

So why sent it back at all?
Geek Review - Tonido
The only thing this article made me want to do is visit that hot spring in Japan.
Kurzweil is a genius but maybe he should try not to put such specific dates on his predictions. It makes it easy to say he was wrong by detractors.
Hey, thanks for the feedback, we definitely have options for businesses in the pipeline.
Why Facebook fan page Vanity URLs will change the game
Quantum computers will require complex software to manage errors
People have proposed solutions to this problem, like if you own a domain but stop paying the maintenance fees it will disappear from the DNS (so you can't use it), but will still appear in WHOIS and you'll still have legal title to it forever.

Ultimately it's political: Some people believe that domains should be property, some believe they shouldn't be, and everyone has trouble understanding the opposing viewpoint.
You are absolutely right: you cannot ever completely take the whole matchmaking and dating and getting to know each other part of real life dating online.

But that is not the point I see in online dating. Online dating shall in my view replace the chance encounters, the host of the parties, the finding out about commonalities by going to the same sports event etc. Having a picture and some basic data will enable you to find some stuff to talk about -
afterwards people will probably tend to 'take it offline' anyway for all the reasons you gave.
Burrowing black holes devoured first stars from within
There is a danger in using short term revenue boosters. Twitter is wrestling with this exact issue. It's a rare site that I would return to that has pop up ads. i.e. nba.com

Most sites don't have enough good original analysis for me to tolerate that sort of disruptiveness.

It's a danger for all companies in the web startup space.
Math theories may hold clues to origin, future of life in universe
Three Words That Could Overthrow Physics
Lists like this are so bogus. It penalizes companies that actually sell a product behind their main web site like Freshbooks and my own Shopify (30) but rewards sites that are the product such as tr.im.
Did dark energy give us our cosmos?
Ditto, though the article didn't offer much, it helped me articulate the feeling I've been having when and if I get to that point.
Massive Layoffs Coming To MySpace - 25% Or More May Be Cut
As to my supposed abuse of language, I don't understand what you mean.

Correct me if I'm misunderstanding you on this part: If your claim is that the paying users of github are subsidizing the free users, that's simply not true and is a misuse of the word subsidize.

Calling a price "artificially high" on the other hand is meaningless. The correct price is the price that create the most value. There's no such thing as an artificially high price in an open marketplace. Or, more specifically, it's impossible for the producer of a good or service to set a price that is artificially high.
Can't it be because they are proud of accomplishing something difficult? The harder the challenge, the greater the pride.

Also, you're looking for a specific answer to a very abstract question. You can't ask why something is highly-valued without specifying by whom. Is there a particular instance of this behavior that you are looking to explain? Otherwise it could just be confirmation bias.
The Spooky World Of Quantum Biology
But isn't high blood pressure sometimes just a symptom of other problems?
Deflation seems more likely:

Fiat World Mathematical Model

http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/2009/02/fiat-worl...

Will this printing create [price] inflation? This is dependent very much on what money will do next. If banks will not lend and banks sit on that cash forever and ever like the great depression because the risk is too high and the banks do not know if the lending will end up in good assets or bad assets, and because banks are in so many bad assets now they probably will not lend at all.

That is the observation that Murray Rothbard made, that during the Great Depression that banks have chosen not to lend because the risk of accumulating bad assets was far to high. So they were sitting on massive reserves. That is what is developing right now.

A good example is what happened in Japan in 2001-2002 where the Bank of Japan pumped 300% at one stage and lending continued to collapse. I expect similar things to happen here. If lending will not increase we can conclude this will not be inflationary.
Why "I'd Google it" is not an acceptable Interview Answer
Genius.com's Favorite Web Development Tools
Ask HN: Student laundry?
Doing laundry sucks. Especially when you live in a dorm as a student.

Most washers and dryers charge somewhere around $2-$4 for washing and drying. Do you think a student would pay five bucks for someone else to do the laundry and return it SAME DAY?

Think campusfood.com except for laundry. We'd pick it up, wash it, dry it, (fold it?) and return. Then collect $5. Charge extra for stain removal, better detergent, etc. But this is simple, not a dry cleaners.

At first, I could just use a laundromat and me and another person could swap pickup/delivery and laundry duties.

