skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
People pay more for "bootcamps" than they do for "seminars." So even pure information product sellers like stock tip newsletter operators have always known that packaging and format plays as big if not a bigger role than the content itself.

Anyhow - lets look at the key elements that go into successful information / content selling.

1.

Advertising.

Advertising has always been the chief device. Information product sellers like Tony Robbins made their fortunes on top of aggressive advertising!

Google et al have covered this online ad model well. And companies like InMobi are doing well to cover the ad model for the mobile market.

2.

Direct Distribution

What of folks who couldn't advertise? New comic book publishers had a hard time selling their books . Until Phil Seuling came and developed a direct market distribution system in 1970s for comics by connecting specialty shops. And organizing Comic book Conventions.

Amazon - by getting kindle into the hands of millions - has created a direct distribution device for books.
iTunes has created a nice marketplace for music.

But I see a huge opportunity over here for someone who can create an entire ecosystem for direct distribution for other types of content. News. Blog posts. Art work.
"but have the ideas expressed there had much influence on language design?"

yes!

Every imperative(I include OO in "imperative" here) language that allows local computational state, and every functional language trying to maintain referential transparency (and everything in between) embody those ideas, so yes the ideas of dealing with time in computation by local state, streams, pure functions etc are influential in all language design.

"Is Rich's presentation representative of some ideas more advanced than that section of SICP?"

This is a vague question, (what exactly do you think is "more advanced"? ), but to (try to) answer it, (imo) No, not really, not at the level of ideas.

Haskell or Erlang is, for example, as advanced, in terms of ideas, (or more advanced, depending on your pov) than Clojure, for e.g

Where Rich has done great (,brilliant!) work is to turn these ideas (and others- see his bookshelf!-,e.g many from lisp, e.g meta programming with macros) into a workable, practical, and beautiful language which interoperates with tonnes of existing libraries.

The combination of deep theoretical insight and a ruthless focus on practicality is what (I think) makes Rich Hickey unique.

The one aspect of Rich's talk not covered is SICP is the use of persistent data structures, but if you have worked through SICP, you'll instantly understand why this is a great solution and what the potential tradeoffs are.

The problems (and advantages!) of state in programming languages and its interwining with time (and therefore concurrency) is clearly laid out in SICP Ch. 3. (Eg. Section 3.4 is titled "Concurrency: Time is of the essence", 3.4.1 is "The Nature of Time in Concurrent Systems" while the language is very clear, it needs repeated reading and deep thougt (imo) to get a good grip on the ideas).

Every functional language(e.g Haskell) deals with the "functional" view of time. Every language that allows modelling of local state and loss of referential transparency(all imperative and OO languages afaik) choose the "other path" (some would say the dark side!) of dealing with time in computation.

Let me repeat, my post above was not claiming that Rich's talk is valueless or that he is only repeating what SICP said.

My point was (only) that a good understanding of Chapter 3 of SICP would be a great background to understanding this talk. Eg: You will understand exactly what he means by OO needing to "stop the world", even without seeing the details on the succeeding slides.
Experience Fast Mobile Browsing with BOLT Mobile Browser | Tech Bucket
See the 'tux3' linux "phased tree" filesystem which was implemented (and then quashed by NetApp) some time ago (2001):

http://www.mail-archive.com/tux3@tux3.org/msg00035.html

I assume that all "snapshotting" filesystems (NetApp, ZFS) have a similar structure?

Edit: ah, tux3 is alive: http://tux3.org/, it was tux2 which was quashed. Cool.
Automated generation of machining sequences
How do you own music?
Feature requests go here ⇒ http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=363
Book Review: Search User Interfaces
Jetstarasia.com - Directory
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Well, if you have investors outside of the founders. ;-)

But, depending on the investor, I can't imagine they're quite like working for The Man, who conjures up really unhappy images of cube farms and dress codes. I guess I can't really gauge the investors of Mint; maybe they were that bad.

And when people say they have their family to worry about, and I ask them to elaborate, starvation is brought up in many cases. Maybe it is just hyperbole in an attempt to preempt my probing.

But this opens up another probably off-topic discussion on the bounds of beholdenness, and how much of that is self-fulfilling.
London Moscow Translations
A company providing Russian interpreting services
I was amused to see this comment on HN, a site run by Paul Graham.
Data Monster: Why graphics processors will transform database processing
It should be checked whether it's OK or not.

