skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One-time fees are somewhat risky for new companies, though they also have some appeal.

The risks are that Dropbox probably does not yet actually know with certainty what it costs to store and backup your data for a long period of time. We all know it gets cheaper per GB, over time, for raw storage but there are other costs, as well, and with bandwidth getting cheaper, it may be that the use cases for Dropbox expand to include things that are more demanding or expensive for them to provide.

There's also the concern (an ethical one) that perhaps Dropbox may not be a sustainable business model, and might be forced to shut down in a year, leaving a bunch of customers (rightly) feeling screwed.

That said, the benefits for a vendor in providing a one-time fee are pretty huge. After three years in business we just queitly introduced our first lifetime license type a couple of months ago, and it's been a nice bump to our short-term revenue; about 20% for the first two months it has existed. And, that money is probably more valuable to us today than it will be in four years (which is when the "lifetime" option begins paying the customer back for the higher initial price).

So, if the Dropbox guys were asking my advice, I'd say it's probably wise to add a lifetime pricing option. But only once you have enough data to know you can afford to offer it profitably, and you have reasonable expectations about how much it will cost to continue offering the service in the future. Money is worth more to startups today than it will be next year, so get the most money you can up front.
The pic isn't new [1][2].

Two anecdotes on Jobs' Furniture:

Larry Ellison, "It struck me that there wasn't furniture good enough for Steve in the world. He'd rather have nothing if he couldn't have perfection."

Ed Riddle, an early Mac team member, recalls his interview with Steve Jobs: sitting on a furniture-less floor, staring into each others' eyes--the two men shared a Zen master--followed by Jobs bowing and saying it had gone well.

I did something similar. I wanted to figure out: what were the fewest amount of items I needed to get stuff done? I shrunk it to: a bed, desk, chair and computer. Of course I had peripheral stuff. But now that I think about it, I didn't even need them.

[1]http://money.cnn.com/galleries/2009/technology/0911/gallery....

[2]http://news.cnet.com/geek-gestalt/?keyword=Steve+Jobs
Fascinating parent and fascinating though depressing article.

I tried to help a would-be new age guru more up in that world and it's a strange freak-o-nomics situation.

Rich are the most desirable customers for any establishment that doesn't seat 60K people. The rich have more time than money, so they don't mind spending a lot of money for a positive experience. But the rich also don't have a lot of time to determine who's an actual good speaker or spiritual healer or whatever. So they instead go with those who are preselected. That's celebrities of some kind. Many celebrities still have poor skill levels, we can be sure. But they might be a bit better than non-celebrities. If the rich had the time to research the matter, they could find even better speakers but they won't spend extra time researching the question for the same reason they will pay $1000 - their time is worth more than their money.

It's paradoxical - there's lots of money to be if one can master these processes but virtually by definition only a few do so.
What extra steps do you take to increase your chance of getting an interview?
Github and Commons-based Peer Production
So, for example, immigrants tend to do more poorly and members of an outclass tend to do more poorly (for example, historically this meant Black Americans tended to test poorly).

And that's why Californian Japanese-Americans are well known for their "shifty, work-shy attitude, and tendency to drift into crime"
The author's angle seems twisted and disturbing yet he's also describing a somewhat twisted and disturbing world...
It had a remarkably good story considering the lack of dialog, narration or any other story telling elements. A real work of genius that truly stands the test of time.
+1 I call Comcast every 6 months and threaten to cancel if they don't give me the latest signup package. Been paying ~$80/month for TV, Internet & HD for the past 3 years :)

If they say they can't help you, just ask to talk to a manager, they'll do anything to get you off the phone.
Interesting how you can watch him for free on Youtube or for $50 or $500 dollars in person.

