skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Maybe those people should buy oil futures, or stock in energy companies then. That way, when oil prices rise, they can cash in on their investment and cancel out the higher gas prices. If they have some financial leeway, they don't have to be a slave to gas prices.
Just showed this to a math PhD grad student. Her eyes immediately lit up. She instantly determined that who ever made this, is in fact a genius.

Great idea and great implementation. I have seen so much LaTeX frustration. This will definitely ease a lot of pain.
Even more alarming: almost all the oxygen in North America is heading towards Europe and Asia at an alarming rate. What will we breathe?

Jobs like water.
What blunder are you talking about? HTML4.01 has DTD, XHTML1.0 has DTD, did it help in any way?
Tag soup is already there and will stay for a long time.
From all the specs so far HTML5 has the best description how to deal with it.
This article is from May 2004. I don't see how dated information like this is relevant unless there is a follow up study.
Ask HN:  How will the world change when the PageRank patent expires?
Most Web 2.0 sites including HN would benefit from PageRank or a variant thereof for example.

How do you think the world will change?
If you want to surf, move to Santa Cruz. There are more breaks for various skill levels and they are easy to get to. Pacifica is an easy break for beginners but there's only one, and there isn't much to the town. Half Moon Bay has even less of a town, is far away from everything, and has no beginner breaks.

My advice is probably controversial because Santa Cruz is far away from the action and considered weird, but I was much happier when I lived there than when I lived in San Francisco. It's not too bad of a commute from SC to places like Cupertino, especially if you are used to Atlanta traffic.
In life I've found three things I deeply care about so far: my wife, startups, and surfing.

Why not pick wife, surfing, and one 40-50 hour a week job. Start a family. Start your company in your late 40's early 50's with some partners--there are a lot of people who become entrepreneurs at that age. In the interim save your money and your health. I worry that your current "stopping rule" from work is disabling injury.
Clearly the customers of those businesses benefit.
I did that once back in high school. This was my primary source, and probably what you're thinking of:

http://www.geocities.com/spm_stm/Project.html
I can see that MS Windows on netbook and in China is effectively priced to impede competitors (Prirates and Linux respectfully). MS needs Windows to be popular to justify spending billions of dollars on it.

Regarding the last 4 points, I think companies like you having to ask the price, because then they know who you are and can sell to you - vs. you anonymously going to a website and leaving.
As always with this sort of writing the piece itself doesn't follow the rule it sets: there are many needless paragraphs spent ranting about laptop battery monitors.
I think this point doesn't get enough attention from people whose salaries are big enough to save lots of money. If you make $60K after taxes and spend $30K, then you can easily eat a $300/year increase in gas expenditures. Your savings rate goes from 50% to 49.5%, big whoop. But if you make $31K and spend $30K, and gas goes up $300/year, it's eaten up a whole 30% of your savings rate. And if you make $30K and spend $30K and gas goes up, you're screwed.
tens if not hundreds of companies are using it right now, but because they're not selling a product based on it there is no infringement.

You have to prove that, as long as you can't take apart some machine to prove infringement it is just another fishing expedition.

And even if you did, I'm not sure if that would constitute infringement (since you are not selling an apparatus containing the infringing item). Maybe one of the legal eagles here can fill that one in ?
Well yeah, but I mean you can't really choose you level of tax payments as an individual. I can choose to leave and not pay any, but I can't say "better cut back on my taxes this month to make ends meet".

I'm not complaining about my taxes. I think there are tons of things we could do to improve how we spent tax revenue, but I wouldn't say we are overtaxed.
most likely it won't change a bit
I never argued any of the points you refute. I merely pointed out that when you are poor (temporarily or not) and lack a car, you do end up paying more for stuff that you have to buy nearby.
1) "...no implementors" Just FYI, I had such an idea that I thought was far too weird for anyone else to even consider let alone implement. But someone eventually did it, while I dithered.

2,3,4) "exercise ... rest ... shorter work weeks"

Okay, let's start with the facts: if you believe the people who have made studies of intellectual work, nobody has ever achieved sustained productivity greater than seven hours a day. To meet a deadline, you can sprint for a few weeks at a time and achieve greater productivity. But that time has to be recovered later.

Startup people (and certain corporations, like Google) like to claim that they are working insane hours. But I suspect if you did a proper study, they would actually be spending more time than they think in non-work activities, or be working ineffectively.

By the way, this doesn't mean that startups aren't way more productive than established players. I've been there and achieving 1-2 hours per day of sustained effort can be a challenge.

In the case of YC startups, possibly the very young can achieve greater productivity than oldsters, although this must come at some cost since they have less experience. Or, it's possible that they were ridiculously efficient performers to begin with, so even at reduced capacity they're doing okay.

