skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The irony of course is that the handful of customers who did choose the yearly plan actually contributed to one of my best months in terms of revenue

I'm not an accountant, but you should recognize that revenue over the life of the subscription, not all in one month. The revenue you collect from a client signing up for a year's worth of service will have to pay for 12 months of expenses that the client generates, plus a reserve fund to pay for refunds, etc.

Take the example of a web hosting reseller with a $20/mo plan or $200/year. Each client costs $10/mo (bandwidth, storage, maintenance, support). If I get a client on the annual plan, I can't count that $200 as "money in the bank" because I'll have to consider that $10/mo in expenses ($120), plus the possibility that he'll request a refund after 3 months.

The solution is to collect the $200 now but recognize it in $16.67 monthly increments for the life of the annual subscription.
http://jeffreymiron.blogspot.com/

What about Jeffrey Miron, the champion of reasonable government and reasonable policies?
If you want an example of how NOT to launch an API and get developers on board, take a look at Wolfram's API.
They lost me before that, precisely on "download a pdf to see the api docs".
Let's wait to see how well it does before making these kinds of statements.
Let's Build The Real Web OS
New feature inspired by this post: the per-item nofollow tag. Or should we just kill it? It's one step short of content generated by Markov chaining.
Isn't the San Francisco area prone to earthquakes too?
Perhaps he is referring to the sidekick/danger bump in the road wherin MS apparently lost all user data, but recovered it with heroic effort, gaining rather bad PR, and possibly strained vendor relationships.
If it's message passing, then yeah it's a good thing, but apparently it's just a syntax thing so not too exciting.
No, I think bankruptcy is little better than failure unless the gov. will pump in funds as well. Take AIG for instance, which backs debt at various levels. Clearing the books of that juggernaut would still send ripples through the system, likely freeze up credit markets, and wreak stock market havoc. I think Greenspan is right about breaking up such institutions.
I think it would be better to either find a legitimate use for the feature, or conclude that it might be a mis-feature.

For example, I can see the value of allowing a default function argument to be a Proc/lambda. I can even imagine how it might make sense to allow it to be a named function declaration -- if def actually returned a function object, rather than nil as the article notes. But what the author demonstrates seems to me nothing more than a broken consequence of Ruby's syntax.

Finding weird corner cases may indeed be very hacker-ish, but blindly labeling them as good is not, in my opinion.

I could be wrong about the value of this construct; someone might come up with something useful you can do with it. But, until then, I'm not going to view it as anything other than a curiosity, not as an example of "ZOMG look how cool Ruby is!!11!".

Regarding Symbol#to_proc, I would say that it is only syntactically weird. But if you have any background with functional languages, it's an incredibly natural semantic construct.
This idea was inspired by this post, http://www.nearsoft.com/blog/wave-is-to-interaction-as-the-b..., which I think puts Google Wave into context.
You really want governments to start failing?

I mean California is getting close, but that's mostly because it hamstrung itself early on by allowing citizens to promote legislation.

While there are a few governments that I would like to be changed (Chinese Democracy anyone), the general trend towards democracy and liberty has been a good thing.

If saw a govt does get too big to fail, having it fail could well lead to chaos or a dictatorship.

I know there is a lot of whinging by Republicans in the US about 'small' government, but really you're not going to get decent change in your country overall unless the federal government acts as the states aren't up to it (seatbelt laws anyone?)
true, and as as an accounting major I should know better (sadly I spent all my time playing Counterstrike instead of studying).

your example is sound, but using it as a model I guess my question is how do you weigh up what is more important:

1) Guaranteed 12x $16.67 payments over a year
or
2) Monthly $20 payments where the customer can cancel at any time

This is the kind of thing that attrition / churn rates can help answer but - as is the case with many apps here I think - it's still early days and we just don't have reliable data for that kind of thing with only 2 or 3 months of operations under our belts.
> The mentors who taught me the ropes with version control systems would not be impressed.

Or maybe they've also realized it's not 1992 anymore.
The problem is, he hasn't actually admitted his biggest mistakes. As far as I know, he has never taken responsibility for the credit and housing bubbles.
Google Beats on Earnings, Revenue; Shares Higher
Followed up with embed example and how to: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=883551
This is a paragon of obfuscatory buzz-speak.
It's called "attempting to rehab your image". Let's not assume it is a genuine belief.
Dean Kamen's Robot Arm
I found his voice quite different too. But I attributed the difference to a change in personality. Such a change is likely to accompany a view over the cliff-drop of intellectual mortality, without dropping over the cliff itself.
I was hoping for some discussion of the crab-bucket and the hammer. These are, I think, relevant topics for this site.
Really, really clever. It combines Google Wave Bots with crowdsourcing seamlessly. I hope this gets done soon!
another one for the list http://infoproc.blogspot.com
I believe that's $60 for 1k total requests - you use those up, you need to pay $60 more.
> Perhaps he is referring to the sidekick/danger bump in the road...