Do you think people would pay for this? I'm almost willing to try it due to the extremely low cost to me at first.

I already have hosting and stuff, I can make a dead simple website that just accepts addresses and phone numbers for us to pick up and possibly for them to specify how many pieces they have (or loads).

Opinions?
You have a certain logic, but all I can say is that I have not witnessed it myself after working now for 2 different contractors. Of course, in both of those cases everyone in my immediate management chain was, like me, a former military officer.
I wonder how many people actually reads the paper online.
Evolutionary Brain Theory
Prophetic, maybe, but it's all pretty obvious if you've spent much time on the Internet.
Are You Ever Too Young To Start A Business?
It works much faster in Chrome than Firefox.
Recession Wipes Out Hardware Upstarts
The Media Fall for Phony 'Jobs' Claims
The Fallacy of Finance
Success Tips For New Entrepreneurs
Will Exxon Get Googled?
China Faces Criticism Over New Software Censor
Why is it slightly misleading to say it lets you loan to small businesses?
It's not a zero interest loan, is it?

Lending is the most common form of investment, and it's comparatively safe. Equity investment is what's risky and dangerous (unless you get into junk bonds, or lending to bankrupt companies).
Data Center Overload
Most, like the iPhone 3G. However, not the iPhone 3GS: http://images.apple.com/iphone/iphone-3g-s/images/photos-gal...
Not sure I understand the question. They aren't sent back to us.
When I first heard about the whole Singularity thing it made sense. I thought it was cool. I wanted to be there.

But as I've learned more about the limitations of our understanding, our biology, and computers I've realized that this isn't something that will be happening any time soon without some amazing breakthroughs. I don't expect the Singularity to happen my lifetime, and I'm still in my 20s.

We really understand very little about the brain. We don't know exactly how neurons work and the most information we can get from the brain is on the order of 1-7 BITS per second when sampling from implanted electrodes. It's also not a lack of data. We don't even know how to fully decode the data we already have.

Our understanding of AI really is pretty poor. Knowledge representation and machine learning has become a hard enough task that many researchers are back to developing algorithms for specific tasks, which embeds the knowledge of the researcher in the algorithm, precluding the system from learning anything truly novel.

They say we can't see past the Singularity because things will change too much and too fast. Right now we can't even see the Singularity because too many things would have to change too much and quite fast.
Wikipedia states that Ununbium (element 112) was first created in 1996, but that team's research was disregarded. Apparently, we've synthesized elements up to 118, except 117.
Yeah, funny, I was thinking of a similar principle. However, mine is slightly different. You match people using collaborative filtering techniques based on your social network profile (bayesian filtering, for example. . .). Then you via gps on your cell phone. IE, if two likely matches happen to be geographically close to each other, the cell phone tells both of you "hey, you guys would be a good match . . . would you like to hook up at a nearby coffee place?". If both say yes, the cell phone will allow you to meet at a local coffee place (or whatever).

The point is is to have a weird excuse to interact briefly. Just by a brief encounter one can know if that person is his/her type.
Why you need a project would be a more accurate title.
And who will pay the for the instructors, the manuals, the instruments, the lab materials, etc?

At least for science labs, there's no "special building", just a specialized room. Also, in majors such as biology universities house research projects that can give students the chance to practically apply their knowledge. I doubt other research organizations, like corporations, would be as willing to teach students in the same way. Even if they did, it'd be a shame for a student's first experience with real science to be for commercial pursuits and not basic science.
It seems like an element should have to be stable to be considered an element. This only lasted a few microseconds. Couldn't you put almost any combination of particles together for an arbitrarily short amount of time? What's special about an element?
David Lynch on ideas
Ah, of course, I was wondering what this articles equivalent of "But it won't happen to us because we're special!" would be.
Only in the top10 there are 2 URL shortener (ow.ly and tr.im)
I think I overestimated for a long time the concept that you really need an original idea to make money with the web.
If you use a service without charge which entails a non-zero cost to produce and supply it, then I'm afraid somebody, somewhere is subsiding it. So that's my first abuse of language sorted.

As to the price of premium services being 'artificially high' - as I make clear in the post - this refers to paying for a benefit that is necessarily incremental (if it wasn't, nobody would use the free service). The price of that benefit is generally excessive when compared to what can be had for nothing.

