skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The issue is that they need a certain amount of revenue per box.

So, they buy a new Core i3 box with 8GB of RAM and they want to get $40 over the next two years to cover the investment. If they have to reduce its price to $30 after 6 months and further as time goes on, they don't cover the investment.

Now, they could price the box at $60 and lower it over time, but then you lose signups since it's a higher price (even if the average price over two years would be the same). You can say: well, have the older servers whose price has already been reduced available for sale as well. That complicates the lineup and is hard to manage. Unlike the new servers, the old servers only become available when someone gives one up which makes the supply unpredictable. With a new server, they can always buy one. Making matters worse, if the old ones have a reduced price, people are more likely to stay with them.

A decent part of this is that a lot of people are probably "needlessly" upgrading. By that, I mean that a lot of people probably aren't upgrading because the new server will make their usage better, but because they have a sense that they should be getting the top that their dollar will get. They were running perfectly fine on the old box, but why not try the new?

Ultimately, this is why VPSs are a lot easier. You can lower prices as time goes on in a reasonable manner. Someone wants the 1.7GB/1GHz 2007 box? That's a fraction of a new piece of hardware we can deploy. On the contrary, if someone wants a two year old model at OVH, they can't deploy a new two year old model: it's only available if someone gives it up. So, it becomes hard to capture the cheap-end of the market unless those signups keep paying for that box.
Telling You the Answer Isn't the Answer - understanding is born out of confusion
It's not that the MVC is wrong, it is that the model is not being built right. Moving to the BorrowABook feature is making a model class.

All too often in my experience I see code that has the model rolled into the controller. Controllers and UI are structurally supported better in frameworks. We get lazy and put model code into controllers. It is the way we make spaghetti code today.
"It would not contain the world’s great literature"

Is there any point in providing instructions to create machines for broadcasting information, ranging from printing presses to the internet, if you don't provide a source of formulaic drama (Shakespeare?) to keep it economically viable?

Can you have a broadcast TV infrastructure without something like formulaic sequels of Shakespeare to lure the people in? Or if not him, someone's work?

Its like providing blueprints, and diagrams, and videos, and textbooks describing how to make a chicken coop, and then after they finish studying and methodically replicate our work and build a million really awesome chicken coops, they ask "OK we have these very nice chicken coops as per your designs... now, tell us what exactly is a chicken?"
This is quite pointless because it essentially cancels out

This is ultimately what makes this so bizarre -- in the end such a chain has a single "benefactor", and then a number of what could best be described as victims: People who become a part of this process because of social obligation. Given that the people were already in line and obviously ready to pay for their order, this is unwelcome generosity, and it takes advantage of the law of reciprocity in many cultures.

This sounds really cynical, and I suppose it is, but I see nothing heart warming about Western culture in these acts. If someone randomly paid for other people's food, that is one thing, but what we're reading about now are people obligating the people behind them to pay for the people behind them, essentially trying to become a part of something -- the initiator -- for little.

If I pull up to Tim Hortons and just want a coffee and a donut, having to understand and then orchestrate the chain is not something I was looking for, and in the end I've gained nothing.
Maybe they have too many electronic substitutes. There's nothing in the human makeup that says "will procreate even in the presence of unlimited sexual gratification elsewhere". Its certainly something to be studied and understood.
Unit tests each have an assertion message that states what's wrong, and the frameworks should each print the line # & stack trace. My IDE parses that output & highlights the errors in my code too.
Cool. Suggest we delete the submission and this discussion, although if you don't, it doesn't matter. I'm just a bit obsessive about tidiness. Born from working on the C2 wiki, I guess.

Edit: Although I see now that this submission has a few upvotes, so maybe we'd better not delete it. <shrug>
it would be much better for their sales if they did not force clients to manually renew every 3 months.
Before Dropbox, there were 100 cloud storage companies, half of which were VC funded. But Dropbox knew the problem better than anyone else, focused on making the actual use of space easier, and disrupted the existing solutions who were merely trying to compete on economy (offer more space and/or charge less)

This is a very true piece of advice in many ways.

