skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The reason that people buy virtual goods is the same reason people buy most things. Cynics often comment that you are "buying air", as though the only thing people spend money on is rent, food, and the other basics.

Whenever you get a community of people together, economics is something that naturally arises.

I have run a successful virtual goods business in Second Life for over 2 years. The main products I have been selling center around video/machinima production, audience and performance interactions, and avatar animation improvements.

Just because the platform that my products are built on is a 3D MMO-ish environment doesn't mean they have no value. I often make the analogy that my creations are simply software programs that I sell, because that's what they are. Hundreds of millions of people worldwide have purchased software for decades. Our entire modern economy and culture is in large part based on software and the industries that operate in around around it.

When you look at communities in "virtual" spaces, whether they be full 3D environments or sites like Facebook, people find value in software that runs in those platforms. The value that they find varies greatly from person to person. Some find an application that helps them manage their friends list useful, while others have no problems spending a few cents or a dollar to send an image of a funny puppy to someone they care about.

Another kind of virtual good is music. I used to occasionally torrent music if it was something I wanted. I was also broke then. However, it gradually happened that I have transitioned to buying almost everything I want online. For me, and I think for others, it is so much easier to find and buy a song on iTunes than it is to stab wildly in the dark on torrent sites to find exactly what I want. The same has held true for tv shows and movies. When I was broke, I torrented. The quality was hit or miss. But since I bought an AppleTV in 2008, I just buy the stuff I want to see. Its always high quality, and its instantly there.

Virtual goods are really no different than anything else people spend money on. For women, maybe its fashion. For guys, gadgets or cars. None of it is stuff we need to keep our carbon-selves running, but they're stuff we want. And if we have money, we will pay for it if its easy.

There's a very good economic lesson that is often missed by people. If you make it extremely easy for people to spend money, they will spend money. No complicated signup forms, no thinking required, and make it as inexpensive as possible. The more barriers you put between the customer's money and your pocket, that's all the less money you will be getting from them.

Making money is easy. Making something people want can be a bit harder. So concentrate on building something useful and easy to use, and make it easy to buy.
New Yahoo / AT&T Deal Means New Competition in Many Newspaper Markets
Graph of connections to Max Baucus (lynchpin of healthcare reform)
I was 5 when we got ours, and while not many of my friends started programming I was certainly not unique.

More kids should get their hands of a programming environment when they're that age.
Amazon bought zappos because zappos is a top notch shipping, fulfillment, and logistics company.

But so is Amazon, and they even already resell this as a service.

Honestly, I thought Amazon and Zappos were the same company for a while. They both fulfill orders reliably, they both have good customer service, and their pages look a lot alike. Now they are, so technically I was just predicting the future. (Now to get a blog!)
When you buy Zappos, what do you buy?
How true.

And it has been said many times, too. Perhaps this iteration will be more successful: people may want to listen to pg more than some random guy.
Do Fruit Flies Have Free Will?
Amazon could definitely use Zappos' brand recognition in the shoes/fashion market. Amazon tried entering that market under its "Endless.com" brand: http://www.endless.com/ (I don't know how successful it's been.)

Amazon would love to grow into every vertical market, but in branding terms many people still think of them as selling books and media, and maybe electronics. Buying a recognized brand is a significant shortcut, especially if that company can benefit in turn from Amazon's technical infrastructure.

Full disclosure: I worked for Amazon from 2005 - 2008.
>AIs don't have a conciousness (and probably they never will)

"Computers can't beat men at chess (and probably never will)"

You're making a very strong (and in my opinion, unjustifiable) claim. You really shouldn't state things like that without backing them up.

That said, it is very silly to suggest that robots today need a code of ethics, because today they are certainly not conscious.
One of my articles got linked here, I found it in my referrer log.
From the about page: "Now Gigablast has grown to several, highly-talented employees" So not quite one guy.

That said, after having read some of the comments on the page I think we should cut the guy (or guys) some slack. As jacquesm's link points out 55% of users in a double blind study found gigablast better than Google. We're talking about a couple of guys matching, and maybe beating, one of the worlds biggest software companies at their own game. A couple of guys matching Google's thousands of employees and thousands of servers.

In a word I think they're absolutely fucking awesome and deserve total and absolute respect.
I think you're conflating on logic bugs and programming bugs, so to speak. I can see why Hall would say that a real AI that would do bad things through its conscious decision procedures should feel remorse or be considered psychopathic. But if he's talking about "AI" today, then yes, he's clueless.
Very excellent communication to employees, and precise, as well: "Your job is just as secure as it was a month ago."
There exists no "AI industry", at least not strong AI (i.e. artificial consciousness).
I find it vaguely surreal that I work at Amazon, yet I read about this on TechCrunch before I found out "officially".
I agree that derogatory nicknames automatically lower the respectability of an argument. However, writing "loose" when meaning "lose" hurts credibility even more in my eyes.

