skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Henderson conceded the cost of building a Volt will be expensive, about $40,000 per vehicle. But he said the vehicle will qualify for a $7,500 tax credit, which will reduce the vehicle cost by that amount for consumers."

http://money.cnn.com/2009/08/11/autos/volt_mpg/index.htm?pos...

Note that the figure is the manufacturing cost, not the price. The price will be higher.

Hybrids and electric cars are status symbols. The premium is more than you save in operating costs. At that price point, you can buy cars that are more effective status symbols, if that's what you're going for. Buying the Volt is a bit idiotic, and it'd be more idiotic without the subsidies that the rumored cost you cited includes.

The Volt is not fancy. It is high tech, but the appeal of most high tech gadgets is from the experience of using them. Driving a Volt will be marginally different from driving a Chevy Cruze.
A lot of organizations are completely hopless when it comes to identifying a "good language" (for the problem domain), too.
To be fair, I wouldn't be at all surprised if Jason doesn't have the foggiest idea if Matt is a high profile user. He (or rather, 37s) is like Kibo: mention that you had a bad experience from them online, and WOOSH! there he is.

Now, I'm not privy to what happens next, but assuming what happens next is an honest attempt to make things right, why wouldn't you want a company doing that?

Obviously it helps them to appear responsive and to get the "dirty laundry" more out of the public eye, but a private exchange is probably more appropriate for individual incidents anyway.

Where it goes wrong is when you have people from a company searching the internets and having something like a team of lawyers descend, or a lackey with absolutely no authority or ability to fix the problem. Or astroturfing. But the president, offering a direct contact to help? Assuming the damage is already done, I can't see any better way to respond.

[edit]: one more thing: He says, "sorry you had a bad experience with our support folks. If you had a problem I definitely want to hear about it."

The first thing there is "sorry". Not "We pride ourselves on...", or "What was the problem?", or even simply "Give us a call", but rather: "Sorry". This means a lot. The customer is not put in a position of having to defend why they had an experience; 37S is taking for granted that he/she is upset, and is trying to make it right. There's not an assumption by the company of "I'm sure we didn't screw up", but--if not an assumption that they screwed up--at least an open mind that they could have screwed up. yeah, they are known for great customer service, and for good reason. But to stay on top of that, from the company's perspective, is to constantly entertain the possibility that you could be wrong.
In this case, he's emulating the effect of an exception in a language which doesn't support them particularly well[1]: logging the exception message and then moving to a "rescue" or "catch" block which does necessary cleanup.

This is one of the few uses of goto which I find acceptable, and it's only necessary because these languages lack exceptions. Using goto for normal control flow, or even complex error handling, can be quite the nightmare. Particularly bi-directional gotos.

Given the situation though, that it seems he's avoiding exceptions out of habit or performance concern, I'd still use an exception in this case, rather than the goto, to protect myself from probable misuse and unpredictability.

[1] according to this http://stackoverflow.com/questions/324284/how-to-throw-an-ex..., objective-c has exceptions, but they're resource intensive and should be avoided.
I don't think that changes the fact that good programmers can make a bigger difference than good languages, assuming you can effectively sort for them separately like that in the real world.

Then again, using good languages tends to attract good programmers, so this mostly appears to be of academic interest.
Would you pay your friend for his comments on a social platform
Interested in hearing your views on this!Are opinions valuable to the point that you are willing to pay $s on it. Would you pay a physician assistant if she advices you on a social platform that you look unhealthy and might have symptoms of some disease!? I am giving away free ideas for any one who want to develop an internet social healthcase solution :-). I am interested in the general social acceptability of accepting comments or opinions as consulting!
Or put under government control, and profits go to the people for the length of the sentence.
That's a pretty bad analogy in any case: it's like you deliberately bought a house from Apple without being able to install any additional appliances, but they will sell you more appliances, most of which made by third parties, most of which are totally unnecessary and destined to be thrown away after a day or two, but all of which have hidden cameras in them. You can install appliances Apple doesn't sell you, but then Apple will refuse to support the appliances you already have in your house, the house itself, or your lawn chair.
(1 unread) Yahoo Mail, incubus_rockx
For the history of Tetris, check out the BBC documentary "Tetris: From Russia with Love".
Objective C or regular c gotos represent logic jumps which are hard to track by tools and humans.Debugging is difficult when code conditionally jumps around blocks instead of following a flow pattern easily discenible by reading the code. If good code is poetry code that uses gotos are google translations of poetry :-).Technically sound , emotionally funny
Google CEO questions Murdoch's online pay plan
Lose their right to free speech? What right to free speech? Centuries of jurisprudence have never recognized a right to free speech for corporations. Corporations stand to GAIN a right here, not lose one.