(1) If there are "no" competitors, there is likely no market;

(2) There can be many competitors, but no "competition" if you execute well

(3) You need true insight to pull off #2

(4) A good screen is (3), and in the presence of (2) a huge market opportunity for an investor.

(5) Talent drives (3) more than age; but experience matters

(6) Corralary to (5) is rare experience has value in the context of (3)
This shows up all the time in the myriad Haskell eDSLs. Monad-based interfaces are obvious but throw away information that is useful for optimization (see http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/slindley/papers/unembedding.pd... for how to get some of it back). Applicative interfaces are really amenable to optimization, though (see Facebook's Haxl project: http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/1le4y5/the_haxl_pro...)
The internet? Infinite sexual gratification is a new phenomenon. Does it correlate with this societal statistic?
The controller is always the ugly part, because it's the piece that's responsible for interfacing between transaction-specific logic and your general backend interface. The article is right that it's easy to put too much business logic in the controller, but fails to recognize that "MVC" isn't supposed to be your whole application - just the UI side. The functionality of this BorrowABook class doesn't belong in the UI layer at all.
As if any other carrier is any different?
That would be fine if the article was called "Japanese people don't start enough families" - however, this wouldn't be an interesting headline, since it's years old news and most informed people know this already[1]. But it isn't, is it? It's asking the question why. I can ask such questions as well, but if I'm going to write an article about it, I'd hope to come up with some analysis to try to answer it - and this is exactly where the journalist got lazy and just cobbled up whatever anecdotes he can attribute to actual Japanese people saying them, cause, you know, they must be at the source of this, right?

[1] Although I'm not yet sure whether more babies is actually what Japan needs right now - looking at their population density, going easy on the baby making might be ok for a while, if there is a plan in place on how to turn it around once the population has fallen to more sustainable levels (and also how to pay for everyone's pensions in the meantime).
Others have focused on how "pay it forward" chains actually do produce surplus, of a particular kind. But what jumped out at me was the idea that you must have redistribution to get a cooperative structure:

> To get a cooperative structure you have to give away surplus -- that is, people with more have to give it to people with less. Yes, redistribution!

This is correct up right up until the hyphen. Cooperation involves giving away surplus, but everyone has surpluses on different axes. Someone good at software development might have no idea how to fix his car; he gives away his surplus software development talent to someone with more knowledge of auto mechanics. Obviously the trade isn't direct since the mechanic might not want his software--so the developer trades his software for money, then trades money for the repair. This is cooperation!
None of my childres/nieces/nephews are married or have childred. They are all approaching their 30s. Something is going on.

In a previous generation ALL would be married, ALL would have at least one child.
Four ways trans people are changing the gender/tech debate
My CustDev journey over the last few weeks (London based startup hustler)
I agree generalizing is not a good idea, but a single person wouldn't necessarily hang out at an outlet mall by himself either. (or spend a lot of time outside for that matter)
Cheney had heart device disabled to protect himself against a fatal shock
Thank you mtdewcmu, did not know about the built in sort in gawk, will make the switch.
We are all screwed... Don't eat any fish from the Pacific Ocean..
I agree. There's a lot of sentiment around, "the right way to do something". I somewhat blame rails for the explosion of opinions, but maybe it's just developer nature.

The right way is the way that works for you and your business requirements.
This is similar (or more or less the same) idea that has been advocated by Uncle Bob and others. Here's my comment on the experiences we have had with this approach: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6470693 (the topic was about running tests quickly, and the approach, as mentioned also in the article, decouples the business logic from frameworks - allowing testing without firing up web server, database, etc.).