You many not agree with those words, but I don't think they, too, represent an abuse of language.
I can't find it now no matter what, but there is a video in here somewhere where professor talks exactly about that http://www.youtube.com/user/periodicvideos

I rememebr he says something about higher you go in the periodic table you add more electron to the shell and there is only a finite amount of space in there, and at the time, highest element had all of the slots filled in and then something weird about electron orbit.. ugh and I have watched it just the other day.. but there it is, and all of the videos are very interesting (at least to me)

edit:
here it is http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Stxor9L00BU&feature=chann... - a video about element 118 and professor gets asked how can they know there are only 118 elements in about a minute in video

and here is an edited video of all 118 elements they have explained http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LFsdbLFHgY8&feature=relat...
Right, because everyone who goes to college is rich and primarily motivated by alcohol, since as everyone knows most alcohol consumption for teens starts in college.

University gives you the chance to have more or less complete control of your time and at least learn to be responsible for yourself, before you get a job and learn to be responsible for colleagues as well.
I see laundromats in my area (NH) that offer this service for $0.79-$0.99/lb typically.

I would find such a cleaners in your area, and strike a deal to funnel business to them for a discount rate.

Structure it such that pickup/dropoff is $2.00 or so, and service is $0.99/lb and try to negotiate a rate for yourself initially at around $0.89/lb.

Pickup/dropoff would be at scheduled times, and a 24 hour (not same-day) cycle. Same-day is a $4.00-$5.00 premium.

Basically start out as a middle man with a website and a marketing effort. College students are notoriously cheap and broke. If you find that you can actually make a business out of this, you can then find your long-term strategy (push the local laundromat to drop their price, invest in your own equipment, etc.).

My gut reaction is that there is a business in there, but the balancing point is rather more precise than you would first expect. Liabilities are also somewhat moderate when dealing in real-world goods and services (someone claims (rightly or wrongly) that they gave you a $100 special edition shirt that was a gift from their dead grandmother that you lost/damaged/ruined). Best, IMO, to limit liabilities and overhead until you have all the kinks worked out.

If in a pure college environment, picking a catchy name ("Your Girlfriend") and giving away sloganed T-Shirts ("Your Girlfriend Did My Laundry") ("Your Girlfriend Washed My Undies") could get you a lot of exposure.
The next Silicon Valley
Some resources are not very scalable, with our technology at least. Oil is much discussed, but wood is probably less easy to replace. And by far the most important is arable surface. Every food (except fish, which is already not doing so well) depends ultimately on cultivated land. Eating bread and cheese takes a lot less space then eating beef or pork - but the final currency is still surface. And that is not unlimited.

There are other resources too. Every technology consumes some amount of hard-to-replace materials. There are a lot of rare metals in a computer or a monitor. So far the market absorbed any shortages, but imagine a 10x increase and suddenly high prices due to lack of basic materials don't seem impossible.

Even iron is not unlimited. Wikipedia says we have 800 million cars on the roads. Make that 3 billion and you start scraping for steel. Aluminium too. Pretty much everything we mine will see sharp increases in price sooner or later - and it would be very unlikely _not_ to run out of something with a 2x or 3x increase in consumption.
Or they could just lie about it:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/fuffer2005/3216972462/
http://memo.tv/msafluid_for_processing

Also ported to Flash:

http://blog.inspirit.ru/?p=248

I've tried it on a multi-touch display, and it is a lot of fun even without any additional things to play with. Pretty heavy on the processor with a lot of people, though.
Nice article.

One of the benefits of this economic downturn is that all the get-rich-quick folks who were starting web2.0 companies are now gone.

So now it's just us: people who fit the article's description for passion.
If, like you, they're going for a PhD in the subject, then yes.

If, like me, they're faced with it in practice, then what they need to know is, "bad".
Please, AT&T, tell me how much you want for an iPhone 3G S.
Regarding #2, I believe altlaw.org is exactly such a project. To the best of my knowledge, a screen scraping bot/webapp is the largest clojure project to date.
voluntary. you don't need to get permission/contracts set up with the government/people to love (see "free love" on Wikipedia), and you don't need to take loans from banks (see renting vs buying articles, especially 'is renting throwing money away?' or something like that from earlier in the week on hacker news). // free love advocacy: complete.