skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The system most common in the US is a subsidy on the purchase of the phone, which for most people ends up working in a similar fashion. This is part of why the traditional phone contract here is much more expensive than the equivalent service in other countries, as phone subsidies make up a large portion of per-subscriber costs.

As most subscribers purchase subsidized devices, this system ends up working much like the system you described, but with a key difference: the up-front cost can be easily manipulated to serve the needs of carriers and manufacturers. At AT&T, the 4S is 0$ up front, the 5C is $99, and the 5S is $199, and that is the price the customer will see and reason about more than the monthly fee. This effectively creates a market for the 5C.

Things are getting complicated now that T-Mobile has introduced their à-la carte pricing scheme, where the service sold is decoupled from the cost of the device (whether paid in installments or up front). There you see a much less stark difference in the up-front costs between iPhones, and I'm curious about the sales numbers there.
Well, it appears to be for sale here:

http://www.virginmobileusa.com/shop/cell-phones/iPhone4-8GB-...

And, I've heard it remains for sale in China.
It's a marketing page. Would it be better to just have a login form like before? As long as Gmail itself remains minimalistic, what difference does a marketing page make?
Nexus 5 appears in Google Play store for $349
From the outside, the state of education in the US seems really worrying. Hard to see the wage gap closing any time soon with the way it sounds like their kids are being educated.
It's not the difference of opinion, it's the fact your post adds nothing to the discussion. This adds even less.
Not really. there is a much greater marketing push behind the 5c so the expectation seemed to have been more than the ones for " last years model"
There is no doubt that Iraq did have chemical weapons [1], that chemical weapons are classified as weapons of mass destruction [2]. There's also no doubt that the nebulousness of the term was used by both sides in the debate to steer conversation. The ridiculous assertion at one point that Hussein was trying to acquire nuclear weaponry [3] muddied those waters even more.

Iraq did have chemical weapons (WMDs). They had demonstrated a willingness to use them on civilian populations [1]. Iraq possibly still had active WMDs at the end of the 1998 inspections. Chemical weaponry tends to have a fairly short shelf life, though, and stockpiles need to be constantly replenished. We did not ever find WMDs in iraq after the 2003 invasion, but we did find the labs to make them and the evidence that they had been manufactured at some point. This was not news, because we knew that Iraq had WMDs. It was considered insane by most western agencies that a dictator as mad as Hussein was would willingly disarm; Willingly let the stockpiles he was known to have had of WMDs simply wither and rot. Every major intelligence agency believed that Hussein had WMDs.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_and_weapons_of_mass_destru...
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weapon_of_mass_destruction#Evol...
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niger_uranium_forgeries
What happens when a language has no numbers?
>Such posts require workers to think critically, yet graduates of local schools are often unable to read or do simple maths. This is why the company recently decided to open a new factory in Poland...

This was the solution? Seriously? Going through the hassle of opening up a factory on the other side of the planet across language and legal barriers all because the local population in Oklahoma didn't come shrink-wrapped precisely as ordered? Seems to me that a far more simple solution would be to train your work force, rather than externalize that responsibility. If the problems are really so systemic as they are claimed, then demonstrate some civic responsibility and see to it that your community gets its act together.
It appears they were suing the founder, Daniel Fung, personally and in addition to suing the company. The lower-court case is Columbia Pictures Industries Inc. v. Fung, 06-cv-05578, U.S. District Court, Central District of California (Los Angeles). The appeals court case is Columbia Picture Industries v. Fung, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, 10-55946 (San Francisco).

http://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/ca9/10-...
Richard Sapper & The Origins of The ThinkPad Keyboard
I don't have a problem with climate change as a science, or even something we should be concerned about. My larger issues are regarding the hysteria, and anti-corporatism that tends to go along with it.

For the record, I'm pretty anti-corporation, but for different reasons. I feel that given the problems people face in their individual lives, communities, and even in broader society, and the earth as a whole it comes down to, what can we change easily today, what can we change with a minimal impact tomorrow, and what directions can we take to accomplish a given set of goals farther into the future.

First, what are the negative impacts of global warming? Can these be addressed in a more localized level? If they need to be addressed globally, how can that be prioritized and accomplished?

Second, have the issues and solutions been prioritized by impact:cost analysis?

Third, given impact:cost analysis and prioritization, are there smaller steps that could have a larger impact:cost ration that can improve a problem in the near term that could have a higher priority?