I agree that the interactors make rather odd-looking OO classes, but I suppose the imperative nature of most requests to perform some logic make them less objects in that sense. This has the added benefit of seeing what the system does, just by looking the class names in the interactors folder/namespace.
Have you ever actually read On Computable Numbers, With an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem? The whole point was to isolate the necessary components of what computers (which was a human job title at the time) do.
Resubmitted since it's apparently one of my more popular projects and I just rewrote part of it to make it much faster.
I'm not one to overly worry about data collection, but there is a difference between giving all your data to the same company and different data to different companies. Consider the reactions when Google itself changed their T&C to unify all their services.
> any customer I've ever had will tell you that the value they received from me far exceeded what it cost them.

That's the whole point of capitalism (as opposed to what our non-representatives in DC call capitalism) -- with free trade everyone is better off.
I honestly think I am getting a quicker understanding than skimming a bunch of text and letting my brain fill in the rest. So sure, I'm better for having taken the time.
There may be hundreds of stories about various companies, but they aren't like this one. It seemed to be about generosity, and only tangentially about Chick-Fil-A, but I couldn't help (1) imagining myself being generous in my local Chick-Fil-A drive-through and (2) imagining myself feeling the warmth of someone else's generosity at my local Chick-Fil-A drive-through (which I've never experienced in real life).
No I understood your point, I just don't agree that it results in any meaningful advantage. What you didn't model was the fact that the server does not process packets immediately as they are received. They are buffered and processed in batch during a server tick. If the two packets from different players are not received along a tick boundary, then the server will effectively consider them simultaneous.

And remember, we're considering 1ms vs 5ms, so the difference would be 4ms in this case. I would like to see what percentage an advantage someone has in this setup. Even 63% isn't anything significant considering skill comes down to game knowledge rather than absolute reaction time. People will pay for smaller/bigger numbers, sure. But that doesn't mean there is anything practically significant about it.
You were intending to pay for your meal anyway; that you're actually paying for someone elses meal makes little difference for you

These chains have been common at coffee shops drive-thrus in Canada for years, where the standard deviation of orders is very small: Almost everyone is just getting a coffee and maybe a donut. A couple of dollars, generally. I have to imagine that order size varies much more dramatically at a burger shack, and it has to suck if you and getting your cheeseburger and end up in a chain with a family of six behind you.
American Caucasians' fertility rate is steadily declining.
France has high birth rate for native French too.
I'm not sure which one is bigger at the moment.
I didn't watch the stream but wait... Qatar and Luxemburg are not the most technologically advanced, but Japan and Finland are not the richest countries. I don't think the country you're talking about exists.
If you read the OP, you'll find that's what happened.
Startups Need To Embrace Zero Paid Media Marketing
Good luck doing one liners with Python, as long as it use wspace indentation for e.g. loops and don't support {}:s as an option. :-(

I'd argue with most others, Perl is the single most useful command line tool. Not the only one, of course. But afaik, you can't e.g. load a JSON lib in awk as part of a pipeline. (I deserialize dumped data structures multiple times a week in [ad hoc testing with] pipelined cmds.)

Imho, if you know Ruby or PHP as the back of your hand, don't learn another scripting language for command line use. Learn some completely different language for some other use, instead.
For those referring to the social utility of Facebook, I recommend hiding your news feed. The newsfeed is not a social utility, whereas messages, profiles, looking up mutual friends, etc. IS a social utility. Here's how to hide your newsfeed without affecting your experience on the rest of the site:

https://medium.com/productivity-efficiency/631ed8f466e1

Basically, this trick uses a Chrome extension that hides the newsfeed using custom CSS.
And the bad news gets worse, this is from yesterday:

"Officials of the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) said on Friday they detected 400,000 becquerels per liter of beta ray-emitting radioactive substances - including strontium - at the site, a level 6,500 times higher than readings taken on Wednesday, NHK World reported."

"On Wednesday TEPCO said it had detected high levels of radiation in a ditch leading to the Pacific Ocean, and that it suspected heavy rains had lifted contaminated soil."