I watch five minutes of him on his site. He indeed seems like a good though perhaps hyper-aggressive speaker.
ObCryptonomicon: The scene where our code-breaking genius spends the entire time devoted to taking the Armed Forces IQ equivalent test to one question on a boat floating one way while you pass in the other direction on a train. He proceeds to attempt to account for turbulence and many, many other complex things and completely fails the test.
That's gold for someone who wants to develop opt in/non intrusive ads. Thanks Periodic, I felt the same way but building ads that are "desirable" to the user experience is a challenge.
Slow release of contextual search & advertising tools
My buddy Tyler has been busy. If you have a twitter account please check it out. We're still working on other oauth handshakes (facebook, googlewave), and there is an rss input variant floating around.

You can read more about the first concept here http://www.victusmedia.com &
http://victusmedia.com/intelligent-advertising/

The page: http://victus1.victusmedia.com/ can be used as a blog plugin:

<iframe width=”100%” height=”600″ src=”http://victus1.victusmedia.com?associate=mycoolidnumber” frameborder=0></iframe>

10% goes to me/or tyler (5% chance each), and 90% to the host at this time.

We're tracking feedback here:
http://victusmedia.uservoice.com/pages/32379-general
Happy Carl Sagan Day
Very cool looking! I am going to consider using this for an upcoming project.

One of my most significant criteria for using a library is its API and documentation. Maybe I'm not looking in the right places, but I had trouble finding API.txt in your repo; consider including a link to that from your project page. Also, it would be helpful if you provided an example script in each language on your website as well.
Yep, works well (got me from the VZW store to my house without trouble ;) )
Really interesting and unique puzzle app. My feedback:

The tutorial is very cumbersome to use, with standard UIAlertViews covering the game board. I suggest replacing that with something custom.

The font looks unprofessional; replace Marker Felt with something less cheesy. The graphics in general could be spruced up (if you want to stick with the simple style, that's great, but at least make buttons look like buttons)

Also, download the "world records" in the background as the first puzzle is loaded (it is impossible for its record of 4 to be beaten anyway)
I just spent the morning reading this book through O'Reilly's Safari access. It is absolutely brilliant and is up there with Presentation Zen and Slideology as 'must have' books if you're a speaker.

Here's the thing though - despite Scott's best efforts, I don't think this book helps you if you're not already a speaker or somehow interested in speaking. But if you are one or someone like me who enjoys it and is looking to polish 'the craft' this is great. Scott notices a lot of patterns, some of which I do unconsciously and never noticed before.

Highly recommended.
Slidable Composite Photos of Berlin Wall 20 Years Later
"By His Bootstraps" by Robert A. Heinlein
Also, it's 18% (now) of <60% of the users who upgraded, so that's more like 30-40% of users with a flawless upgrade.
Because "early adopting" is generally used when talking about beta software, but in this case the software was declared released, but the users' experiences resembled that of early adopters'.
No, I'm saying that the blogger is removing the ".com" from Adobe's copy, with the result that he is not distinguishing the brands. Adobe sort-of does.
If it makes any difference, they called it "Photoshop.com", this blog just dropped the tld.
"We" might, but women in technology don't. When someone writes about a successful man, people can assume that it's because he's successful; if someone writes about a successful woman, comments like yours make it seem like she's just being written about because she's a she.
I still think you wrong.

1. Even if a competing company picks up that business wealth is still lost; Sure the other company may earn more money but the total wealth in the world has gone down. That other company could've productively produced some other good, and now has to produce what the other did. Also, the construction workers rebuilding it is just bastiat's broken window fallacy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window). If the factory didn't burn down the construction workers could have built new things, not merely replacing old.

2.I may have not stated this one clearly enough; when a factory looses it's competitive edge due to mismanagement it's losing wealth. If they were able to properly manage the company everyone would be richer on average.

3. When you build too much of a good that isn't needed then you've lost wealth overall. The housing example might be too complicated, it has a lot of interrelated factors, but lets assume I make action figures. If I produce 100 Billion of them and there are only 1 million people that want them -- we've lost wealth... The time and energy producing the extra ones has now been squandered. Sure the market may expand to 10 million people with deep discounts but wealth was still lost.
Kind of a dick move by Bountii.
About an hour ago I downloaded the windows installer for Ubuntu. It ran just like any other installer on windows and when I restarted there it was, right beside windows. I can also uninstall it with the add/remove programs window.