It may seem really insensitive to take a step back and look at things objectively.. but the "OMG, my grandkids won't ever see real trees!!!" approach is just as polarizing and ineffective as a whole as the religious nutters.
Well, reading that as a 22 years old Polish male gives me mixed feelings. I was living in Poland and studying there for my whole life and basically I have experience basically in whole educational process here (preschool, elementary, gymnasium, high school and now pursuing BS degree at polytechnic) I can definitely say that polish educational system is not that great. Of course we have a lot of people contesting in computer science /maths /physical national Olympic which are very hard contests but it is still very small factor, those kids are often struggling with the same problems you would expect they have (harassment, bullying etc).

Polish educational system (especially nation wide maturity exams after high school and college education) are in my opinion decreasing. The maturity exam is getting easier and easier each year to allow more people just to pass. Sure, life is going to verify that somehow, but it also diminish value of this exam.

In my opinion people that are successful in polish school are only those who decide to not follow teaching process given at school but they work very hard on they own, in my opinion the main problem that is present here (and probably worldwide) is students assessment process, every student is taken to the lowest common denominator when it comes giving grades. People that (in scope of the class room) are doing fine, let's say B grade students think they are doing just fine and there are only few things to improve, similarly A students - they generally tends to think they have already reached the peak, when there is still unbelievable much things to learn.
> I didn't really know how the world worked, and it seemed to me like the system had been designed for the purpose of dragging me down to the level of the brutes around me.

A huge amount of education "policy" in the US is driven by the goal of closing the "achievement gap" between blacks and whites (for educational purposes, Asians are honorary whites).

Since when you improve instruction, high performers tend to benefit as much or more than low performers, gap closing is usually accomplished by enforcing a low ceiling for achievement generally.
Ok, so you're citing three pictures on a blog. I guess I'm supposed to be 300% more convinced?

But seriously: you're cherry picking one set of mean global temperature data, to dispute one graph in one IPCC report, for one line of evidence (of many). And your argument isn't rigorous or statistical -- some guy hand-drew some lines over the graphs, and asserts that it doesn't fit the data, even though the observed data lands pretty cleanly in the range of the models. And even if the models are off here, it doesn't invalidate the hypothesis of AGW. You can't win, even if you make a good argument here.

The reason nobody but climate denialists read these arguments is because they're pedantic and facile, not because there's a vast scientific conspiracy against you.
Jump Desktop + ConnectBot for the ssh tunnel works well for me. I use it to bring up the desktop on my TV via an Android "mini PC"; vi on a TV is an interesting experience :-) Also great for reading pdfs.
Bitcoin reputation capital marketplaces
Look into the wood whisperer. He has done a lot of Greene & Greene projects in fantastic detail:

http://thewoodwhispererguild.com/members/
As long as Gmail itself remains minimalistic

Gmail stopped being minimalistic a while ago...
And the article is almost 2 months old.
SimplyInsured (YC W13) Is Hiring Hackers - Change Healthcare Forever
Great article on the subject, which turned into the first in a series: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-08-27/why-walmart-will-ne... ("Why Wal-Mart Will Never Pay Like Costco", By Megan McArdle, Bloomberg, Aug 27, 2013 12:29 PM MT)

Key paragraph:

> In other words, Trader Joe’s and Costco are the specialty grocer and warehouse club for an affluent, educated college demographic. They woo this crowd with a stripped-down array of high quality stock-keeping units, and high-quality customer service. The high wages produce the high levels of customer service, and the small number of products are what allow them to pay the high wages. Fewer products to handle (and restock) lowers the labor intensity of your operation. In the case of Trader Joe’s, it also dramatically decreases the amount of space you need for your supermarket ... which in turn is why their revenue per square foot is so high. (Costco solves this problem by leaving the stuff on pallets, so that you can be your own stockboy).

And Walmart is the exact opposite of those things: It thrives on selling poor people everything they need and can afford, and they need lots of cheap labor to do everything a Walmart store needs to do on a daily basis.
The Lost Google Novel That Takes a Better Look at Tech Culture Than The Circle
I can totally use this as a marketing tool.
This is actually a pretty good idea. Not sure about its longevity as Urban Dictionary tends to have a somewhat practical use, like a crowd-sourced dictionary. This is pretty fun though, I'll play around with it for a bit and see if I get hooked. The layout needs a little work I think.
Most people don't need to think. Thinking isn't necessary to live in today's world.
I wouldn't be surprised if sales of the 5C are fine for US-style subsidized contracts, mostly because the psychology is different. Carriers do not present the total costs of their contracts, and customers are presented with two numbers: the monthly service fee and the up-front cost of the device. The service fee is the same between iDevices, leaving the up-front cost as the only apparent price discriminator.