We are talking about some non-zero (lets just say integer) chance of global catastrophe if the oxgenation of the Pacific ocean is disrupted by mass radioactive spoiling of biomass. I don't understand why a concerted organisation of nuclear engineers and assistants are not stepping in to avert what could be game over for Japan in general, to say nothing of cascading affects across the oceans and N. Hemisphere in general.

http://rt.com/news/fukushima-high-radioactivity-well-335/
How to spoil the fish with salt and pepper
Although the SC AI guys are still stuck with BW, not SC2 :'(
How to Use Your Commute to Add Skills and Improve Your Work Life
Thanks for the context. The additional context does not really make the statement any better IMHO.

Starting a company with one of your friends has a lot of "drawbacks". If your friend is underperforming by a huge margin you often don't want to risk the friendship by telling the truth.

Some of my friends have nothing to do with tech or business - most of them enjoy a very low risk way to live (employed with the state or county for example) and don't want to do it any other way. I enjoy a little bit of risk in my live. :) This different way of living does not make my friends any worse or better...
I'd say that signs of an imminent merge with Google Wallet were clearly visible throughout the year...
I strongly disagree that it's worth nothing. In terms of money, sure, someone paid extra, and someone got free stuff, with the bunch intermediaries.

But isn't it true that we collectively spend our lives chasing the ghost of connection, goodwill, and meaning? Don't you think that lacking those is one of the major "bugs" in western society?

So now we have a chain of people who get to participate in an act that brings them together, makes them part of a small "community," and allows to them to exercise both generosity and gratitude.

I think that's extremely valuable, and that someone has figured out how to do that for such a small price is pretty smart.

If you want evidence that my position is closer to reality than yours, consider how strongly stories like this resonate with people, and ask yourself why that's the case.
At the peak of the CB "bubble" around 1978, roughly 10% of all cars had a CB radio installed in them as a lower bound, although claims were it was higher, like 15% to 20%.

That percentage has dropped somewhat since then...

There is no particular reason to assume the peaking and decline of a socializing technology must result in its similar competitors growth in a nearly identical field. It could be home video conferencing or terminals built into vehicle seatbacks or far more likely, something we can't imagine at this time.

And no, for you youngsters, the smartphone was not the social technology replacement for CB, for basically all of the 80s and a substantial part of the 90s average people simply completely stopped technologically socializing in their cars. I see no reason to prevent future people from simply not socializing via handheld devices.

That doesn't mean the death of the industry, truck drivers still have CBs, but your grandpa probably does not (not since Carter was president, anyway)

The industry can only make money on the up slope, but investors and innovators can make money on both up and down slopes. Might be time to start thinking of money making schemes for the down slope.
Scared, shocked and confused for a moment while I thought Google was shutting down Takeout (which would've been a huge step backward.) This is okay (it's been superseded by Google Wallet anyway.)
Radioactivity level spikes 6,500 times at Fukushima well
I upgraded to 8.1 yesterday on a home-built AsRock Extreme 4 with i7-3770 with 16 GB RAM and OCZ Vertex 4 SSD. Whole process took 10 minutes and performed perfectly.

Sorry you had an issue, but wanted to point out that it is working smoothly for many people.
Hey, I guess PRISM belongs to China, too!
And there is so much taken for granted.. how long did it take us to get to the table of elements, their properties and the knowledge of where to find them, the knowledge of how to manipulate electricity.. the tools to regain knowledge, a microscope and a telescope..

and simple ancient things, such as what is the best form for a house under given conditions. Farming possibilities, storing, transportation..

Everything stacks, and to get to a thing like pure aluminium or plastic has taken ages. In case of a breakdown it is good to leave pointers to restarters. I understand that this is what the article talks about and not the notion of 'noble civilization' as opposed to savagery.
> Windows 8.1 - Open the marketplace, click the button, download, prepare for installation, reboot, begin installation, verify installation, hang, blue screen, reboot, hang, blue screen, reboot, revert to previous installation, reboot.