Here is my biased view of the issue. If corporations gain the right to unlimited direct political advertising, then they will have a much more powerful lobbying option than any they have already. This will give incumbent corporate powers increased influence.

It is the nature of incumbents to try to maintain their dominant position by fair means or foul. Therefore we'll see companies asking the government to erect more powerful barriers to competition. These barriers will often be bad for startups and innovation.

Obvious examples of barriers are expanded patent and copyright laws. However that is just the start. Suppose that the oil industry decided that the right president pursuing the right foreign policy would improve their profit margin by 5%. If they had invested 1% of their 2008 profits into the last election, that would have been more than both presidential campaigns spent together. Is this really how we want US policy decided?
Blueprint for a Quantum Electric Motor
Limestone Networks (rented dedicated server provider) switched to free incoming bandwidth like two months ago
I will bet you $25 that she will not vote in favor of corporations having the right to free speech.

And maybe you're right, but in this case all she did was point out that the plaintiff's argument would raise such a question and might result in an excessively broad ruling for such a narrow problem. what she did and what we might do in the future are two entirely different things, and you are applying your opinion about the latter to the former with no basis in fact. I know, I'm being pedantic here, but I think you're reading far too much into what she actually said.

Edit: I'm more and more confused about where you think she would be wrong anyway if the did vote this way, since you do don't think corporations should enjoy the status of legal persons. How would a suggestion that corporations don't enjoy constitutional protections infringe on the individual rights of those shareholders?

Presumably, even if DownWithPedro Corp is forbidden from advertising on the eve of the election, I could still write an impassioned screed on the same subject in my own name. to be honest, I think the reason this particular company (in the lawsuit under discussion) exists is not to make a profit but to protect its investors from the financial risks of being sued for libel if they released the film as a group of individuals without the benefit of limited liability.

If the company is later convicted ... make sense to claw back into previously paid dividends ...

I agree with most of what you say. We are not so far apart on the possible implementations. My beef is not with the basics of capitalism per se, but the fact that nowadays at least, arcane corporate structures are all too often employed to diffuse responsibility to the point of meaninglessness. In the Pfizer case I mentioned, one sales manager got 6 months of house arrest plus a $100 fine, which I frankly thought was just as unfair to Pfizer shareholders as to consumers. A few years back I thought Sarbanes-Oxley would lead to meaningful reforms in comporate decision making and risk management, but the events of the last 2 years have proved me woefully mistaken :-/
How to create an anonymous website?
Hi,

This is a throwaway account for obvious reasons.

I'm looking to create an anonymous site, which will need hosting and domain registration. The site will only need static files served from it. All ideally with no trace back to me. And that won't be pulled by an ISP at the first letter from a lawyer.
Does anyone know an easy and inexpensive way to do this?

Why?

I'm in the UK and some months ago signed up to a course in a non tech related field. Fees were required in advance so I did the usual searches and visited the premises before paying a sum of around £10,000.

Following the "start" of the course it very quickly became very clear there was literally nothing backing them up and no chance of actually learning anything or gaining a qualification. Through a series of calls, emails and letters I tried to resolve this and am currently undergoing legal proceedings to try and recoup some of the fees.

I have recently discovered there are at least several dozen people who feel they have been duped by the same company. Two years ago, through legal channels, they had them shut down and the owner blacklisted from running a company in the UK. They resurfaced a year later with the previous owner's son as the new director and have since begun re-advertising under a different name.

As they are a small course (with high fees) it would be very easy to get high in the search results for anyone searching for their name(s).

>>

I do not want to post anything slanderous or untrue online, just a warning to other prospective students that there is a very high dissatisfaction rate with previous students (possibly over 50%), with examples of the problems faced by some.

I would prefer to remain anonymous for the time being at least until other legal action has gone its course.

Thanks
a corporation is a contract

You are not completely correct here, because the corporation itself can enter into contracts with other people (and corporations).

I know the distinction first-hand because when we invented the license behind FairSoftware (http://softwarebillofrights.org/license.html), we had the exact same problem: we are building virtual corporations by using a licensing contract among participants. It's great, but it doesn't create an independent "person". As you said, it's just a contract between people.

Regular corporations are given special treatment by allowing them in turn to do special things. So they are more than a contract.
Don't agree with you 100% here. The product made the success possible. It was necessary, but not sufficient for success.
An interesting thing about this article is it makes me think about just how natural the english-fragments within mainstream (c-like) languages are.

Loosely speaking, a c-like English would be: "For each tree in the grove, paint on the stem"

But what would a Scala-like sentence be??? "trees in the grove - paint circles on their stems"???
The restriction is on the right of the political campaign to accept donations, not on the individual to speak. I believe that if an individual wishes to invest their own money to get their own version of the message out, they are free to do so.

