skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is an interesting and definitely non-trivial economic issue. What we're presented with it the classic supply and demand pricing problem, with some fun complications.

I'm assuming a horizontal supply curve (and marginal cost approaching zero), which implies that pricing comes down to substitutability and demand.

The pricing strategy in the article implies that to break into the top 10, your app has to be priced at $.99. To me this suggests that quality apps are perfect substitutes, and are selling at as close to marginal cost as possible. Once you fall out of the top 10, however, the competition is more monopolistic, and you can raise your price such that you sell the quantity where marginal cost equals marginal revenue.

This seems backwards to a traditional market, where the competition is more monopolistic in the higher quality products, and more perfectly comptative in the lower quality products. Interesting.
Interesting. But even if they are descriptive, I don't think this will mean they're now human-text instead of machine-text. After all, code is ideally descriptive as well.
If you are trying to make money online, start a business with an obvious group of products, benefits, and prices, like 37signals.

That's not how 37signals started at all. They were a web design company.
Visual Studio "Express" is free, but doesn't have many of the features of the for-pay versions.
http://www.microsoft.com/exPress/download/
(Link also includes downloads for betas of Visual Studio 2010 & trial edition of for-pay versions.)
Is Matlab an exception to your statement on programming languages? They are following your hypothetical of owning the only implementation, and people are certainly willing to pay for that proprietary language + implementation rather than use another. Arguably being a somewhat niche language makes its market and competition smaller, but it's a very large niche, spanning several industries and many academic institutions.

Alternatively, Matlab may succeed because it straddles a couple of different categories. It could be argued to be a language, an implementation of that language, a development environment... since it's very goal-oriented, it could even be seen as a more traditional piece of software with an unusually hard-core scripting language.
And this is why I have a journal, rather than a "blog" - it's a place for me to splurge whatever I happen to feel like, whether it be links, updates about pancakes, or a rant about c#. It's there for my friends, or anyone who happens to feel like reading it, not a tool for any purpose.
#bookz on IRC, undernet.
Yet, I am glad I can use the site without downloading any plugins.
The Many Worlds Law
I think you meant "The trick is to own the platform and then sell the tools you must use to develop on it at an absurdly high price."
I suppose that means that Verizon would have to hire a crew of forum moderators, and pay them enough to deal with the complaints they will surely receive about moderation decisions. And then figure out how to produce enough revenue to pay for all of that overhead. I'm not sure anyone has figured out how to monetize forum moderation well enough to make it pay well enough for moderators to enjoy it. I write this as someone who has been a forum moderator since 1992 (starting out on the Prodigy proprietary online network) and who still has volunteer moderation responsibilities in various places today. What compensates me for moderating in the places where I do it is a good atmosphere of informative discussion, and the chance to do something about making the atmosphere better. But if have an Internet service provider account, I might very well like knowing that the service provider disapproves of off-topic messages, but I wouldn't like to be the person enforcing that, because anywhere I visit on the Internet will still have visitors from other ISPs, and thus the place I visit may still be full of off-topic messages, but if I work for Verizon I have to deal with all the people complaining about my decisions who visit all the sites I don't care a whit about. My best single way to get the atmosphere I want now is to visit only sites (like HN, for instance) where somehow there is a culture in which contributors outnumber pests. No one has to pay me to help preserve that culture, and no one COULD pay me to attempt to build that culture somewhere where it has already broken down.
I give out free $100 dollar bills. People want it, I don't profit.
Suppose that there was a world where the "Many Worlds Law" was true and another world where it wasn't.
I probably should have given another example, as micropayments was just one. Another example would be having a self-serve ad space selling system where sites could negotiate directly with advertisers rather than rely on AdSense percentages.
Climatologists should articulate what adjustments are necessary and why. Popularizers can then make it accessible to laypersons if need be - there is certainly enough interest.

The whole point is that up until now we've been trusting the details to climatologists, and that trust has been broken.

Layer on top the stakes, and also consider that this issue really lies at the intersection of many fields: climatology, computer science, economic, politics; opening this up is the only sensible next step.
[2006] A fundamental way newspaper sites need to change
I have a reasonably fast connection, but the experience here is greatly improved by downloading all the datasets: http://blog.chromoscope.net/download/
Finding exact roots of high-order (>4) polynomials isn't just difficult; it's provably impossible[1].

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abel-Ruffini_theorem

Nonetheless, the iterative approximation algorithms are incredibly efficient and numerically stable. There's one really clever trick that actually uses floating-point imprecision to do something you couldn't do in exact arithmetic (inverting a degenerate matrix), that converges to within machine-epsilon in about three iterations.