It may be "stupid" for a customer to pick the slightly-cheaper 5C when considering total costs, but there is a market that places greater value on the extra $100 due at sign-up than on the superiority of the 5S over the 5C, and that is a market in which you and I do not take part.
A must read corollary to this is PG's "why are nerds unpopular"

http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html
The 5c seems to be such a basic case of decoy marketing, that it's astounding I haven't seen it being mentioned more often.

http://www.dmn3.com/dmn3-blog/decoy-marketing-it-works-and-h...
This is really similar to what Google Apps have used for a few years now.
I agree, or you lose hope in the process. You're not going to get a reply the first time or even the 100th time, but if you believe that it works and keep modifying your approach in the email, it can work. I've tried sending cold emails and I got a reply after the 12th time. I try to tailor the email to each person. It's more time consuming and I can't send them as often as I want, but I find this more effective.
You can use any number of remote desktop front ends for Mint/Ubuntu...rdesktop for starters. Beyond that, if your company's mail server is a recent version of exchange, or even MS's office365 service, you should be able to configure your email client of choice.
Congrats, HN crashed it :) Cool idea though, looking forward to checking it out when it's back up.
What are our options when it comes to desktop ergonomics. I'm familiar with where my elbows should line up with the desktop, and where my eyes should line up with the monitor, and I'm familiar with the discussions about sitting and standing, but what about monitor angle?

I've wondered about embedding the monitor in the desktop, angling the monitor back around 30 degrees like drafting table.
The huge problem is you are complaining about tools used by other developers. Pick up tools that work best for you and let others choose tools that work best for them.

There is no inferior tool in this world. You select a tool based on your need, affordability and choice.

The important part is not the tool itself, it is what you make with your tool. We remember Leonardo da Vinci for his creations, not for the tools he had used to make those creations happen.

As of now, the most popular cameras in Flickr community are Apple iPhone 5, Apple iPhone 4S and Apple iPhone 4. All of these are phone cameras. You can see awesome photographs taken with these cameras. If you make a rule to accept photographs taken only using expensive DSLRs, sites like Flickr will not exist. And the world will be little less beautiful without sites like Flickr. By the way, Flickr is also powered by PHP.
>> Those people have fiduciary responsibilities to their stockholders, not to your moral compass. This is something resolved on a societal level, not on the corporate level.

> This is the kind of ethical cop-out non-philosophy that's tearing then American environment apart.

It's possible to describe something without agreeing with it.

Responding to that statement the way you did is pointless. It's like getting angry at the doctor who tells you the cancer you have is almost certain to kill you.

What you quoted is simple observable fact, verified in many ways through history, and becoming angry at someone for stating it means you are angry and it is still a simple observable fact, verified in many ways through history.
Snowden breaks silence to insist he didn’t help foreign agents
I genuinely enjoyed school from primary sections to university, but now as a parent I feel more and more that the school is also there to act as a buffer between the parents and children and push society's values down the kid's throat, for better or worse. i.e. Sitting 8 hours a day in school is a way to make it normal to sit 8 hours a day in a cubicle. I don't know if I'd want my child to go through that and be able to do any corporate job he'd be qualified to, or try completely exotic ways but have him more limited in choice afterwards because he didn't get the 'training'
Gotask: write build tasks in Go
For a while now Google have been aggressively pursuing a marketing first approach to their product offerings, this is no different. The very fact Google have sneakily implemented ads disguised as emails into Gmail is a sign that Google are no longer a minimalistic company.

I think this is a case of someone making a big deal out of an obvious situation. Hardly an issue here.
His team created Skein and it was a NIST finalist for SHA3 so he obviously can audit code. He also I believe has a position this year at a university for a few months to work with students and their graduate projects in crypto engineering.
Let us not play politics on deaths, that too of Children. It is plain truth that the illegal invasion of Iraq by US in 2003, and the sanctions prior to that exterminated millions and millions of lives - on what basis can we defend loss of innocent lives?? On what basis can anybody defend violence - war? When will we see a civilized humanity and not war mongering nations and industrial complexes?
> There is so much liquidity in MSFT that it'd trade at a penny spread with or without HFTs. Thus, the only advantage is speed.

You're talking to an unabashed proponent of subpenny increments. Smaller spreads, more counterparties, faster execution -- these things cannot possibly hurt.

Note that I am talking about the concept of HFT. It's true that there are shady operators who abuse rules and undertake things like quote stuffing. I'm not here to defend any of that.

> So you got your order filled in 5 milliseconds instead of 6 milliseconds. So what? You're a person.

Still a net benefit even for just market orders. Limit orders benefit much more from HFT, particularly the stop-hunting variety. I think of the randomized price action as similar to quantum noise. No one really knows to the nth decimal what the price should be, but it wanders around where the money thinks it should be.

So that noise can help trigger your limit trade at exactly the price you want, whereas the false placidity of more granular enforcement is less likely to hit your limit.

Now let's look beyond just me and consider that some firms get more relative benefit from HFT than I do, and that these slivers of benefit sum across market participants.