However, for startups, it might be necessary for them to work in a suboptimal and overworked manner, since a startup goes down so many blind alleys and has to meet so many arbitrary deadlines due to customers, investors, certain conventions and trade shows, etc.

5) "20% time" Don't base any decision on what Google says they do. It's all lies, or deliberate omission to make you assume the wrong thing. Most 20% time is spent working on tools for one's existing project, or in mini-sabbaticals with other teams. Furthermore it's usually taken in blocks, not as one day a week (although that does occur).

6) Even overworked startups fail -- so what? That is no indication that part time startups succeed.

I do know of a case where a startup did "succeed" (was acquired for a relatively small sum) and the founders had never even quit their day jobs. However this was in the middle of the big Web 2.0 acquisition frenzy and the founders had phenomenal contacts in the industry. You cannot rely on this.

In conclusion it sounds to me like you want freedom more than insane riches. So you should aim for some consulting niche or niche market, where the returns are too small to justify a full-blown startup investment, but there is plenty of revenue for an indvidual.
brave activists who lived through the difficult times I mentioned—Nazi Germany, Tsarist Russia, antebellum United States

Really? You're still convinced the Tsar was a serious tyrant? The Tsar was a little Debbie snack cake compared to his replacement. This is a good view of the deep memory hole into which the left throws every incompatible truth. In an article essentially advocating latter-day communism, he puts in a dig against Nicky, the nicest ruler Russia ever had.
The shareholders probably benefit more than the customers.
I did. (I am neither a grad student nor poor any more). It wasn't very convenient carrying large milk and juice containers and large serial boxes back on the bike and Atlanta is not a very bike friendly city.
I think the point of the diagram is to show where people decide to spend their money, that is, the money they actually get. What they get is after-tax. They do not get to spend the portion that is taxed away anyway so it's not on the list because it's not their choice.

By the way, don't you guys in the U.S. get a salary report for each paycheck you receive? Such a report in Finland would state your salary before taxes, after other deductions such as insurance, pension, union fees etc. each listed per row, and finally your salary after taxes. I think that producing such a report is required for all companies so at least in this part of the globe you wouldn't miss how much you pay taxes.

I must say that personally I really don't even know my salary before taxes unless rounded to the nearest 500 euros or so. All I'm interested in how much I get transferred to my bank account each month.
Yeah, that's spot on, it's a cultural issue. We've dumped increasing amounts of money to traditional education model to almost nil effect. But how do you change a culture that glorifies sports and celebrities and openly mocks anything related to learning?

So it's an "education" issue but not in the programmatic way that most people assume but in this broader systemic way can't be fixed with money alone.
Hey, thanks!

I was actually looking for a post where one of the founders discussed their metrics after taking their startup 100% paid. He was talking about their process and the amount of setback they experienced.
I think in a lot of cases the product is suitably different in a way you can't easily compare for every deal. Amount of support, client licenses, cross promotion, source code availablity, features.

For server hardware I've seen companies simply upsell more expensive more profitable model to the customer paying more.
It's also "poor businesses subsidizing rich businesses". Note that the rich business didn't have the ROI to go out and build the tool themselves; without poor businesses chipping in they wouldn't have the tool either.
I work/own(15%) in a small startup in the survey business. It's been about 10 months and the biggest problem is the time between the first meeting with a client and a signed contract(usually more than 6-7 months).

Another problem is that the survey business is very trust based. Most people don't have to skill to interpret correctly the raw data and the common statistical and sociological pitfalls, so they must trust our conclusions. Also, no clients want to listen to 1000 recorded calls. So we have to gain our client trust which is sometime difficult when you're a young company.

To answer more directly your question, I work maybe 15 hours a week(more when we finish data collection on a project) but only because I've automated about every portion of the business and used a lot of open-source software(like asterisk, jasper, etc.) My partner works a lot more but he's in charge of business development, but he has more shares(49%) and when the contract pipeline will be full, I'm the one that's gonna be busy. But he "gets" to have lunch with clients and play golf...

My free time is spent working another project/startup.

English second language here, go easy.
Even with list pricing, the price does not often represent the costs. For example from Apple:

32GB iPhone 3GS costs $100 more than the 16GB model, yet a 16GB microSDHC card only costs $50.
Interesting. For reference, rough figures from Finland:

- housing 28%
- transport 15%
- groceries 12%
- culture and spare time 11%
- personal well-being, extra studies, etc. 11.5%

Personally, I can confirm that living costs (i.e. rent or mortgage) indeed do chop the most off my salary but food comes already as the second, but then again I eat well :)
The people who run these chains have organized themselves to be good at dealing with municipal organizations. Same thing goes for design firms, creative firms, accountants etc. that deal with large corporations.