[1] In the general case; special cases may be tractable, e.g. x^n-1=0.
Please note that this is the best-selling record of all time, not album (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_albums_wor...) nor single (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_singles_wo...).
Around the roots of unity are large empty expanses, with a single root in the middle. This sounds like a classic unstable equilibrium to me. But an equilibrium of what?

Craziness like this is why I became a mathematician =).
I have a question: WTF is this doing on Hacker News?
Making something people want : easy.

Making something people want enough to pay what it costs to create it : hard.
Lulu charges a flat fee of $1.99 per copy (or 2.98 for DRM'ed edition).
YouTube - XboxISO's Channel
Review our webapp- The Uncertain Future (future world modeling)
I very strongly doubt that they will be unable to profit. They've just managed to rack up so much funding without doing so that they haven't made it a short time priority yet. If they had no master plan for huge profitability only idiot VCs would continue investing.
> "references" were added to perl because of lexical variables.

I'd like to see a citation for that. My understanding was to allow for simpler nested data structures.
Does this mean the data don't correlate with you experience, or you have a more general test?

They look reasonable to me at a first glance...
Although you are right, they are, they almost certainly weren't when they first came out.
All Hail The iPod Touch
While I agree with your comment I think it should be noted that it is a lot easier to reproduce results than to make original research. It would probably not be viable to come up with new climate models, etc. but it might be viable to verify and eventually correct the current models and algorithms. After all the science has been done, and is known, so checking assumptions behind the code should be doable.
Server seems to be melting (for me) at the moment. Here's the Google cached version: http://74.125.47.132/search?q=cache:LSsihXo7tIQJ:putthingsof...
It would be nice to have also there a visualization of Scheme.
It's skirting profitability though. From http://www.4chan.org/news/?all#95

"We've long since shed the notion of recouping costs through donations, and instead turned to ad revenue for covering operating expenditures. Our entry into the wild and not-so-wonderful world of advertising has been mixed. We've added more ad positions to the site over the years to offset rising overhead and been bounced around between so many ad networks and account managers that I'd be hard pressed to list them all. But we've succeeded—4chan is still here, after all."
While the number of pages being read may remain relatively constant, that wouldn't mean that ebook pages are basically constant. It means that paper books and ebooks are in a zero-sum game with each other, and the price of ebooks could influence the balance between them.
The authors get the pure profit of 35% from "revenue", not "profit." That seems huge. That means the profit of those authors may be better than Amazon, which has to cover the expenses on development, distribution, marketing, maintenance, or any other costs relevant to Kindle business.
Yeah, I noticed that when I was in London a few months ago. They're almost non-existent in NYC as far as I can tell, and that experience has been consistent with my experience elsewhere in the US.

Perhaps the London merchants are required or otherwise incentivized to use portable ones?
Even more seriously:

(k) use the service in any fashion for the transmission or dissemination of images containing child pornography or in a manner that is obscene, sexually explicit, cruel or racist in nature or which espouses, promotes or incites bigotry, hatred or racism
How does this effect Verizon's position as a neutral carrier? I was under the impression you couldn't take a position like this without giving up safe harbor. If my interpretation was correct that means any forum that moderates can't claim safe harbor for illegal/libelous content. But that can't be right since so many do moderate. Or would this only apply to those that control the pipe and not those that control the site? Sometimes you think you know what's legal and sometimes you have no clue...color me clueless at the moment.
I can’t even imagine what a Perl grammar would look like

Since there's no BNF for Perl it would be hard to visualize its grammar.
Paraphrasing Stargate's Teal'c: "Ours is the only reality of consequence."
I'm very excited for this since so much of my work depends on low latency to NorCal. One of the guys at Amazon mentioned they were thinking about it earlier on in the year and I've certainly been anticipating this since then. I might actually migrate some of my stuff back to Amazon again finally depending on latency concerns.
Excel, the first GUI-based Word and Powerpoint were out for the Mac first in mid-to-late 1980's. Windows wasn't ready for them. Multiplan and the original Word were DOS apps.

I know it's irrelevant to this Post, just a historical note.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_PowerPoint
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Excel
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Word
I'd love to see C++ plus templates visualized.
The good news is that by charging a substantial fee, we are eliminating a lot of the annoying, cheap and low-rent service providers. Those type of folks are already complaining to me about the fee--which is exactly what I want.

Any decent lawyer or accountant of note will look at the fee and say "$1,500 is a lot for dinner, but if I attending eight of these over two years and get one client it pays for itself." That is to say, the right providers will take a long-term approach to this.

We've got a sick group of angels already lined up for the 14th, and you don't have to be a startup from Los Angeles to apply to present. You can be a startup from anywhere around the world (although closer to California is obviously better since most angels like to invest within a one hour flight of the startup).