You know. Fair enough that is an idea for a feature (personally I think the community style moderation seems to work ok); but demanding it isnt likely to get you anywhere. Just a comment.
re: all the zip suggestions. Apple already provides a solution:

"Internet-Enabling a Disk Image

Although all disk images can be transported through the Internet, users need to open them, retrieve their contents, and discard them. An Internet-enabled disk image automates this workflow. After a user downloads an Internet-enabled disk image from a network using a web browser, the image is automatically opened, its contents placed at the user’s download location, and discarded (in the Trash). This improves the manual install experience by performing a few tedious tasks for the user.
"

Too few devs seems to be aware of this.

Anyway a custom installer for Firefox is a backward idea.

= tmk =
Famous african artists directory
Need of famous african artists directory, then click to africanartnow.com
Forgot the link:
http://developer.apple.com/mac/library/documentation/Develop...
What is the last time that a feature that was requested on the feature request page was actually implemented ?
50 Cent's 10 lessons for success in business - and in life
prettier user interface and waaaay better marketing

a prettier UI and waaaay better marketing are clearly not to be poo-poo'ed as "no innovation", apparently.
There's Point. If they were So happy doing that, they don't have to keep on saying it.
"two posts of mine"
They may be your posts, haven't checked the ToS, but I'm pretty sure HN claim full editorial power and so can edit them how they like. The only problem I'd have is with that not been clear - when they edit they should add a "edited by X from an original by Y" type statement.
If the submission is not well-written enough for people to read properly, whose problem is that?
Thank you so much for writing such an informative post. Its no doubt a useful one.
<a href="http://www.rentcar.ro>; Rent a car</a>
Why have you flagged it? This seems like worthwhile discussion to have, at least once.
Google Launches DoubleClick Ad Exchange
> you are either doing site-effects (evil)

Uh not necessarily, and even if you are there are many situations where it's interesting and useful.

> or using variables inside your closure, so you might as well name it, too

Does not follow.
Seducing a VC: Interview with Kleiner Perkins' Randy Komisar
Claude Shannon -why prefer the bit to the dit, nit and Hartley?
Yep. This is cool, but effectively the opposite of useful.
Because for some silly reason meta discussion is taboo on HN. You can talk about any other site here but you can not talk about HN.

Personally I think that meta discussion should simply have a place out-of-band, instead of being suppressed.

Which of course you are supposed to ask for on the 'feature request' page where it will then be ignored...

HN is a great community but it does have its flaws (like any community), the weird thing is that there is this tendency to pretend that it is perfect by discouraging discussion of the flaws. I'm not sure I understand the background of this, but since the benefits seem to outweigh the costs I take it in stride.
I think the main reason is exactly this: the local telcos don't earn money on voip telephony. India is looking to increase income - being able to bill phone calls is definitely desirable for some people.
It's not on my Kubuntu and I'd be a bit upset if it was - why include it? Especially as the major browsers have gopher support.
In Britain international criminal lord could sue Interpol for libel and win.

I think that only sensible way to deal with the libel is to allow it. It's already that way in reality. If someone spreads a rumour about someone else to hurt his reputation the source of gossip is impossible to track and impact can be devastating despite all the clarifications and court judgements. Explicitly allowing for libel could do the same to impact of false claims that possibility of posting anything on the internet did to perceived credibility of any unverified information.

Those laws might be fine when small amount of influential people could effectively disseminate information but in the viral age of today, when false information written on someones anonymous blog can sweep across information agencies all over the world the libel laws effectively serve only trolls and powerful organization to fight journalists.
Woobius Eye: A few good men
Google speeds up Android with new release
Google has updated Android to version 1.6 colloquially known as Donut bringing with it a number of additional tools to help enrich the mobile experience.
C Programming in Easy Steps (book review)
You have a standard domain name (as siblings note) and run a gopher server via that name. You'll have to have your own server (or virtual server) as I can't really imagine any hosting company allows gopher servers?!
Getting to know .net build tools
I've recently been looking into using a build script to make building/testing my code easier. I've also wanted to implement a CI build server and using a build script makes it a lot easier to implement.
This is true for me. My Kindle2 has been gathering dust since I bought an iPhone. I wouldn't be surprised if others behaved the same way.
Many of the current digital picture frame models are wireless and can play audio and video. There's at least one other one that can connect to Facebook. Note that much of the press is calling it a digital photo frame as well:

http://blogs.zdnet.com/gadgetreviews/?p=7554

http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2009/09/hp-dreamscreen/

The products have evolved while the name hasn't. It's the same as referring to an iPod as an MP3 player.
The big trick here is I think if you are in that position to help people to help themselves.

That's the best kind of thing a friend could do.

Honor is preserved on both sides and when it is all done the friendship has only strengthened, not become lopsided.
pay off close friends' debts

I think it would be a better idea to loan them money to pay off their debts. Of course, your loan should be interest free, shouldn't have any strings attached, should give your friends very long time to repay - otherwise there wouldn't be any difference between your loan and the 'other' loans in the first place.
First of all, there are no 'terms of service', there are just the guidelines and they do not state anything to that effect.