The case in front of the Supreme Court is one where a company produced a special that would have been legal if they only worked with private money, but wasn't because they had some corporate money.
I still think Apple is trying to build a more favorable deal with Google. From Apple's perspective they have the most widely used mobile web device in terms of actual usage. Nokia, RIM, etc sell more units but the iPhone dominates mobile usage. Google is already the default search & map provider for the iPhone delivering tens of millions of users and probably hundreds of millions of ad views to Google. Perhaps Google Voice could be a default also? What if Apple were willing to either build the functionality into the core software or simply pre-install the GV app on every iPhone? Maybe Apple feels like they are becoming the real mobile gateway to the Internet and might deserve a bigger slice of Google's pie? I'm not endorsing this theory as good business but it makes a lot of sense to me.
Every angle on this story I've seen so far makes the VCs look completely irresponsible and the Skype founders look like moneygrubbing assholes. All these parties seem smarter than that, I wonder if we will ever get to hear the full story.
Craigslist is a fairly unfiltered portal into society. It is not based on relationships like facebook, it does not require more extensive seller verification like ebay. It is basically the newspaper classifieds in an online format with only a twinge of technology sprinkled in.

Craigslist is easy to use and the primarily text-driven approach means it is accessible to even users on dial-up connections (and although you might think this rare, I still know people in the US who have no viable high-speed Internet options and are using dial-up).

Fraud is, IMO, inherent in society. Manipulative and creative people have been taking advantage of trusting or less educated people since man first implemented a monetary instrument.

I think part of the make-a-better-Craigslist camp is similar to some of the confusion around the mint.com sale... Not everybody has the same motivations... I don't think Craigslist wants to be the best/safest/most-diverse online classifieds system. I think they want to be the easiest, simplest, I-can-go-home-at-night-and-not-be-bothered online classifieds system. There are many things they could do to be "better", but I don't believe the cost and complexity is worth the impact on the lives of the employees and the business overall.

There is a market opportunity for an improved Craigslist, but it's a little bit of an end-of-the-rainbow pursuit.
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To be fair, I wouldn't be at all surprised if Jason doesn't have the foggiest idea if Matt is a high profile user.

I'm actually pretty sure he does. This is simply based on observations of previous threads that I appreciate you may not have had as of yet.

Now, I'm not privy to what happens next, but assuming what happens next is an honest attempt to make things right, why wouldn't you want a company doing that?

I don't recall saying that I didn't. I think you are overreacting to my comment without fully understanding it. I'm a pretty big fan of 37S overall, mainly because I like their "we're building a successful company, not a buying opportunity" message.

That doesn't mean I'm going to give credit where credit is not really due.
I agree, I have been using it for years at my company and it consistently performs very poorly when you have a large mailbox (and it's unusable if you try to have it save messages for offline use). filters randomly miss messages, only to work when you run them manually, opening an email sometimes just hangs forever, it feels sluggish all the time...

I don't like the interface either, you can't tell when it's doing something CPU-intensive in the background like compacting unless you notice that it says something in the status bar, and the status bar changes when you do something, leaving you wondering what the hell it's doing.

I installed the new beta a few hours ago and it seems just as bad, just now it was sitting in the background and it made my brand new macbook slow to a crawl for some reason. so I tried telling it to do the new archive feature on my inbox, and it gave me a folder for the years 2005-2009 with an extra folder for 2000 with nothing in it, and the 2005 folder ended up with a bunch of messages from 2005-2009. awesome. it's still hanging for long periods of time just trying to open single messages. I'd say it's my fault for using a beta but the release isn't really any better.
lol true words.
sorry, my example wasn't meant to mirror too much the AppStore. I was only using the Apple names as satire. My point is to show what can happen when products are sold as services and/or when a product or service can be controlled after the initial transaction.

I have no hatred of Apple. I am a fan of their products and use them daily. I think they are doing pretty much what any other company in its position would do. If society doesn't want this sort of behavior, we have to regulate against it. That's how we control the boundaries of what companies can do.

I think this case of Apple/ATT/Google is a good battleground for fleshing out these issues before for example, the nature of things like books changes drastically. Apple isn't the only one testing these boundaries. We've seen the music companies try. Now we're seeing inroads in Books. What happens when every product becomes a service? What happens when every product must be extended through the same provider that you made the initial transaction?
Cool, I actually like stuff like this :)
Have you looked at NearlyFreeSpeech: https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/about/
Agreed. Money earned is a different game than money won.
Is it too inconvenient to keep your (including your cat's) food out of their reach, so they'll just go away?
So much of the commentary surrounding this contoversy is analogies & thought experiments, presumably because there's not a lot of precedent for cases exactly like this.