The angels coming will have 200-300 angel investments between them I think... really exciting, super qualified and intimate. I'm trying to get 100% of the companies that present funded.
Part of the risk in buying a book, is in buying a book that you don't want to invest the time in, and that will end up sitting on the shelf. What Amazon really should to is charge by the page read. This will allow people to have a more enjoyable experience per page read (since they'll start reading books they might not have bought otherwise, and will not feel obligated to finish books they bought but do not like). If they have a more enjoyable experience per page read, they will be willing to spend more. $.05 a page read for non-fiction, and $.02 a page for fiction would be a good price.
Oh yes allowing scripting is often an excellent feature, but I wouldn't consider a scripting interface "changing code at runtime". The boundaries of the application and the scripting environment are clearly defined most of the time. Scripting is more like receiving automated control input.

Of course the JIT of the scripting language might have self modifying parts in it but that's not the point.
What concerns me is whether a pattern similar to the distributor's downward price pressure that you rightly illustrate will be mirrored for content creators, be they authors, musicians, software developers, etc.
Free classified ads in Yellowknife, Canada
Free classified ads search engine in Yellowknife, Canada. A free, easy and fast way to find or to place ads in Yellowknife.
"Make", not give.
Criticism, Cheerleading, and Negativity
But when a non-paywalled alternative comes about (see Google Law), it threatens to eat its lunch.

I think people view for-pay information brokerage as unfair, unless it comes with service. If it's something they know costs the other party 0 marginal cost to provide, people start resenting them, which causes the paywalled service to hurt doubly hard when a free alternative comes about - even if they follow to free, people might stay away out of spite.
Some companies and people profit from it and have figured out ways to do it, so... disagreed.
> Been to an Barns & Noble lately, very much like Starbucks.

Question: why can't Starbucks replace them then? It's a serious question - why can't Starbucks' have a e-book kiosk, where you can browse and buy books for your Kindle/Sony Reader/Nook/etc? Seems like that would include the best of both worlds - the environment to socialize and read, and the efficiency of digital distribution.
You have a point when it comes to the proportions of dots and such, but I'm not sure if it'd be a fix to a problem which doesn't exist. I don't think it'd effect phishing much either, since that kind of user wouldn't understand that dots are important, et cetera.

But anyhow, here's a quick mockup: http://grab.by/11oz
If anyone has an idea for how they will make money, they are keeping them to themselves. I haven't heard of a single plausible idea.
Agreed - I think the minimum viable visa charge (due to high minimum fee) and the increased abandonment rate due to the hassle of using your CC is holding a lot of things back.

I think this is a very necessary startup, but one that's going to be very difficult to pull off well, and will require serious cash.
It was a real-life hack. Philip Roth observed that it turned Christmas into a holiday about snow.
Ask HN: How do you manage money?
I've worked hard and I live frugally, and I've managed to sock away a small but non-trivial amount of money. (Mid six figures) It's not enough to become a professional investor, but it seems like too much to be sitting in a bank account+index fund. I like my job, have no ambitions of quitting, but I'd like my money do more than sit in a mutual fund. I'm willing to spend some time&effort on it, I'm always tempted to try and build an automated trading system, but I realize I'd likely loose money rapidly.

So, how do you mange your money? Once folks sell their startups, what do they do with the money? Everyone always says 'manging money is a skill', where do people learn it?
That has not been my experience, but it may be different for games.

But still, he seems to ignore that more people will buy it at $0.99 rather than $2.99. And this will raise its ranking.
The problem is that then downvote is for spam/junk. Why would I want to suffer a penalty to make the site better for others (I've already seen the spam).
She's just a terrible interviewer. Here she is, arguing with Umberto Eco about stuff most people learn in Middle School:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/25/magazine/25wwln-Q4-t.html
I'm aware of the potential bad implications of a TOS item like this, but realistically, this is so Verizon can more easily ban forum/comment/Myspace spammers upon receiving complaints from the operators of those sites. We (probably) want them to do that.
In the meantime, perhaps we should try and think of a name for the new economic system.

No half-Greek half-French monstrosities like "bankocracy". Sounds awful. Trapezocracy please. (Warning: Google Books tells me I'm the first person in the history of the English language to think of this, so probably I'm spelling it wrong and it should be something like trapezitocracy or trapezacracy or I don't know what else).

An Oxford man should have been able to think of that himself, especially one who gets published in the London Review of Books on a regular basis.
Visual Studio Express is free.
Exxon's R&D budget isn't going into global warming research - it mostly goes into research into how to find and tap oil (geology, physics, mathematical modeling, etc). A substantial portion (20-30% - from what I can gather) goes into green research (biofuel, solar, fuel cells, carbon capture, etc).