> And stocks without enough liquidity to get to a penny spread? The HFTs don't like those stocks, because the "F" is not "H" enough for them to participate. The very nature of HFTs is that they prefer to participate when there is already plenty of liquidity.

Of course -- this should not be surprising in the least to anyone paying attention. The reason HFT practitioners participate is to attempt a profitable strategy. Liquidity is the side effect, not the goal. So while it's fair to say they provide liquidity to the market, or even that providing liquidity is the role they play, it's neither their duty nor their motivation.

Similar to how commodities speculators provide counterparties for nervous farmers, they are guided by the invisible hand and not by duty.
My second computer was an IBM XT 8086. That was the first time I played and fell in love with Rogue. Every time I grab a copy of Rogue nowadays for nostalgia's sake I'm left disappointed because I can never find the version of Rogue that I played as a kid.

My friend, your emulator has that version of Rogue. The kid inside me thanks you greatly.
Ask HN: Meditation healing powers?
I've always been interested by Buddhism teachings about meditation and in particular mindfulness meditation. Someday I would like to go to the Himalayas and Mount Everest to truly experience what they experience ( true happiness ).

But what is more interesting is that lately there is a lot of science supporting the change of the brain and happiness concerned with Meditation and compassion. I was wondering if anyone here tried meditation and experienced a change of life or more happiness or just a better quality of life?. Please explain your experience and techniques.
RDP (as of Windows 7 iirc) supports TLS 1.0 negotiations...
The summary is that Alex has invested in two companies that he'd like people to consider are the solution to a crisis he describes.

He also pooh-poohs a scheme by Peter Thiel which is a privately financed personal pilot project for 20 talented young adults a year by investing in their work without requiring ownership of whatever they come up with. He criticizes this plan for only applying to 20 people even though it was never meant to scale to the populace, it has always been about giving very talented young adults who are already working on something interesting an alternative to college debt. He then as a counter example points to a system with literally millions of students as input which has produced a student in Mongolia who was accepted to MIT, the same student who is mentioned in numerous articles as the great success of this system.

And we have his credentials as having cashed in with Reddit. Reddit it cool and valuable, but it's also not profitable after all these years, which should be considered when talking about things that are expected to yield some sort of economic value and not just a cash out for a property that never manages to create positive cash flow.
My critical thinking skills suggest that the factory work pays terrible. A common complaint by factory management is that they can't find work, but they pay people on the order of 12/hr for entry labor. Which is about the rate I was paid as an undergrad at a poor state university - the low man on the underpaid totem pole.
>Apple controls that server. They can send you whatever public key they want.

Isn't that also true (minus Apple) for the PGP keyservers?
It's a weird world when millions of units sold is interpreted as "no one is buying it".
I only discovered by accident that you could highlight a certain part of the page to track. This is a great feature and you should introduce some text letting the user know this.
I feel like I can reuse an old comment on mine for this :)

4 points by jlengrand 153 days ago | link | parent | on: Ask HN: Why can't I get started?

In the past year and a half, I started at least a different dozen projects. None of them is finished, or in a "correct" state. I would start something, to stop it half way through in order to start something else. I would sit on the computer to work, and start gaming a few minutes later. . .
But lately, within 3 weeks, I popped up my first android application on the store; without any prior knowledge on database, webscrapping or anything else I needed to build the app.
The difference? The users. A friend of mine called me saying : Hey, I do that every morning, and the current way of doing it is a pain. I am sure you can do something for me.
And magically enough, I got motivated, working my arse off to get the first version finished. Since it is on the market, I got 60 recurring users and growing. And this keeps me motivated. I put hours on the project, just because I get feedback.
So the conclusion: Do something that someone asked you to. Get your users first, start working afterwards. Don't be alone.
If you don't have users, then join a project that has already started, in order to code with someone and get some interaction.
I think that for a good 90% of us, what keeps up working is the passion for solving problems others have.
Hope this helps :)

The updated version is that I am currently having 700 daily users, everyone is really happy on the store (4.47/5) and I keep working on it daily.

Hope this helps :)
I'm really impressed - and curious - about Priceonomics' ability to come up with such well-researched and well-written (getting both right isn't always easy) posts on such a wide plethora of topics.

Especially because the authors don't seem to be their staff (I could be wrong here). What motivates the writers to come up with content that must surely take a lot of time to research & write?
Zope.cooties
It looks like alliteration and rhyme are winning components of a suitable word.
Researchers challenge Apple's claim of unbreakable iMessage encryption
Worse yet, the standard education indirectly discourages independent thought. It is difficult to reconcile the standardization of education with the wide diversity of students. There is simply no way everyone's intellect can flourish under a one-size-fits-all system.