(I know this type of pedantic behavior isn't ideal, and I've never made a grammar-nazi posting before, but I've seen multiple usages of "loose" and "loosing" on HN lately).
You need a little more than familiarity with programming to get started with a JS toolkit.

Most JS toolkits are heavily biased towards the browser environment, so you also need some knowledge of the DOM and the host environment provided by browsers for JS execution.

That said, if you feel like experimenting, I'd recommend using Firefox, installing FireBug and reading http://docs.jquery.com/Tutorials:Getting_Started_with_jQuery . That should get you started.
It was a horrible mistake. But they have said that they will never do it again. Looks like they have learned their lesson. You can give them a pass for now ?
For definitions of luxury where luxury equals utilitarian? This seems counterintuitive, can you give a better example? (not that I disagree).
Harvard never got free hot breakfast on weekday mornings. There is a nearly $800 a year meal plan, from which hot breakfast was just eliminated without changing the cost. Very different than losing the free coffee.
Yes, in the short term it sucks that they deleted e-books, but they are doing it to make sure that in the long term, they can continue to provide a wide variety of e-books to their customers. They have to keep the publishers happy to do this.
Welcome to the world of publicly traded companies.
I know John Stillwell, and I think his opinions and beliefs are being mis-quoted by being taken out of context. I think he is right that ideas of number and space are fundamental, and I think he's right that they are being neglected, which is a scandal. I agree that "New Math" was a complete debacle, but I think it's not relevant to this question.

I agree that math is like a language, but I disagree that it requires the student to put together a large and messy collection of terms and concepts. That may be the way you view it, but it's not the way I view it, it's not the way I teach it, and I get pretty good results in masterclasses, and more generic classes, by helping the development of the web of inter-related ideas, without large numbers of apparently unmotivated definitions.

In short, I think Stillwell is right, and I think you're missing his points because you appear not to have read his original works.
Do you think they really care about accuracy?
I was looking for the same WHO statistics you refer to while you were writing your reply. I see we both found the same landing page, but you are referring to figures that thus far neither of us can find on a specific webpage giving figures for the United States. Where did you get them?

Using some of the keywords you kindly provided, I Google and see lower mortality figures for the United States, by more than an order of magnitude, I think. It also appears that most cases of malnourishment in the United States are secondary to disease states. Remembering that my dad was paralyzed and unable to swallow for the last six years of his life (he was fed by a gastric tube, with the help of a relative) brings to mind examples of people who could starve to death in the United States, although they wouldn't be able-bodied people who were not eating because they can't afford to get a meal.

http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/mor_oth_nut_def-mortality-...

(The numbers I am finding on the above site, which claims to be based on WHO statistics, don't back up the numbers in your reply, which evokes my curiosity about how we can a primary source for the official figures.)

http://www.answers.com/topic/protein-energy-malnutrition-3

http://www.worldmapper.org/display_extra.php?selected=411

http://books.google.com/books?id=L5fGm_7ThKEC&pg=PA496&#...

Let's keep following up on this. I'll ignore your invidious personal criticism [smile] in the interest of getting the facts on the issue. What magnitude of problem are we talking about in the United States by the standard WHO definitions, which I accept as an authoritative count of deaths by malnutrition in each country? How many of the United States deaths are secondary to neglectful caregivers of minors (a problem I acknowledged in my first reply) and how many are secondary to adult medical complications (an issue we both forgot in previous replies)? How do the United States figures compare to specific countries elsewhere in the world?

It sure ought to be possible to get the WHO figures directly from the Web, but I'm still searching. The keywords in your reply were helpful for finding other sources.
Not to be cheeky but if you're familiar with programming and JavaScript I'd start with the jQuery source:

http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.3.2/jquery.js

Be patient and focus on understanding one part that your are familiar with - perhaps handling AJAX requests.
The undergraduate population often sound like a bunch of snots, which .. they probably are by and large. But that's true at every university. Rare indeed is the undergraduate who actually has something worthwhile to say. As a grad school and research institution though, Harvard rocks. Every single department has one or more faculty who are at the top of their respective field. Think about that statement, it's pretty amazing.
"3) We want to align ourselves with a shareholder and partner that thinks really long term (like we do at Zappos), as well as do what’s in the best interest of our existing shareholders and investors."

I read that as there was pressure from a shareholder for the short term. Some board member was pushing for an exit.
You have to respect a company that doesn't try and squash communication, but instead releases a letter to its employees to the public blog like this.
My only point is that I hear a lot on the news and from people I associate with about how gas prices are too high, and they tend to blame it on the government or on corruption. We hear all this talk of America's 'dependence on foreign oil', but very few individuals stop and ask themselves why that all is.