I agree with your suggestion that editors should leave a unique mark to make sure that people realize that the original content is no longer what it was when the poster put it there. Accountability flows both ways.

As long as editing is limited to clarifying titles and fixing links I'm ok with it, but if there ever would be a single documented case of a comment being edited to make it read something that wasn't there before then I'm quite sure that terms-of-service notwithstanding HN would become a different site overnight.

I'm not in the habit of checking up whether what I wrote before is still there, maybe I should be ?
>> It's the same as referring to an iPod as an MP3 player.

Does anyone actually do that? I don't think they do TBH.
Except the point is that in most languages, it's more than an implicit parameter (like 'this') - it mutates away while the function is running.
Wall St has too much political power for the government to stop this. If they can get the Glass-Steagal act repealed, they can squash an inconvenient policy initiative.
My bad, I named the wrong book by Smith. "The Arts of the Sailor" is okay, but I meant "Marlinspike Seamanship" as the best one for learning.
I know. I read Stu Halloway's book and I read some articles about how the persistent data structures work. But I also did some tests myself. Performance isn't great but that's not so much the issue for me. Memory use is a problem though. I can't have a list of a million integer pairs take 160MB of RAM.
I'm sure Mint's founders and investors analyzed the acquisition quite heavily, more than any of us for that matter, and concluded that the acquisition was a fair and reasonable deal, otherwise they would not have agreed to its terms. Only time will tell if this acquisition actually becomes a detriment to Mint and its end-users in the long-term. I believe if Mint continues to have a focused and creative team behind its product, one which continues to effectively evolve the service in order to accommodate their users needs, they should continue to grow steadily.
MSFT Office Live Workspace is in Beta
Ask HN: What was the last time a requested feature was implemented ?
With some regularity people are being sent to the 'feature request' page to post suggestions about things to add to HN.

It is one of the longest threads since HN was launched, and there are many good suggestions in there, some of them quite old that have not made the cut without any reason given.

This seems to result in two things, an increase in the number of feature requests in regular posts, and a feeling that the feature request page simply exists as a way to vent this stuff so that it can then be safely ignored.

To verify, is the feature request page still actively monitored ?

Has there been a documented case in recent history (say the last couple of months) where a request from the feature request page was picked up and actually implemented ?

And if those cases do not exist would it be an idea to reboot the feature request thread ?

And to tell people if their feature request is not going to be honored why that is ?

I'm appealing especially to those people that always feel the need to point people to the feature request page (assuming you don't do it for the easy karma boost) to prove that it is actually 'live', after all you are sending people there you must have some proof that it works.
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HAMMER is really good. ive been using it for about a year now and never got any corruption. the reblocker/pruner was initially an IO hog for about 5 minutes at 3am, but that has been fixed. Its totally smooth now. We use Solaris + ZFS + time slider on a storage server at work, and quite frankly, HAMMER has, even at its infancy worked better for me. HAMMER can now extend the file system on the fly, and I expect a file system shrink feature to be ready by the next release. From reading the mailing list it shouldnt be very difficult thing to do, thanks to the reblocker.
Make sure you have an open id from one of the providers

http://openid.net/get-an-openid/

Link the provider with your facebook account in the settings page.

Any time you are authenticated with your open id provider you will be able to login to facebook. Yahoo is currently an exception.
It's a text editor, looks to be curses based(?) using python. For me it wasn't worth looking at - posts should have descriptions of what they're about. Grrr!
The reality is that the trailblazers tend to take it in the shins. Google just got search right. They were about the zillionth company to try. Facebook seems to have gotten social networking right, also at the zillionth variation on the theme. Nobody talks wistfully about becoming the next WebCrawler or Friendster.
Yes. Walk into any store and look for the section where the iPods are. It'll be labeled, "MP3 Players".

http://www.amazon.com/gp/bestsellers/electronics/1264866011/...
Patent Squatter Sues Nearly Every MMO Developer (and Microsoft)
You might like this one better: http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_fast_do_electrons_move_between...
When was the last time that a feature that was requested elsewhere was actually implemented?

Edit: What I'm trying to say is that I don't know if requesting it on the feature page really helps, but I haven't seen any features requested outside the feature page actually seen implemented. pg is probably very busy and few people send patches.
What about screen size?
I'm cool with the idea, it's nice and I really hope that you will succeed.

Not cool to attempt to rig the vote though.
Rig the vote? What do you mean?
When you give someone advice that they are supposed to follow then you should probably not answer a genuine question about your advice with something that I read as 'but it doesn't work elsewhere either'.