Sure, but the other factor is that they would rather deal with a few suppliers/clients than deal with a million.
Last chance to take startup executive compensation survey (and get results free)
> As much as I'd like to see big business curb their carbon emissions, there's simply no way they will be cut back by 75% anytime soon.

Individuals do not have any significant influence, the industries need to cut back. The industries only exist to make stuff for people to buy. I am going to present the obvious, naive solution that everyone seems to be ignoring. Cut back your spending by 75%. Every dollar you spend eventually becomes oil and is burned by big business. In the words of Don Lancaster (1), "It is both a valid and useful concept to think of 'using dollars' as 'spending gasoline'".

(1) http://www.tinaja.com/glib/energfun.pdf
Think of "using dollars" as "spending gasoline" [pdf]
Why the #$% Do We Swear? For Pain Relief
As a customer, I certainly did not benefit when Dell, a few years ago, moved their server support offshore, leading to that support team telling me repeatedly that I should "reboot Windows" when I was working on a firmware issue that would not even let me install Windows.

Well, Dell lost $200,000 a year worth of business for that, so....
Rosetta Stone Sues Google for Trademark Violation
I can't believe this is getting upvoted. He chooses a market where lots of desperate people got locked into the wrong choice and he makes it halfway bearable for them. This is called winning.
You wouldn't normally just charge $50k to an F500 and $5k to an SMB. You'd come up with a product line where the $50k price list item was more suitable to the F500.

The process of figuring out what combination of features, functions, packaging, and licensing parameters to assign which price points is the real nuts and bolts of product marketing. It's a huge chunk of what a real product marketing manager does.
It's also called "market segmentation" and "product line management".
These 'look how these 4 lines of Java translate into 2 lines of Scala' don't really convince me to start using it. It would be a nice to see a more structural example. Like a real world app. Anything available that is open source?
It's not a secret, every meetup organizer has to pay to run a group. From http://www.meetup.com/help/billinghelp/#Doesitcostmoneytosta...

There are 3 price plans:
* USD $12 a month for 6 months (a single $72 charge)
* USD $15 a month for 3 months (a single $45 charge)
* USD $19 per month

Each plan has a 30-day money back guarantee. Organizers can run up to 3 Meetup Groups with their subscription.

For more information on fees, check out: http://orc.meetup.com/archives/2006/02/the_lowdown_on_1.html
It's not a scam, because they are not cheating or fooling you.

It "smells" bad - but I can't logically find anything morally wrong about it.
You seem to feel some sort of moral obligation to price things as cost-plus. "This good cost me $90, 10% profit is reasonable, you can have it for $100."

You're upset by pricing based on value. "This good cost me $90, but it's going to save you $500 this year alone, so it is a steal at $250."

I guess my argument to you is that the goal is (naturally) to squeeze more cash out of customers. But the customers with more money are presumably getting more value out of the product.

For my current venture, we're selling software that helps keep students from dropping out of college. Our effects are measured in additional revenue to the school from students retained. Assuming we manage to provide the same percentage improvement to every school, the value we provide to an institution is going to vary widely. A small community college might have a third of the revenue per student as a private institution, and a small school might have a tenth as many students as a larger institution. My incremental costs aren't really all that much greater from school to school, but the value to the schools vary widely. It only makes sense to provide them different prices.
No, the business goal of "secret pricing" is the same as the business goal of not being the first to name a number in a salary negotiation. The person who gives a number first concedes an advantage to their counterparty.

Another practical advantage of not naming your price is that it ensures you get maximal contact with your market. If you publish a pricing matrix, some percentage of your market will (almost by definition) "price themselves out" of your product. You'll never even get to talk to most of these prospects. With "secret" pricing, you retain the ability to at least talk to them, to learn if it's feature/function you're lacking or if it's pricing, and to figure out what your pricing should be.

Note that there are a lot of tricks that PMs can use to get "secret" list pricing from competitors; you could use the same tricks to uncover prices as a customer, but it's much easier just to get on the phone and ask.
The first thing I learned in my first marketing job was never to use cost-based pricing. Nobody prices technology this way in the real world.
Google itself has largely abandoned PageRank as described in the original paper. It's only one of the signals used to rank web pages.

I don't understand your assertion that Web 2.0 sites would benefit from PageRank. And in any case, the patent is not what was holding them back.
You can usually get pricing on a first call with an account manager just by saying "I'm interested, but I'm not going to talk to you again without back-of-the-envelope pricing".
Not in the bible, but the talmud says that someone who "plays with doves [i.e. gambles on pigeon races]" is disqualified from being a witness (i.e. their moral character is suspect).