I thought that might be the case.

> ...gaining... strained vendor relationships.

With who, aside from T-mobile / Danger?

If this incident is what the OP is talking about, I don't see how it's relevant for current or prospective Windows Mobile licensees.
Why systems management isn't cloud computing
I have a different theory. I believe Texas will resist this because Texans have been to New Mexico. Anybody who thinks it's a good idea for the entire US energy system to rest on ANYTHING in New Mexico is out of their freaking minds. I've lived in New Mexico. There was a shootout at a major intersection where the suspect didn't even have a gun. They cornered him, and one of the cops got too excited. He shot at the suspect, cops on the other side thought the suspect was shooting at them, so they shot back, then the other cops figured it was the suspect too and shot back as well. This was at 3pm, a couple blocks away from a school, on the busiest road in the city (Santa Fe). In New Mexico, more cops, judges, and state senators get arrested for drunk driving than anywhere else in the country by a HUGE margin. It isn't a close race. They own the category. I didn't even read the article, I'm just telling you now, ANYBODY who pins major infrastructure on the assumption that anybody who does anything in New Mexico does it competently is just asking for trouble. (The article mentions some crazy plan to build a "superstation" in New Mexico. Like we need centralized energy hubs, in the age of the Internet.)
Oh, that's a really interesting case! I hadn't seen any like that when I posted, but that's definitely something to consider. I think you could work around whenever you get multiple "perfect" fits like that by comparing a) whether they are non-blank, or, more sophisticated, b) are there continuous edges across the boundary.
Move somewhere else. You might find there is more work elsewhere.
I think in the case of governments it's not that they can be too big to fail, it's that if they get too big, they do fail. Though maybe that's the general case, now that I think about it.

edit s/its/it\'s/g
Not sure what you mean by fixed-criterion How about about just demanding falsifiable predictions, and doing experiments to test them?
With the new Verizon Android phones coming to market shortly, a key factor will be how many features does Verizon remove from the phone. The new Android phones are extremely powerful and Android provides an excellent platform to leverage the hardware. However, it's doubtful that Verizon will offer the new phones with full support for things such as free Maps/Navigation, free games, chat, etc -- since they charge quite a bit for these services on other phones. It will be very interesting to see how this plays out.
I think it would be great to have more competition in the smartphone marketplace. My concern as a developer is that with so many devices coming out can I be reasonably assured that any app I write for android will work on all devices as with the iPhone? I certainly cannot afford to buy 12 different phones. Sure, adroid is supposed to be the common OS but is it going to really work that way in practice?
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At the same time the bigger the government the less change the country will have since most of the resources will be used by people in government to maintain the status quo.
Spigit Raises Capital for Workplace Social Network
Measuring things by times-faster is not really the right way to do it. Some software engineers are capable of completing important tasks, some are not. They are (error-divide-by-zero) better.
How Your Mac Is Saving The World
There are certain things about OS X that come from its Next roots. An OS like OS X has the potential to be the kind of seamless environment we've only had in R&D or dreamed about. OS X already has system-wide facilities that programs can hook into, like Undo/Redo. Also note that there's a lot of drag & drop. (For example, you can drag & drop into a Terminal.app window, and that file's path name appears there!) OS X won't get us all the way there, however. For that, you need an OS where everything is a 1st class Object that can be scripted against. Those things have existed in research labs, so we know they're possible.
Yes, 1-click deploy ROCKS. I can't believe how I lived without it, FTP-ing files to a server, updating the code would take like an hour or more, now it's a matter of pressing 1 button and waiting a few minutes.
Spamming is wrong, but ultimately the market will take care of crappy conferences. If it's not worth it, people won't show up and they'll cease to exist.
Handy Github clone bash function
There are really only two types of Chinese hackers.

The professional ones tend to be patriotic, and will attack foreign sites(you'll hear that on the news once a while).

The "less professional" ones steal your WoW accounts.
where did he apologize? Link?
Charles Babbage Confronts the Devil, Becomes a Ghost Hunter
The handset makers are hedging their bets with Android because they know Microsoft is interested in producing their own first party phone. When this happens it's likely Windows Mobile will become Microsoft's only licensed handset OS and will be neglected and forgotten in quick succession. Microsoft's handset would probably run a new, non-licensable, OS. The rumors that Microsoft's phone project is in trouble are non-sense. They could slap a dial-pad on the Zune software and ship a product in 6 months or less. It's definitely going to happen.
Crazy. I just heard an absolutely glowing review of this from a friend less than two hours ago. He said it was one of those things he picked up just to see what it was and couldn't put down again until he'd finished it. And now it's on Hacker News. It's definitely going on my short list.
There is no too big to fail, that is just a ploy to convince you to not be angry at your money being given to them. Sure if they failed it would be bad, but it's going to be bad anyway. All we are doing is prolonging and exacerbating the pain.
I don't think Anamax is saying that he wants appropriate governments to fail, but rather that ginormous governments should be split as well. If a country's failure leads to chaos, perhaps the size of that government should be rethought.