That was by far the most painless install of any OS I've ever installed.
Apple will probably always make something that's a bit nicer, but (hopefully) Android will be 'good enough', and win out on being more open and more friendly to those who want to hack with and on the platform. I for one have no interest at all in doing mobile were it to come to be exclusively controlled by Apple.
in my experience - no, unless it was on archive.org.

If you change the source page, the cached pages elsewhere will update with those changes. Thus you can make a source page blank, and the cached pages will follow.

However, if you delete a source page outright, the cached pages still might remain intact as a record: thus better to blank out first for whatever the elapsed time of the cache might be until it refreshes - then delete - just so as to be safe in case the cache keeps deleted files.
Zen OS X: How to eliminate distractions on your Mac
This is great. I've always wanted a way to one-up censorship. Let's see them censor the whole web.
You probably have something like 2^32 ways to seed your RNG. But there are N! possible outcomes of the shuffle, so at most 2^32 of those will appear (one per seed).

2^32 = 4294967296

100! is about 10^158

So for just 100 items, you're already missing most of your outcome space. You might switch to a generator with a bigger seed. For this example with 100 items, you need at least

log(100 !) / log(2) = 524.764993

bits in your seed. For N items to be sorted, you need about NlogN bits in your seed. So if you're trying to actually make each outcome possible, then no matter which clever algorithm you use to go from random numbers to a shuffled sequence, you've already lost.
Linkbait title; Ubuntu has done a great deal to make Linux look much better.
Ask HN: anybody bought droid? what has been your experience?
Anybody bought droid? how is it compared to iPhone?
"... Your text is incorrect. Carl would have been 75 on Monday, November 9. Cari Sagan Greene ..."

Not quite.
Just create a new one - that's what I did:

http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=nextmoveone --> http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=auston
Wait, does this mean I cannot die because if I die, I will not be conscious to realize it?

Sweet, but what if all possible realities are of me dying?
Bad when it's Linux, great when it's Revision A Apple hardware...
Ubuntu is about optimizing the common case at the expense of the corner cases. If you want something that is actually stable, use Debian.
How to Save Apple from 1997
Correct me if I'm wrong but my understanding is that Spanish copyright law allows downloading and sharing of TV shows anyway so long as there's no money involved.
In the Netherlands you pay ~€8-15 / month for all the TV channels that are available, so the AppleTV solution would never work here. There are less channels and US series are delayed (usually by a year or somewhere near that), but it's still a lot cheaper. We get BBC1 and 2 but no other UK channels.

The AppleTV is much more expensive here, €270 ($400) and iTunes doesn't do any tv shows here yet, so it's not like we have a choice :). Anyway, what I'm trying to say is that the tv market really differs a lot between countries.
Really slow website for me.

Edit: so here is a site using it and the script that is used http://andrew-jones.com/2009/06/19/irrepressible-widget-from...

When you click on the widget you just get taken to the welcome page and it shows what site it is from and who censored it (not really easily seen I think it should be the center of interest).

Script itself:

<script type="text/javascript">
var irr_lang = 'en';
</script>
<script src="http://fragments.irrepressible.info/js/fragment-180.js" type="text/javascript">
</script>

and an opendir of their fragments:
http://fragments.irrepressible.info/data/current/

Interesting but I don't see it being much use only posting fragments rather than the whole thing.
Check the iTunes store for shows.
It's an experiment (written in arc: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arc_(programming_language) and good experiments are supposed to push the boundaries and make you a little uneasy.
But it's Lisp!!1!
Netflix only has past seasons and their quality is mediocre. I'd agree with you if they offered true HD and more current episodes.
I thought this would be some distributed way to reassemble texts, but actually it's just an awareness campaign?
A spider that searches out for copyright infringement
As long as anyone else can observe you dead, you will be dead.
This spider hit my site today. I'm not too worried since everything on my site, I own. But it's still interesting.
Woah... I'm surprised one of my posts is on hacker news. WTF? That makes the geek inside of me want to throw a party. I'll clear up some questions that were asked here...