So here's mine - Imagine that, next week, Apple releases a new service called iVoice that all but duplicates the functionality of Google Voice. Transcribes voicemail & e-mails it, provides a full web interface (probably integrated with MobileMe), and obviously integrates seamlessly into a new iPhone OS update. If this happened, would it be a significantly different issue than Windows packaging IE with an install, but not Netscape? Can you imagine the hell that would break loose if Windows decided to become an IE-only platform?

I suppose the big difference is that they make the hardware too - but there's no way Dell could get away with making a hardware modification that prevented you from installing certain software. Does Apple really get to make all the rules here?
FCC to Mandate Net Neutrality for the Web
FCC Backs Google in Net Neutrality Fight
Thankyou - that is exactly the service I'm looking for - my google-fu is low today :)

I'll leave the post open rather than delete, just in case anyone else happens upon it.

Thanks again
A wise man once said:

Get in, get out - that's a O.G.'s classic
(pdf)
http://labs.google.com/papers/disk_failures.pdf
results start on page 4.
The upper class is not wearing FCUK, they're wearing Hermes. It's the middle class that's wearing FCUK.
There are enough competitors to ensure that Apple isn't stifling economic growth. The last thing we need is the government saying what policies any arbitrary company can or cannot have with regard to its products. That is a sure way to prevent economic growth.

Please don't encourage government involvement. SOX did a good job of killing the IPO market. We don't need more of that love.
While right, I don't think Apple's crossed any of the important barriers: what you agree to upon buying an iPhone is pretty much what you get.
"And yet it seems clear that deep down inside, I would love to try it."

You've already decided what you want. So the only real question is whether you can afford it. That should be fairly straightforward to figure out.

It's not necessarily a bad sign that it pays less. Jobs that suck have to pay more, and vice versa.
> It controls a critical communications channel for me.

I believe the critical difference, insofar as the FCC is concerned, is that the cellular telephone spectrum is a public resource and as such they can impose certain restrictions on the companies to whom they partitions slices of that public resource that fall outside of the normal bounds of anti-competition law.

I don't believe that cable is regulated the same way.
I don't see how transistors can be zero cost and at the same time be incredibly expensive.

Without the dummy devices you actually would not be able to pack them as close, so the dummy devices actually help achieve the goal of higher density.
The same places everyone else goes, actually. Macy's, the Gap, Nordstrom, AE, etc etc. Many of these mass manufacturers make great stuff - but the effect of their products can be greatly enhanced by getting it fitted by a tailor.

Since my route home after work passes through the transit hub under the downtown shopping core, I've taken the habit of just randomly perusing clothing stores on my way home. I do this about once a week - it keeps your eyes sharp for particularly interesting pieces of clothing that isn't just "yet another collared shirt".
perhaps, but it's about time they dumped M$ considering they acquired lotus in 1995!
"+/-" feature to show/hide threads.

Few times in a year there is an onslaught of "make hn as reddit" (which triggers the erlang effect). While this goes away after few days, there is a trickle of crowd who still persist on unimportant/distracting comments - which triggers more comments below. It would be great to hide these "unwanted" comments.
The documentary does not paint this man in nearly as good a light.
I'd love to see that source-code.
I agree with your assertion that Facebook choose to. However, it seems like it was the right choice.

There are plenty of times where the companies (and consumers, and founders) best interests are served by taking early money and focusing on growth rather than profitability, especially if their VCs are open to helping those founders take money off the table as they hit milestones).

my .02
ah, and it just crashed when I tried to delete a bunch of messages. it was trying to index them, using 60% of my cpu, despite the setting telling it to automatically delete them because they were more than 30 days old. which has been set for a long time, leaving me wondering why they are still on the server in the first place. I'm not sure I would recommend Thunderbird for professional use. I haven't seen it lose messages or corrupt my mailbox, but it sure is flaky for me.
Contract coding conundrum
Hi guys,

I am getting into contract programing and I have a problem. Supposing I quoted a price (via email) and the guy accepts, then I realise the work is harder than I thought and the code could be licenced.

Is it legal to say "Sorry I've changed my mind, I'm coding this on my own now but I'll give you a free copy when it's ready."

If not, is it legal to say "Sorry something has come up and I don't want to work with you any more" but then code it for myself?

I have signed no contracts, spoken on the phone once and exchanged a few emails. I've barely started the code and we first emailed about a week ago.
Wow, I've been thinking of building something like this lately fairly seriously. Why did you stop?

I wasn't able to find anything at mentorapp.org; has the hosting expired?

I'd love to talk about possibly collaborating on this (although I think it would be tough to monetize, so I see it as more of a "pro-bono side project"). My contact info is in my profile.
History of FORTRAN and FORTRAN II