We should step back and realize that a government isn't some sacred perpetual institution but rather a means to represent people. If a government fails to represent it's people, it must be changed.
The key way the market works is by information traveling around, for something like this the reputation is what matters. There are two ways for someone to find the reputation experience and reading what others have written. To that end, it is extremely important for individuals to share their experiences/perspectives so others don't have to waste their time learning about it directly.
I strongly disagree - I don't think any fields - even perpetual motion machine construction or astrology - are inherently bogus. We should demand that these fields make falsifiable predictions and then test them to find out which ones aren't false. Of course we can't conclude that they are inherently bogus when we haven't tested them. If we have tested them and found that they are false then that's all we need to know. (I'm all for testing a genuinely new perpetual motion machine, almost all "new perpetual motion machines" have already been tried or depend on principles that have already been tested and proven false.

Let me reiterate since it seems that my message was a little unclear - the purpose of the medicine and finance analogy was say that even though there were many bogus financiers making false promises about their products by using simple models where they don't apply - this doesn't mean that there could never be non-bogus financiers that take a more rigorous and transparent approach to their use of models. We should demand the construction of financial instruments which cannot be "booby trapped". This is a case for more and better financial innovation, not less of it.

Of course this takes a broad view of financial innovation to include such things as auction design, election methods, etc.

I will also retract my statement that the valuation models were pseudo-science - to the extent that they made real predictions they were scientific. But they were undoubtedly cynically exploited.
Most people think astrology is bunk science, but they can make predictions and do experiments.

Throughout history physics has had experiments whose results were incompatible with current models, which eventually lead to new theories (relativity, etc) but how do you know when contradicting information disproves your theory or will expand it.
It's stunning. For commercial use (i.e. the way that a huge number of startups would like to use this), the cheapest option is $2000/month.

They say to contact them to tailor it to your needs, so maybe they're willing to come way down from that number.
+1 with some proof:
http://www.tuaw.com/2009/09/21/in-app-purchases-not-so-hot-f...
Flash. Oh please, God, let it be true!
Moving isn't free, much of that 25% doesn't have extra money sitting around in their bank account.
This is a great strategy for getting people to use your service which is based on facilitating open source project.

"Hey, we only hire people who we know from having worked on open source with them. I'm sure other people do this too! PS, GitHub is a great place to collaborate on open source stuff."

Perhaps I am being overly cynical in my assessment of their motivations, but it does seem somewhat self serving...
Seems to me that @ruv's statement could be refuted by a quick scan of the Wikipedia article on cloud computing.
I remember when all my sites ended with .shtml and I thought it was the coolest thing ever.
You raise a good point, and in order for this to work they'll need to ensure a full suite of emulators are available for testing. Android already provides an emulator [1] that can be configured to match the target device, although I can't speak to its quality as I have not used it. Windows Mobile is in a similar position, and its SDK provides emulators for every phone you would want to test on.

Phones differ so much in form factor alone that you really need to be testing individually for any phone in your target market anyway. Its a huge time-sink to be sure, but you won't be flying blind.

[1] http://developer.android.com/guide/developing/tools/emulator...
He never really apologized

This blog sums it up:

http://greenewable.wordpress.com/2008/10/23/greenspan-about-...

and

http://sanders.senate.gov/newsroom/news/?id=bc863544-b90f-4e...
Can't recommend Tyler Cowen's Marginal Revolution enough!
Chronicle the Growth of Mint.com from 2005-2007
Check out the footer section of the blog and you will find the related posts. Written by the second engineer, third employee at Mint.com. Amazing.
Granted, it's been a year or two since I ditched Netflix, but as I recall their recommendation system already ranked the importance of ratings based on how similar the other reviewer's tastes were to yours (I imagine by finding other people who tended to have ranked movies the same as you).

My impression was that they were far more concerned with doing well with recommendations than with the plain rankings.
It's interesting you suggest that considering the credit card holder bankruptcy legislation the banks pushed through preventing this very thing for consumers of their products.
Improved write barriers in Factor's garbage collector
Oh god I loved Server Side Includes. I ran a Tiberian Sun / Red Alert 2 site a years ago and had like 30-ish pages of content. Each had it's own navigation bar. Now imagine the time it took me update if I added a page or changed the navigation.