The behavioural change I'd like to see, is for people's reaction to high prices be "well I'm not going to buy gasoline, then". Granted, gasoline is almost a necessity in some situations. But if people really did care about their dependence on oil and the high prices, they wouldn't use it for non-necessities. If that happened, OPEC would get the message REAL fast.

edit: So for instance - you mention that those who live in rural areas shouldn't have to rent city center apartments just to get around. Well... everyone I know who lives in the city (downtown) own cars and drive them everywhere. I'd like to see more people question each trip and say, "do I really need to take the car?" I walk to the grocery store, and it only takes me a 1/2 hour, if that. Most people would take the car, but hey - I don't ever have to pay for gasoline unless I go out of town.

And I'm not talking about disabled people, or delivery companies. I'm talking about the average person - if they want to complain about high prices and government corruption - they should walk. It'd solve the obesity epidemic, too.
Ample Uses of Tickets
Congrats to Zappos. This deal seemed to fly under the radar. I think this is good buy for Amazon as long as they're leaving management in place.
I'm with you.

Thanks for providing the ceo letter link. There's an HN link right below this one on the front page, I'd upvote that one.

As for the purchase, I hope they continue to have their customer tours in Vegas. I was planning to take it one of these days.
This is why our team meetings are only 15 minutes long, and usually shorter. Any discussion or questions get done offline by only those people that are directly affected.
Reading this email or the one by Autodesk's founder (http://www.fourmilab.ch/autofile/www/chapter2_22.html) sometimes leave me with questions on why most people can't take this more "like-a-person" approach in communication.

Most letters from top management that i know of are usually boring and i rarely understand the whole information (usually i ditched it far before i can get through the whole formal languages)
Software for hacking Oracle database coming out next week
My understanding is that this was the case. I've seen some articles indicating that Zappos has struggled to meet the short-term financial goals of some of the investors, while staying aligned to its long-term objectives. So somebody was wanting to distribute their capital gains to their LPs.
Spotify Set to Take America by Storm
The SEO and Usability checklists are in direct conflict, unsurprisingly.

I see very little value in this post. A certain quantity, but very little quality.

Don't vote up trash like this.
I used to work in IT for a Taiwanese manufacturing company that sold to Walmart & Sams Club, with factories primarily in southern China (near Guangzhou).

Spent a fair amount of time in these factories. First thing is, no factory makes everything themselves, it's a huge network of factories and a buddy network of factory managers who supply varying levels of material to one another. That's part of the reason it's difficult to ascertain the true quality of life of workers associated with making a product, because down the line many factories go into making one finished product.

I can say from my own anecdotal experience labor conditions are mixed bag. The light industry factories seemed to have safer conditions, and my companies factories were pretty decent. One iron processing factory I saw down right scary, imagine vats of molten iron at ground level, and operators in bare feet.

One counter-intuitive thing I saw is that workers will often protest not when worked too hard, but when worked too lightly. Many factory workers WANT long hours so they can send more money back to relatives, or increase their personal savings. At least when I was there five years ago, it could be dangerous for a factory to be light on hours, as employees will quit and move to a factory where there are more hours to be paid. With the economic slowdown, this might have changed.

What I'm getting at is it's hard to generalize about labor conditions in China, so saying things like they are all "slave labor" isn't really useful. You have to look at the specific circumstances of that companies manufacturing chain, if you are able.
If you saw a drowning person, would you ask them to be your slave forever in exchange for throwing them a life preserver?

How do you suggest we remedy this? The OECD gets together and forces a minimum wage on the developing world?

That might work, but I think the shortest, fastest and simplest way out hell is let their economies grow as fast as they can.
they're normally written by lawyers and advisors. To partially answer your question - you should check out the SEC guidance on this kind of thing - it's not easy telling people you're about to engage in a massive deal that impacts lots and lots of people with lots and lots of money.
Happy PI approximation day (in Common Lisp)
So everything you dislike about the site could be fixed by a one-time contract from a good graphic/UI designer? Sounds like a compliment to me.
Do you really consider it a train wreck? There seem to be some useful new features.

The tragedy, in my opinion, is that we don't have more to show from a decade's work by so many brilliant people. C++ is straitjacketed by ISO standardization.
Penny wise and pound foolish, on the part of such companies...
Do you owe anything to the people who are just desperate to get out of the same crappy apartment with 12 other relatives?

The local vs remote worker argument works when there's something inherently preferable about the local worker, like you and him are cousins or form the same tribe, or something like that. But nationalism aside, isn't everybody entitled to the same opportunities?
They definitely deserve some merits.

