skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Grandparent was at 22 points when I saw it, so unless >1/5 of the people who saw the comment voted it up, I wasn't in the first 100 readers.
Google also have dual-class shares. As long as the company makes loads of money, shareholders care nothing of those structures. Of course, corporate raiders on Wall Street whine about the dual-class shares because they have more obstacles to take over companies.

For me, I have no problem to report to someone who is junior than I am. If the young king has vision but lack of experience and I have the experience in making his vision materialized. It is a win-win for both of us.
> Stop issuing green bills-redeemable-for-X-amount-of-gold and start issuing red ones

The green ones are no longer gold backed, in that case.
Gold-backing which can be revoked on a whim is not gold-backing in any interesting sense.
The power of positive deviants
Why I chose Common Lisp over Python, Ruby, and Clojure
The $40 equivalent cap is the unprecedented part. I don't see how you can argue that the inflation you see in relatively free-market economies can compare with that.
It looked to me like you were saying that feminism has/had nothing to say about how women reinforce patriarchal norms, or that it focusses on men's behaviour much more than on women's. That's simply not true.

Sorry if I've overreacted, the comments on this article have made me hyper-sensitive.
It would have been more precise to say BCD explains why most artists have trouble finding paying gigs. Wages for artists rise, their output stays more or less the same [1], so the proportion of artists whose output is good enough to justify the rising price shrinks.

The artists who aren't "good enough" (whatever that means), or have trouble convincing buyers that they are "good enough", have to take other jobs, e.g. as waitstaff, to make ends meet until their careers take off.

[1] Mass production has made some kinds of artists more productive, like novelists and screenwriters, but the net effect is a similar winner-take-all situation. Many unknowns compete to be the next Umberto Ecco or Dan Brown.
Differences between Scheme and Common Lisp
It's a political problem; the democratization of principles. Sometimes what everyone likes isn't what's best for everyone.

It's interesting to note that Kent Beck, who brought Alexander to the attention of Erich Gamma, did so with the intention that it could be used for interface design (if I remember right).
Upvoted because I think this is a good point, but the statement "nice error pages matter" isn't backed up with any evidence. I would have loved it if there had been statistics showing how people reacted to different error messages, even though I know that kind of information might be difficult to gather.
I felt the same way for a while, and then ended up setting up an account.

Facebook is what you make of it. You can be a "friend-whore" and try to get every person you've ever met on your friends list, or you can limit it to just people you want to stay in touch with.

You can share as much or as little as you like.

From your blog post: "I am not a Facebook user. " I think it's hard to have an accurate assessment of the service based only on second-hand experience.
Really cool Word trick
I'm not sure you can argue, as the article does, that musicians' productivity hasn't increased either. In the age of digital distribution that same string quartet can (potentially) generate far, far more revenue than their 18th century counterparts.
Such is the power of institutional, organizational, and societal inertia.
New Legal Pot "K2" Is Getting Popular
It always amuses me that some people sneer at thinking paper can have value, and point to their security blanket: magic, shiny rocks. (There are magic rocks, and shiny rocks, but duh, only the magic, shiny rocks are useful as currency. Naturally.)

You can have wild fluctuations in the supply of magic, shiny rocks -- it has happened before, and it will happen again. For example, when Spain discovered that they could kill people and take their rocks more efficiently than they could mine their own rocks. It also happens on the microeconomic level, a phenomenon known as a Magic Shiny Rock Rush.

When the supply of magic, shiny rocks increases suddenly, the amount of magic, shiny rocks you need to buy things also increases.
The author seems to analyze only "buy" and "rent" but what we really do is "buy a license".
You could probably get rid of the "(fixed)" in your title; I bet most people didn't see your original submission, and the ones that did will know what happened.
Indeed, I am in no way claiming my assessment is accurate from a user perspective. But being a non-user also has effects on me, and seeing those effects makes me not want to be a user. This is not an impartial review.
Actually most production databases tend not to use ASM's High or Normal redundancy because the software level redundancy provided by ASM tends to perform very badly when compared to a storage controller driven RAID. External redundancy is usually chosen. ASM is primarily used to easily manage the disk groups when the volumes in the disk group tend to run out of space.
I touched on this in my reply to cousin_it below.

People consume cultural stuff in large part because other people are consuming it, or as an implied comment on stuff other people are consuming.

So the mass production of cultural stuff is limited by the amount of attention people have to dedicate to that sort of thing. Long tail-style fragmentation may change this for all I know. IANA Cultural economist.

But in the world we've been living in, the result is a tournament model, where the Stephen Kings and Britney Spearses provide books and music to more people than they would if everybody chose what to read and listen to in isolation.