To make the long story short, I went to IRC (webmaster.com #ra2 - i think), people there introduced me to SSI. Then a few weeks later, they introduced me to Newspro (a few months/years later, it was renamed to Coranto).
are you thinking of this? http://news.ycombinator.com/lists

or maybe this: http://top.searchyc.com/
It's not a machine per se. It is basically a system that grants launch privileges to the personnel at the launch site under certain conditions that almost certainly indicate a nuclear attack against the rest of the military infrastructure. To launch or not to launch is still a decision made by a human.
I don't live in California, I live in Brooklyn. But my point still stands: a year into this and our unemployment is about the same as it was five years into the great depression. People make light of it because the government's numbers are fudged.
Do you also remember the days before Google? When we had to literally submit our sites to Yahoo's directory, etc.? Good old days :)
Django admin awesomeness
I used to think that meant it was secure (like https). I think I even gave a grade-school presentation on that, but no one knew better either.
I'm not sure why you're being downloaded since that's more or less what happened in a general sense last time.

Strong, sensible banking regulations help prevent situations like this. :(
Do you support C++? There is a lot more C++ code than C# code in the wild.
The distribution of Amazon web sites seem to be heavily weighted towards those countries with the highest GDP. Maybe not a coincidence.

1. www.amazon.com
2. www.amazon.co.jp
3. www.joyo.com
4. www.amazon.de
5. www.amazon.fr
6. www.amazon.co.uk
I suppose that it is a very small fraction of politicians that admit their mistakes because I did not believe Greenspan did. But after some googling, I have to concede that you are right he did actually admit his mistakes, in a congressional hearing no less. So maybe I should not have been that harsh on him.

Although it would have been nicer if he was more cautious while he was at the FED.

Oh, and thank you for reminding me of grad school entrance exams :).
Have you looked at http://github.com/defunkt? For the record, he open sources lots of stuff. It may not be github that's open sourced, but notice he says "open source"
." open source people don't always agree on making sure everything is open. If he'd called it "free software" then that be a contradiction, and surprising.
What I find most interesting is that as the test subject is talking it appears that he is unconsciously gesturing with his robotic arm. Apparently then its use is relatively intuitive and natural such that he can use it express himself as well as pick things up.
really you're not going to get decent change in your country overall unless the federal government acts as the states aren't up to it (seatbelt laws anyone?)

The point is that in the U.S. the Federal Government was, by design, to be limited in the powers it could exert over the states and citizens.

I think the argument from those who are for "small government" is not that change such as seatbelt laws are bad or unwanted, but that the cost of and danger in relinquishing to the Federal Government the power to make those decisions is far, far greater.
The same government might even write an encryption program and then claim it is open source and somewhat undetectable and call it RealCrypt or HonestCrypt or TrueCrypt and dupe everyone into using it. Please name one developer behind this Super, Real, Free, Genuine, Awesome encryption software that everyone is using now. Save yourself the trouble; you can't name one because the developers of RealCrypt are anonymous.
I hope you start to feel better soon. At least you can socialize on the internet.
...can I be reasonably assured that any app I write for android will work on all devices as with the iPhone?

That's one of the main points of Android.

It's in Apple's DNA to really polish their software on a small number of hardware platforms. This might not be so much of an advantage when it comes to apps handling personal information. However, this advantage might be significant when it comes to games some of which have a tendency to push whatever hardware they are on.
Stories of Teenage Hackers Getting into the System
I used his animated mailbox icon when I was in 5th grade on our elementary school page (http://web.archive.org/web/19971008155351/www.ttsd.k12.or.us...). The internet has certainly become larger and less anonymous feeling.
Read or watch the talk he gave that he links to. He talks about how his big "break" came about from writing a yaml parser for Php that had "70" downloads. Hardly "famous." I think his point is that releasing code allows you to show that you take initiative, and can show at least some insight into how you solve problems.

Edit: I just reread. He sort of contradicts what he said in the keynote he links to.
Conversation With Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg
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I was going to ask is does this mean the wolframalfail own all your source code?

But I'm thinking the 6/c a query thing means it's all moot.
Never mind that, my server is too busy to do anything reasonable, so I put it at http://richmondhackers.drupalcafe.com/ - now I don't have to worry about fixing my server. (Not that I should put it off any longer, but still.)
I agree. I know some awesome Java developers that use Netbeans, Vim, Emacs, Eclipse, and one or two that use IDEA. And this is not on tiny projects or lone coder things. This is an enterprise Java app that is probably one of the largest Java apps in the world.

IDEA might be great, but so is Eclipse, NB, Vim, and Emacs in the hands of a developer worth their salt.
>query & write data about places.

Can I write data in? Couldn't find a clue about that in my quick scan.
They have so far not responded to my email.
Yeah, i'm sort of shocked to see that listed. Didn't quite understand why it's quirky... And to question why it only works with literals?