IMHO, though, i think the normal search engine becomes more like a marketing game now. Same as "most people prefer something other than Coca-Cola in blind test", yet they are still the biggest seller by far.

Unless something is changing in the landscape that affect users behavior (like social web - led by FB, Twitter etc), i wouldn't expect anyone can win against Google in this game without MUCH higher value propositions.
Best places to find python/django developers
We're looking for python/django developers over at Analyte Media (http://www.analytemedia.com), a start up out of Chicago. We've been getting a lot of Java/C# developers responding off of CL, but are hoping to find people with a passion for python/django and some amount of real life experience with them. Any idea where these folk are hiding out on the web beyond the usual job posting boards and python dev lists? Many apologies if this has been asked before. Thanks for your help!
Windows 7 Released To Manufacturing
DSLs - 'faith no more' reloaded
DSLs are not the new kid on the block - it seems they are among us for a long time ...
Facebook: Share Photos and Videos Anywhere You Have Email
I think he actually argued that men might have a different distribution for mathematical ability than women. Specifically, he suggested men might have a higher variance in their distribution, meaning more men in the tails at both sides. But the distributions would still have the same mean. So men are not 'better than math' than women -- there would be more dumb ones and more smart ones, and less in the middle, effectively.

This phenomenon, by the way, is commonly observed in other species for various genetic traits. From an evolutionary perspective, it makes sense for the males to "roll the dice" and have a higher variance for many traits. For example, one superstar male frog can have many more offspring than one average male frog. But one superstar female can really only have as many offspring as the average female. That's a crude over-simplified explanation, but the idea is sound.
It seems a good fit, but I always do worry when great grassroots-type great-culture great-customer-service company gets acquired by a much larger company (even if it's Amazon, which is much better than others - I worked there, I know). It's very hard to avoid the intermixing, and the bad things flow much better than the good.
Thank you.

I just forwarded this to my latest ex-girlfriend to help her understand one of the major causes of drama while we were dating. :)
Not so good if you have a great idea on Monday night and want to stay up to work on it.

A "regular schedule", for me, is the worst possible thing for productivity.
Totally agree with you here. I wonder if any of the management team read Steve Blank's "Four Steps to the Epiphany" book. Cuil sounds like the exact example being outlined there.
How Barack Obama squandered the economic stimulus
I'm not so sure.

Search is funny that way, you know instantly if a search engine is 'good' or 'fluff'. Most engines out there today are very comparable wrt to the quality of the results, some are better in one domain, others are less susceptible to spammers but overall there is not that much difference, it's comparable to different tastes in icecream. EDIT: once you've got a user they're not likely to switch away from their favourite flavour, it's what they're used to.

But if some group came along that quietly and without fuss presented you with a search engine that had exactly what you were looking at on page one every time I think the current crop would fade faster than you could say 'altavista'.
Google building 3D hardware boost into Chrome
The Chinese make the technology we do. But we make new stuff. So, the race is on. (That said - go to your local research university's Bioengineering department and tally up the various races. China's going to pwn us. Bad.)
Sure. I can understand that. I am no expert in legal system, but, is it illegal to send out something that is legally correct AND/OR maybe accompany by another letter that practically is more human-readable?

After all, what's the point of the letter if no one is reading it?
Reaching Out to the World With Twitter
Is a dog a biological robot?

If I program a robot to act like a dog, and express pain when kicked - does the robot actually feel pain? Does the biological dog actually feel pain?
That only works if everyone starts their workday at the same time.
"Meetings suck." Preaching to the choir a bit? I'm not impressed. Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM|Microsoft|flavor du jour. No hacker every got shot down for saying meetings suck.
Examples of Extreme Minimalism in Web Design
I loved the video from Jeff Bezos explaining Amazon's beginning:

"It was a great moment when we would examine every order coming into Amazon. And it was always a family member placing the order. And the first order we got from a stranger, I remember, there was probabaly 10 of us in the company. We were all gathered around after the bell rang, looking at the order. And we were like 'Is that your mom?', 'Thats not my mom!'. And thus, it began."

Can totally relate to this feeling.
I'm all for fruit flies having free will (I go back and forth with humans having it fairly often even) but an experiment like this would require that we have absolute control over all inputs into the insect's brain and upon sending a series of data vectors into its brain we would need to be able to surmise whether the output was random or deterministically patternized, and if so how much.

I think an experiment like this would also need to account for the fly's past experience and would need to control that to be exactly like another's.

It also needs to be temperature controlled (since most creatures come equipped with heat sensors) and even things like how quickly the fly flaps its wings can change conditions such as those (especially in such a tiny space).

It would seem as though the scientists were less trying to answer an age old philosophical problem and more trying to answer how predictable a fly is (i.e. how simple its decision process is).