Baumol's Cost Disease is what forces artist-hood to be boolean. If you don't become a bestselling novelist on the national stage, you make no money at all as a novelist, and have to make ends meet as a technical writer or something.
To put it bluntly, it seems that males are more interested in solving difficult problems than they are in inventing novel applications. The result has been uninspired glacial evolution of applications, leaving many of the revolutionary application ideas to the startup community.

Didn't you just contradict yourself there? The startup community is hardly burgeoning with women and hence it must be men who are coming up with all those revolutionary applications you are talking about.
In Poland (and I imagine other socialist countries), people who made a bunch of money took pains not to get stuck with cash, for exactly this reason.

Since it was illegal to own foreign currency, a popular solution was to buy and store grain alcohol, on the assumption that no conceivable change in political system would ever make booze lose its value.

The approach had two main drawbacks - you needed a fair amount of space to store large quantities of ethanol, and you had to safeguard the storage room against the depredations of local aficionados.
Good point, perhaps a future blog topic :)
I am inescapably drawn to the conclusion that the internet is telling you that you should die in a fire, you dumbest person alive. Don't dare to like something else or it'll just add another clause to your doom.

Don't feel bad. The internet pretty much says that to us all, at least those of us who post anything. Ever. On any topic whatsoever.
The evaluation is done differently though.

Academia penalizes ideas that cannot be easily evaluated in a scientific way.

Imagine trying to write a grant proposal for twitter say and consider the sort of scientific evaluation that you might discuss.

VCs don't care so much about scientific evaluation and are willing to gamble on hard to evaluate ideas.
legality is relative term to rules and constitution of the country. North Korea is totally dominated by the government therefore sets its own rules. Whatever government does is considered to be legal because they make it to be so.
This thread is a dupe of this one: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=971331

In that thread I've explained what First Click Free really is (its not new), because the BBC article is quite misleading. This is a small policy change to throw a bone to top-tier publishers like NYTimes, and is unlikely to have the impact you've described.

More here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=971414
> Academia penalizes ideas that cannot be easily evaluated in a scientific way.

Isn't that the point?
Stock? Bank accounts? What planet do you live on?
Thanks. Sorry for the trouble before. I had an old personal wordpress blog that I'd originally posted this on - but there were some technical issues with upgrading WordPress to a modern version.

Just reposted the same content on Posterous.
No. http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/12/changes-i... http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/12/new-user-...
@asciilifeform, I agree with your statement, which is why I would only advocate fiat currency by a govt. such as we have in the U.S. where the will of the people is (largely, at least) represented.
Would you advocate the same change in Computer Science education? Enough intellectual speculation: Java schools for all.

To make progress, you have to try something new.
"Most existing database clustering solutions rely on a shared disk storage to maintain their cluster state, as can be seen in the diagram below."

In the case of RAC, although state is written to a file called 'voting disk', the actual state of the cluster is communicated through a high speed inter connect which is redundant. Only if the network connection(s) are down, state is exchanged through the 'voting disk'.
I've noticed this recently about FT. My reaction is that when I notice a link is to FT I don't bother clicking it, because it's annoying to get the "register first" page, and that because I'm only going to close the page rather than register.

It's not a rebellious, "they're taking my free Internet" reaction, it's just an annoyance that I swat away, like a fly and with about as much thought. This post is orders of magnitude more thought than I've given it to date.

I wonder how many other people are going to react that way to FT and other sites?
The hard part is choosing the commodity, and figuring out how to store it. If you really think all hell is going to break loose, to the extent that the dollar might one day lose a bunch of its value overnight, then you are limited to stuff you can store in your own house, with all the attendant security problems.
Amazingly successful? Not yet. Let's see if it can be turned into a business.
The fact that he proposed removing map, reduce, filter, and lambda from Python 3.

In the case of map and filter, is there any compelling reason to use either of those instead of list comprehensions or generator expressions?
I wonder if a news site counts the visit as a "visit" for purposes of selling ads and eyeballs when you get a paywall poster on your visit, and you just click away rather than register?
The background music and production reminds me of Lost. Maybe Lost is actually based on North Korea. It wouldn't be all that far fetched.
After that, I was planning to dig into some specifics about the best way to manage/deploy a production Common Lisp webapp, which I hope would help a new Lisper get off the ground.

Looking forward to that.
From working remotely to out of an office.
There is a tradeoff between quick, free, easy and effective. Its impossible to learn such techniques on a blog, because any quick, free & easy method would draw the crowds, rendering it ineffective.

Besides, the author's suggestions involve spending time answering and searching forums. Not my definition of "quick".
This is crazy:

"Go spend a dollar on a thank you card. It has to be a custom note, with a reference to something about the interview you enjoyed, something you appreciated, or something about the company. I think everybody sends an email, but adding that personal touch goes a long way."