I was really shocked to see "danielfischer.com" when I loaded up news.ycombinator.com as per my daily schedule...
Another option to take a look at is http://recurly.com/
We offer a super simple RESTful api that lets add payment functionality to your sites. We also handle all the complexities of upgrades/downgrades and subscription management. We're here to help :)
I gave up on cable as well. I get my news online and then I subscribe to Netflix. I have the 2-at-a-time plan + all I can watch online. I've watched most of the movies I wanted to see during the years and soon enough I'll switch to one-at-time $9/month plan + all I can watch online.

My laptop has an HDMI output so all the online movies look decent.

In 3 years, I can't say I miss having TV. But what has happened is that I get a lot more irritated with commercials whenever I am someone's house and they have the TV on.
I would say the iPhone ui is VERY impressive and Apple is definitely the leader in terms of user experience and interface.

However, I'd say Google is almost just as strong in this department. I love the UI on Android 2.0 and it will only get better. I'm not missing anything from the iPhone UI and from my blog post... it just feels like "a breath of new air." It's nice to play with a new interface that works just as well as the iPhone.
Setting a floor price would immediately ensure that the schools that benefit the most from external speakers and additional stimulation, don't get them.

The problem, as oldgregg says, is that celebrities get the money, and real experts aren't engaged. If I start to charge enough to make a living two things will happen. I won't get corporate engagements because I'm not an expert, and I won't talk to the people who benefit the most, because they can't afford it.
Perhaps the LTS version should be offered more prominently, and the regular releases billed as experimental?
To add to this - the only thing that I miss from the iPhone UI is that "spring action" when you scroll too far, it'll spring past the content then back up. I liked this effect and the android has the spring... just not the spring back.

e.g if you scroll really fast it'll just stop at the end of the content vs going past it then back up.
Ha hey! Which mod were you? :)
Could you indulge us further with this one?
All free... AND AMAZING.
+1 you got it.
Sometimes the "block" just means you aren't actually all that into your project.
Well... in my experience, arguing politics or religion is the best way in the world to find crazy people. That's pretty true here, too. It's because this kind of belief is not only close to our sense of identity, it's also where we differ most. That was actually one of the most dismaying things about the period from September 2001 to the Iraq War, in my experience; people I'd earlier respected and liked turned out to be raving lunatics - and they felt the same about me.

I guess what I'm saying is that I'm not looking for more venues to argue politics, but that I wouldn't find it a good idea to argue politics here, either. (Although I just got 70 karma for doing just that, this week. So plainly I have no idea what I'm doing.)
I guess some competition to GitX is good :). I'm almost finished with my study, I'll see if I can get some work done on GitX again while I'm looking for a job. The icon does look a bit familiar though.
Finally an application name sillier than "OpenOffice.org".
Generics for Objective-C
This is not just exposing a flaw, it's committing fraud. Frankly the author's lucky it's lawyers who are contacting him and not the police.

If I someone started posting info on how to create valid but fake mail-in rebate vouchers how long do you think they'd last.
Sure, I appreciate it costs a lot to put things right.

"damaging their brand."

How can you damage Microsofts brand any more than it already is? I don't think most people buying Microsoft buy it because of the brand. Which is why I don't think OS vulnerabilities particularly cost them in lost revenue.
But it's entirely irrelevant because it may be more than twice as hard to increase retention by 50%.
How to Ask for Help — Without Looking Stupid
Dogfooding Google Chrome
Hey! Geez, you've been here longer than I've been.

I was on Writer's Beat. I think David/TGO introduced me to it? I just went on and checked how it today, out of curiosity: I was ronoxq.
Hermit life-insurance policy.
Yes but if I'm not dead in another reality, then I'm only conscious there.

And since supposedly the LHC would kill everyone, that's why no one will see it work right?
Another sign Apple need to rethink their approach to QA
They call it Gity on the website, but the applications title is Gitty.