You can't compare the 'income' of two arbitrary non-profits (greenpeace and AEI) and draw any conclusion from it either. Seriously, it's idiotic and misleading to try to do so.
It's times like these when I wish HN had audio inputs so I could enjoy a cappella renditions from members.
They seem to be getting news very quickly, before anyone else. For example, see recent earthquakes, etc... Other websites want this leading information. Maybe?
He's Not as Smart as He Thinks
You know they have considerable income right now, right?
Haha...

These arguments continue to this day. Just replace the word "pork fat" with "bacon". The obsession continues...
All good are partially non-excludable and partially excludable (e.g. you can exclusively sell the name of a lighthouse; restaurants which exclusively sell food give away for free, to the whole city, the option to buy food. This free option has concrete value, e.g. houses near many good restaurants, or one amazing one, are worth more.). It's just a matter of degree. And solved with a little creativity.
I make counterfeit $100 bills and give them out. People want them. I don't profit. :-p
Government Offers Data to Miners
So technically yes, you could get away with calling this pass-by-value. However, the spirit of pass-by-reference is maintained for any part of the data that most people care about.

And if there's any time you can afford to be loose about the spirit vs. the "technical" letter of the thing, it's when you're talking to a compiler. Right? I agree with the article. If you don't like the meaning of a technical term with a clear meaning, or if you simply don't have any occasion to use it properly, that's no excuse for repurposing it in the same context to mean something different that leads to confusion.

It's worthwhile to remember that (true) pass by reference isn't just a curiosity from obsolete languages. It's common for people entirely new to programming to expect that function parameters might, or actually do, work that way. The terms are at least useful to explain things to new learners.

In my opinion, if you want to insist that Java strictly follows pass-by-value, then I think it has ceased to be a relevant distinction.

Even if you work only with pass by value languages, you should still respect the terminology. Some mathematicians only work with continuous functions, but they don't say, "Hey, this word 'continuous' would be a lot more useful if we redefined it to draw a useful distinction among the functions we actually work with." So "pass by reference" doesn't mean what you want it to mean and doesn't seem very useful to you. Invent your own terminology. Don't destroy existing terminology by sowing confusion. And that's all you can accomplish -- there are too many people walking around who already know what "pass by reference" means for you to get away with redefining it.
A quibble really. I could make diamond rings that are worth $1000 and sell them for a $10. Lots of people would want them.

There are a million easy ways to make $0.10 by spending $1.00
Twitter will make money using premium accounts, selling access to the stream, selling their own premium clients, and selling targeted advertising.
Managing Fast Growth in a Startup
One thing I haven't seen mentioned recently, though some of the comments here reminded me of it, is the effect of fairly steady deflation, the kind enforced by a gold standard, on savings rates. Deflation boosts savings and depresses borrowing, because the value of the dollar will be higher in the future, so you are getting higher interest (ie, benefit more) from savings and losing more in interest (ie, paying more) on loans.
Loads of these "statistics" are nonsense, don't pay any attention.

http://www.indeed.com/salary?q1=Corporate+lawyer&l1=New+...
So that pretty much rules out 4chan, huh?
I'd like to hear more about the process of finding a manufacturer. In particularly, the back and forth between working on prototypes and tweaking the hardware and relaying the information to the manufacturer.

Also, how important the connection between hardware and any software.
ok....

Visualizing "The Future According to You"

As some non-AI savvy individual, I take this headline to mean "what I think will happen in the future". But then after reading, it turns out you are asking me very narrow questions having nothing to do with me, and everything to do with AI. So .... I - do - not - get - it.

Sorry if this is going over my head, but its on the front page, and I always take time to upvote and view "review my _" posts. But this one I am completely in the dark as to why its only about AI. What if I don't care about AI? Maybe just be specific as to your motives on the front page then.
Hanukkah is celebrated secularly by the large minority of Jews that are not religious. It's only celebrated and recognized so widely because of its close proximity to Christmas, the most important holiday in the United States, the celebration of commercialism.

Here's one thing I found with a quick search, though I suspect most secularly celebrated versions of Hanukkah are not done in such an organized fashion. http://forestparkreview.com/main.asp?SectionID=1&SubSect...
Computability of physical and mathematical theories
You didn't get tipped off by the advice that you could increase your farts by eating proprietary beans?
What I've found is that there's almost always some people that want any particular thing. The two really big questions are 1) How many of them are there? 2) Can you make money off them?

#1 is much tougher. If you're in a niche inside a niche inside a niche and you end up with 10 paying customers sending you $20/mo it's technically "working", but too small to be worth it.

#2 is easier. The situation Twitter is in. They have tons of users and now it's purely a matter of ingenuity to come up with a way to profit in a big way.