This has not been my experience, at all, on 4 different machines. It was more:

Open the marketplace, click the button, download, ask for reboot, reboot, wait for a bit of time (between 15' and 30' depending on the machine), and boot to the new login upgrade.

I had a bit of a headache to understand how not to upgrade to a Microsoft account and keep a local account, but that's it.
I don't even think that the reason is "Facebook isn't cool anymore". Facebook is just annoying at this point. When Facebook was for your friends from college and/or high school, things were great. You could post embarrassing things that people did, inside jokes, whatever. Now your mom is on Facebook. your grandma is on Facebook, and so is your boss. Yes you can stop them from seeing everything you post or everything your friends post, but no one knows that. There's probably a 50/50 chance that if I were to post something funny and slightly embarrassing on a friends wall, BAM, there's their grandma who is a tad bit confused. Then of course your friends grow up and all they post is baby pictures.

Teenagers, who are looking to keep things private between them and their friends, can't have their mom popping up on their Facebook pages all the time.
"doesnt need perpetual population growth"
It's no longer about growth, it's about decline now.

Can a country with perpetually declining and aging population survive? In what form?
I'm not sure what the point of this blog post is? I don't think anyone expects that the upgrade will be problem free for 100% of users, especially considering the numerous different hardware configurations.

Also, if you look on the Apple Support forums you'll find people who have encountered problems upgrading OS X, so it is not like OS X has a 100% success rate at upgrading.

I've upgraded my machine from 8 to 8.1 and it went flawlessly, although I did not write a blog post about that.

Perhaps a good place to start would be attempting to look into the BSOD rather than just attempting the upgrade over and over?
Counter-point: my upgrade was "smooth" in that it worked and there were no surprises.

That said, there were definitely issues. Firstly, I couldn't find the update. It wasn't showing up in the store. Turns out I had to run Windows Update first then go to the store. Fair enough, but would it have killed Microsoft to put a banner in the store saying "Want to upgrade to 8.1? First click here to make sure your computer is up to date."

Secondly, it restarted several times (why so many?), often with completely unhelpful messages about what it's actually doing (my favourite was a message something like "now just doing a few more things..." – yeah, thanks). And progress meters that would stall at e.g. 13% for minutes before suddenly finishing.

As for 8.1 itself, it's definitely a step up for me. Just having a start button back and being able to set the start menu background to be the same as your desktop background makes the whole experience far less claustrophobic. The settings to change that were quite deeply hidden away though; I'm surprised I found them.

Also, it sets the mouse-over highlight animation on the start button to be the same colour as the start menu, even if that isn't the colour of the taskbar, which made it clash weirdly in my case. But that's a relatively minor complaint on the scale of things.

Edit: Also, thanks to Hacker News, I knew to expect the "dark pattern" of not giving you an option not to login with a Microsoft account unless you try logging in first with an incorrect password and then it gives you the option. If it weren't for that, I think I'd be very irritated – but then, Apple are guilty of something similar when setting up OS X (I think it's the "Do you want to register your computer?" screen, which you can escape by pressing Apple+Q and it gives the option to quit, but how anyone is meant to guess that is beyond me.)
Mobile OS's also get user lock-in due to 1) people being familiar with how a particular OS works and 2) people not wanting to start over with apps.
Toyota recalls 885,000 vehicles: problem which could DISABLE the airbags
How about: "An army of robot CEOs could continuously maximize shareholder value?"
They had to pull the Windows RT 8.1 update because it left some devices un bootable.
Cloud at Cost: lifetime prepaid servers?
FWIW, Microsoft pulled the 8.1 RT update given the amount of bad installs:

http://news.cnet.com/8301-10805_3-57608310-75/microsoft-yank...
For some people, that "problem" is a feature.