The jQuery screenshot viewer is neat, but having to repoint to each << >> to scroll is annoying.
Shame they didn't caption everyone at the table in this photo:
http://money.cnn.com/galleries/2009/fortune/0911/gallery.ste...
Remember, correlation does not imply causation! (jk) Maybe this is why sales guys are the way they are? Again, correlation doesn't imply causation.
The no-furniture titbit is interesting. The no-clutter principle in apple design, packaging, and his famed presentations seems to have been part of his real-world aesthetics too.
Here's a sort of reply to these sort of articles from Jono Bacon, Ubuntu's community manager: http://www.jonobacon.org/2009/11/06/the-intersection-of-qual...
Did anyone notice she's sitting on a Swiss ball wearing stilettos and a clingy red dress?
"The jQuery screenshot viewer is neat, but having to repoint to each << >> to scroll is annoying."

Just use the arrow keys on your keyboard. Much easier :)
Chamillionaire & QD3 - From Artist to Entrepreneur @ Stanford
Take a look at this unless you already did:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=927927
They should use Cloudfront, S3 or at least a decent web server with some decent bandwith. Slow as...
The set of things out on the fringe of quantum possibilities (1 out of 10^100^100, for example, and beyond) is quite odd. The probability of your body spontaneously rearranging itself to be much younger is minuscule (to a degree of "minuscule" you've never thought about before) but non-zero, for instance.

However, it has been pointed out that if this is true, it is actually quite horrible. Reality may not permit you to fully die, but only a vanishing fraction of the vanishing fraction of realities involves you being anything like healthy; the maximal probability outcome by a long shot is you simple hanging on to a minimal life through a series of increasingly unlikely quantum events but never returning to anything like health.

Quantum-multiple-world believers better damn well hope it's not actually true. Actually, we all better damn well hope it's not true.

On a similar note, while it is funny to talk about how unlikely these events are, it seems to me that if the Higgs is offended about being observed and quantum-destroys the universes it is produced in, the way it would actually manifest is that it would seem that just as a particular particle collision is about to occur that would produce the Higgs, the resulting collision would simply conform to the probability distribution of the Higgs production, along with all the other possible outcomes, minus the Higgs production possibility. (That is, if it's 20% Higgs, 40% something with an anti-proton, 40% something with a proton, it'll manifest as an anomalous observation of 50% proton, 50% anti-proton.) The universe is not going to reach out across 10^52-ish planck instants to do something like drop bread on a machine weeks before it would be brought up; by far the maximum probability is that it would happen in the last few Planck instants, for each potential Higgs production. So, it's a fun story, but I don't see the probabilities adding up for it to be "true". Incidentally, if true, this may be able to be experimentally observed, in that we would be able to see the distorted outcome probabilities.
> it was just done quickly

Ugly code can be written slowly too...
it isn't sweet, since there are likely more unpleasant than pleasant ways of remaining conscious.

"The Sibyl of Cumae, who led Aeneas on his journey to the underworld, for which he collected the Golden Bough, was the most famous prophetess of the ancient world. Beloved of Apollo, she was given anything she might desire. She asked for eternal life. Sadly, Apollo granted her wish, for she had forgotten to ask for eternal youth. Now dried, dessicated, and shrunken, she is carried in a cricket cage, and when the boys ask her what she desires, she says: 'I want to die.'" http://www.history-of-culture.org/Lectures/Part_2/22302.htm
The OpenOffice.org Mouse is Real
Of course - but I think some of us wish that for once there could be an article about a woman in tech that didn't make a big point about her gender and include a staged, sexy picture. :/
The Philosopher's Zone
You are, of course, wrong. Enterprises all over the world buy Microsoft for the security.

I'm not sure what that has to do with whether it costs Microsoft money to handle Vista zero-day. It clearly does.
Certainly that is the greater effect.

My comment is to describe the remaining discrepancy: Women consistently have a lower unemployment rate across demographics.
Maybe you should tell them, they might not know about these options.
Is there a way to change the colormap? Rainbow colormap is considered 'harmful': http://www.research.ibm.com/people/l/lloydt/color/color.HTM