If you point people to the feature request page then you should be able to back that up with the knowledge that you are not effectively sending them to a black hole.
In the USA the burden of proof is on the person being slandered.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_defamation_law
Notably the Eddie Izzard topic was killed off...

I'm glad I got to it before it was killed. It was, frankly, one of the more interesting posts that I happened to see yesterday. It's remarkable that he could do that, and considering how difficult it is he accomplished quite a mind hack.
If you look at it the other way around, it's currently a supressor's paradise. If you say something I don't like, I can sue you and you have to prove that every tiny detail of what you said is factual. Most people aren't going to be checking the dictionary definition of every word they speak or write just to check that they're being 100% factual. So therefore the person suppressing their speech will most likely win. The rest of the world likes to be a bit more sensible, it's up to the claimant to show that the information was incorrect, for things that actually matter this will be relatively easy to do.

Free speech with a few people getting away with a bit of name calling vs supression of valid points due to tiny mistakes in delivery. I know which one I'd rather have.
Eventually, cards will hold the person's name, age, and birth date, as well as fingerprint or iris scans [...]

Arg. Why are they putting this info on the flipping cards?

I just can't understand why these types of ID systems are implemented in an era where it's so easy to hack/crack/counterfeit anything that was made more than six months ago. No system should involve the object which is to be verified presenting you with the credentials through which to verify it.

Cards should be as dumb as possible: They should have a unique ID printed on them. Done. Information on the cards is for the cardholder, not for the verifier. Thus, it may be nice to put the name of cardholder on there, possibly a birth date, so that people don't get cards mixed up. A expiration sticker may also be desirable to remind the cardholder he/she needs to renew.

Anything else you put on there (pictures, descriptions, fingerprints, etc) is dangerous because it will tend to make officials trust the cards, which is exactly what we don't want. We also don't want anything on there which could be useful for someone else (baddies) to know.

No holograms, UV stripes, smart cards, etc are necessary, unless you think they're pretty and like spending money. People should be able to auth just by remembering their number.
Just as a note the patent holders have sued Microsoft already - MS settled out of court. (it does say so in the article but the title is a bit confused).
At the bottom the writer asks HNers to vote for their submission.

"So this is my appeal to you, the Hacker News community. Please vote for us here (the vote closes on Friday). The public vote is only part of the deal, but it makes a difference. You can make a difference."
A seller categorizing the iPod as an "MP3 player" isn't the same as people referring to it in every day life as an MP3 Player.

Do you refer to the iPhone as a 'mobile' or 'cellphone'? I'd say most don't, because it's not really a mobile or cellphone. People refer to it as an iPhone first and foremost, because then people realize it's actually pretty much a mini macbook.

In the shops here though, iPods are usually in a dedicated Apple display cabinet :/

Personally, I think "photo frame" should be used when all it does is show photos. If it can do things that allow the user to interface with it, tablet is probably more appropriate.

At the end of the day though most things now are just general purpose computers, with firmware that limits what you can use them for.
it should be set up in such a way that if someone edits your submission you get to yank it if you disagree with the edit.

Outstanding idea.
Yes, at the bottom I ask HNers to please vote for us in the competition.

I think where I fail to follow you is where you suggest that somehow that's rigging the vote. How does publicly asking people to vote for you rig a public vote? Where do you think all the other votes are coming from?
Noop: Google Language for the JVM
Stating your case and asking people to vote for you is pretty standard procedure in any election.
Seems pretty much standard to me, not just here on HN, but for all competitions where the public vote (elections included) for people to tell other people to vote for them.
I presume from people that are objectively judging all submissions side-by-side instead of by tapping in to the userbase of the fora they are members of.
Drawing people's attention to a vote and promoting yourself isn't vote rigging in any sense. Vote rigging is tricking people to vote for you, or directly manipulating the voting mechanism.
vodafonemobileclicks.com is not a community site with an existing stream of people - the only people that get there is people that have arrived there through articles like this one, or through tweets to someone's followers.
Intro to Erlang's OTP (with examples)
after all you are sending people there you must have some proof that it works.

that doesn't follow. The feature request thread os the communally accepted place for feature requests, whether it works or not is a separate thing.

Also, your implication that it needs restarting if it doesn't work doesn't make sense - it's still an accurate record.
QUICKTIME - Ask.com Search
First impressions:

You can use firefox.

Worked on 2007 but not 2003. I assume this means it requires Office 2007 or better.

Requires an additional download (update to Office, which I believe also authenticates your copy) to create or edit files. (Can view files without)

No OneNote Live (yet?)

Overall, I must say it is pretty janky.
Along with what ghpaco said, keep in mind that locking isn't free either.