Gambling is considered a form a stealing since the person who lost doesn't actually want to give their money to you, they are forced to by the roll of the dice. In normal commerce you get something when you pay. (And don't say people enjoy playing, no one enjoys playing, people enjoy winning.) I believe, but am not sure, that lotteries are not considered as bad though.
"sellers either don't know value of their product OR they are always trying to exaggerate it."

You have a misunderstanding about value. Sellers CANNOT know the value of their product -- the value of their product is determined by each individual buyer given each individual buyer's circumstances. There is no "universal" value for a product. Products are traded for money all the time at various price points based on millions of criteria.

It's this misconception that's causing your problem.
Very much agree with the central point: shorter showers and economic light bulbs don't make any real difference. There is a point I would like to make though:

> The third option, acting decisively to stop the industrial economy, is very scary for a number of reasons, including but not restricted to the fact that we’d lose some of the luxuries (like electricity) to which we’ve grown accustomed, and the fact that those in power might try to kill us if we seriously impede their ability to exploit the world—none of which alters the fact that it’s a better option than a dead planet. Any option is a better option than a dead planet.

I'm a poor guy in a poor country, and I _will_ hurt anybody who tries to destroy the civilization we live in. Reform by destruction is never a good idea.

This being said, I am much more optimistic about political measures. Simply taxing pollution or setting even voluntary (but open and controlled) standards can make the difference showers can't.
Right. However I think the article is valid insofar as that the environmental problems caused by those 78% of corporations cannot be adequately addressed through end-consumer behavior. And that the impact of being "green" in your consumer behavior is quite negligble in the big picture.

Unfortunately the solution suggested by the article is the destruction of "intellectual, moral, economic, and physical infrastructures". How unoriginal. I was waiting for some scheme of energy/resource taxes which, if harsh enough, would surely influence the behavior of the 78% evil scary corporations.
Except they're not always for the same item, and somehow a 100 USD bid beats a 99 EUR bid?
I love people that try to make this a black and white case of scam.

If this is a scam, so is, say, charging folks 15 cents to send a text message.

In both cases, the end company ends up making a windfall of money. In both cases the customer knows exactly what he is getting and agrees to it.
It's Alive: Mac OS X on Non-Apple Hardware
Not much, PageRank was never the brilliant innovation it was made out to be. It was a nice improvement ca 1998 but Google has spent most of the last ten years throwing patches at the problem of people gaming the system. They've been the Red Queen, running faster and faster to stay in place. In terms of actually finding what you're looking for, I don't think Google today is much better than it was then, which is maybe twice as good as Alta Vista 1998. Search engine scalability has come a long way, but search engine results have improved little.
The Chicago rental market --- the third-largest metro market in the country --- is nothing like the NYC rental market. Brokers here are free, paid by developers and landlords. I've had extremely excellent luck working with them, landing 3 excellent places inside of a week each time, at Craigslist-competitive prices.

I'm sure there's a long-term play here in NYC and maybe SF and LA, and I'm sure that's a find bootstrap to a long-term offering nationwide, but I just want to chime in with the observation that the NYC rental market is an anomaly. I don't think we have the pain RentHop tries to solve in Chicago.
It's a little unclear from the chart. But if you have a mortgage, you pay lots more in taxes (the "public services" bit), household insurance, and in repairs.
I sympathize with what you are trying to do, but you are right when you say oversimplifications abound. I do Market/Business Intelligence for a living. I repeatably see the results of split tests change drastically after 100 results per option come in, I have even seen 1000 samples per option change. Human beings don't always fit into a nice standard deviation. A holiday, or the weather, or unknown variable X will just go ahead and mess everything up for you. Sure, if I had to make a decision based JUST on this data I would keep a baby instead of a puppy, but I wouldn't be nearly as confident as the article writer is.
Class is a lot more than income. It's a value system, participation in different institutions of civil society, behavioral norms, language used, dietary preferences, and more. Maybe it's different in the US but here in the UK, working class with money is still working class (I don't mean this in a perjorative sense, e.g. a working class man who makes his fortune won't suddenly start eating foie gras and going foxhunting), upper class is still upper class in poverty (e.g. an artistocrat who loses her estate won't suddenly start drinking pints of bitter and going on holiday to Ibiza). It's not 'til grandchildren that a family's class really changes. Even if the middle class becomes poorer, it won't lose its values (e.g. belief in education) that created it in the first place.
Try these, for starters:

http://github.com/robey/kestrel/tree/master

http://github.com/dpp/lift-samples/tree/master ( http://github.com/dpp/liftweb/tree/master )
Software Transactional Memory: Yay, Ney or Someday?
A long article about energy, energy-density, and how the current "green" solutions are unlikely to work.

No mention of nuclear energy. Because it makes too much sense to think about nuclear, one assumes.
Brilliant article. (I work in ATC R&D.)