Maybe it's different in other countries, but in the UK if you did that, it would absolutely guarantee that the interviewer would consider you a bit deranged and certainly unemployable. Probably sectionable.
I think the more giant gaping hole in logic is how much power gangs have in an anarchy society. If you're interested in maximizing your personal resources, the best way to do it is to terrorize and extort your fellow citizens through violent collusion (see: Mafia in Italy).
Malaysia has much higher proportions of women in Computer Science (~50%). It's almost as if it's purely a cultural and social issue...
I think this kind of post is more interesting when presented as a detailed post-mortem, rather than a HOWTO. If you've just failed at X, don't try to teach others how to do X. Instead, write up your failure, dust yourself off, and have another go.
Umm. I hate to blow your example to bits, but, Twitter was started by three guys.
LOL. That may be a step too far ;)
How I got 6000 RSS subscribers in 12 months
Questler.de - Du hast es Dir verdient
The other problem is that the market can't properly value artists by definition, because if you know what you're paying for then it isn't art.

edit: This is one of the arguments in Seth Godin's next book, which you can get a review copy of here:

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2009/12/preview-copy...
Cupertino makes history with Asian-American majority City Council
That is very sad and reminds me of Soviet Union collapse.
Old people who saved their entire lives had bags full of money that suddenly became worthless ( well some used it as a toilet paper...).
It's a recurring theme in Russian movies from 90's , bag of useless cash.

PEOPLE !
The most important thing in your life is your close ones.
This is a German-language get-paid-to-read-email service. Looks a lot like a pure ad.
Will HTML5 be SQL-free?
That's a good point about the risk of supply fluctuations, but there is no denying it keeps govt's in check by removing the ability to (easily) manipulate currency.

EDIT: In response to replies the above should read "govt's in check short of using force"
Well, a government has to follow its own laws. For example, the U.S. government could conceivably bring its troops into a house under gunpoint and have them sleep the night there. It wouldn't be legal, since it's directly against the Third Amendment.
Simpson's Paradox: Good Data and Flawed Conclusions
The other way of looking at it is that people are paying to be entertained by an entertainment product.
My grandma used to tell me a similar story about her old country (Burma) except they used gold jewelry.
Amazon has repeatedly said that page load times matter. They decreased them once by 0.1s, and revenue dropped 1%. Google is also fanatical about speed (ever noticed how much GMail caches things?). Linus Torvalds said that because Git is so fast at what it does, it changes the way you use SCM.

Interaction times are CRUCIAL.
That's an excellent point. I stand corrected.

It's not that it's necessarily any worse or better, it's just that competing in a crowded field is necessarily different than only having a dozen or two competitors. It's just different skillsets and tactics.

I'm much more comfortable with offering something fairly unique in a smaller market with fewer competitors, but there are those businesses that do very well in huge markets with hundreds of competitors.

Either way, the odds are against you. So you pays your money and takes your chances.
Nope - just a style thing. You don't need lambdas either - named functions are just as powerful.

But I often think 'functionally.' Since I have options, I'd rather go with a language that allows me to program how I think - instead of being forced to translate my thought into its semantics.
I was reading a recent interview with Albini in which he mentioned that now is the best time in history to be in a band, because the web allows bands to bypass record labels in order to market themselves.
The green ones are no longer gold backed, in that case.

In other words, gold-backed currency would be completely ineffective at restraining a meat-grinder like North Korea, which is what this thread was supposed to be about.
Bernard Hopkins vs Enrique Ornelas Live Stream Online Fight
Interesting - I seem to remember YC having a policy of deciding "there and then", but receiving a call 12hrs later means that's not the case. Did this change or is my memory incorrect?

In any case, I wish the author and his cofounders all the best with their startup!
Power Failure Takes LHC Offline (again)
The entropy of a DNA profile
If you can't beat 'em (or buy 'em), join 'em!
It's a gray area, but IMHO that's not what's happening here.

It's more of a bait/switch than an honest upfront cost for entertainment.
How different is this from officially devaluing the currency in situ? This has been done more than once in the USA (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_United_States_do... )
Participation on forums as a method of direct customer acquisition doesn't scale. This isn't to say that it is valueless, but if you're recruiting your new trial users by individual persuasion you had darn well better me selling at Big Freaking Enterprise price points. Otherwise you are spending a huge amount of effort buying yourself a below minimum-wage job. Unless something has changed drastically in American college students in the last five years, you are probably not selling them enterprise software.

Ditto Q/A websites. By the way, you know they're essentially just massive funnels for low quality UGC to choke search engines with, right? (I will give an honorable exception to StackOverflow because some of their answers actually contain useful information that could not be gleaned from a Google search, and the embedded MMORPG is kind of fun.)

Put the content on your own darn page and disintermediate the middle man. (SEO is free (well, freeish) and effective, although it is neither quick nor particularly easy.)
I predict you will get a great deal of pythonic fire. Nevertheless, I find it very nice that you plan to deal with the specific libraries you're using in the next posts. The greatest problem in adopting CL seems to be the extremely decentralized (not to say disorganized) library spacs.
In fact stupid things are often the most lucrative.
Just about as useless as, say, a signature? You are making an incorrect assumption about signatures: They are there to verify or dispute that you authorized a purchase, if necessary, after the fact. The whole point is that the vendor saves the data, because it is his proof that you were there.

Signatures are about managing by exception, because it is impractical to do anything else.

Biometric signing, properly implemented, is far more secure than a signature.

Consider:

* POS system grabs biometric data and encodes it.

* POS system transmits the biometric data to the bank, who returns a cryptographically signed timestamp.

* Biometric signature, authorization, and timestamp are then bundled together and cryptographically signed by the vendor. This becomes the receipt.

* Vendor stores the result locally as proof of sale. Customer receive the same as proof of sale.

Thus, the bank, for the first time, has actual proof of the presence of a customer. This makes the signature stronger. Also, vendor and customer both have much stronger proof of transaction to dispute / verify same.

No system is impossible to subvert. Low-level man-in-the-middle hardware/firmware hacks are always possible. But with some variant of the above, the buying process can be both swift, and much more secure than it is now.
> dust yourself off, have another go.

Exactly. Hopefully these will be useful guidelines for the next time around.
Zoho launches full integration with Google Docs
Basically: I started with my conclusion, and then went through all the other options and rationalized them away until it seemed like my choice was based on objective reasoning.
The only way they could be blackmailing you is if they said something like, "if you don't spend money, we will tell everyone on facebook how much you suck at maintaining virtual fish!"

I don't think this is exactly the case. They sell a service. Whether you deem it a service of value or not is irrelevant.
Somali sea gangs lure investors at pirate lair
The mechanism is chemical/physical, though, and depends on the absorption spectrum of a certain pigment molecule for each type of receptor. I strongly suspect the variance in those is likely to be tiny.
Use proxy_set_header? That's your more-interesting-explanation? You probably don't want to go "tracking sessions by IP address" or you might just think half of AOL is one session.
Obviously, map and filter are better because ... ah, hmm, I don't know.

I think it is a matter of language design. Higher order functions are not as prominent in Python as say, Haskell, where map & friends are generally preferred for composability.
Lispers prefer map & friends just because list comprehensions add all that messy syntax.

If I were a Python programmer, I would probably use list comprehensions, since they seem to be the preferred idiom.
I agree. It is not the "quickest" way to market by any stretch of the imagination. The author was probably trying to make the point that if you have more time than resources (ie money, contacts) here are methods you could try to get you started.

Maybe the title could have better indicated who was the intended audience: the startup truly just starting up.

Reading around a bit it is clear they fall into this category and are experimenting with different techniques and blogging about them. So maybe it wouldn't be worth the time investment for a startup even a bit further along, but maybe worth it for a startup to get their pageviews from 0 to...not 0.
Yes, you are correct in respect with local currency. However, in my country there used to be quite vibrant currency black market instead of alcohol storing. People most often replaced all excess local currency with deutsch marks. At the expense of exorbitant fees, of course. But it was still better to have some deutsch marks than none.

All of it was of course illegal, but the government wasn't too keen to penalise such behaviour. At least I don't remember anyone getting caught.
Because it's moving the goalposts once you're committed.

It's not the same as freemium at all.

A game, where you're competing against other people, that operates on a non level playing field, is unfair. Allowing people to pay money to progress faster in the game is taking advantage of peoples idiocy.

Imagine going to the arcades, playing street fighter II, and it saying "We know you can't get on the score board because you suck, but if you pay $20 we'll put you at the top of the score board anyway". Would that be completely fine and above board?
I'm going to go ahead and deny it, actually. North Korea can confiscate value pretty easily regardless of whether they use crispy paper or shiny magic rocks as currency. "Give me all your magic rocks, or I'll send men to beat you." (If that sounds far-fetched, I would note that the United States has banned private possession of gold before.)

More subtle variations on this: "We require you to pay us in shiny magic rocks, but we will only pay you in crispy paper.", "Our coins are made out of shiny magic rocks... but, haha, there is less magic in them now! Too bad you're not an alchemist and will never notice!", "These paper entitle you to shiny magic rocks. We're lying, but you don't know that.", etc, etc, etc.
"When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal" - Richard Nixon
Very different. This is capping, not just devaluating. If you're devaluating, let's say, by 10%, if you had $10 you will have $9 (it will be still $10 but it will be only worth $9), if you had $100 you will have $90, if you had $1000 you will have $900, etc.

In this case, they're capping as well at $40. If you had $10 you will still have only $9, but if you had $100 (or $1000 or a million) you will only have $40. That's it. That's not just taxing wealth, it's taking all the wealth away.