326 Matching Annotations
  1. Feb 2021
    1. A freemium model is sometimes used to build a consumer base when the marginal cost of producing extra units is low.
    1. Economists call this a "network effect": the more people there are on Twitter, the more reason there is to be on Twitter and the harder it is to leave. But technologists have another name for this: "lock in." The more you pour into Twitter, the more it costs you to leave. Economists have a name for that cost: the "switching cost."
  2. Jan 2021
    1. What’s the use of ie. snap libreoffice if it can’t access documents on a samba server in my workplace ? Should I really re-organize years of storage and work in my office for being able to use snap ? A too high price to pay, for the moment.
  3. Nov 2020
    1. IS186-mediated integration of the plasmid into the chromosome or deletion of these accessory genes from an evolved plasmid that remained capable of self-replication conferred greater fitness benefits than SP formation

      Can we say this is because of the combined fitness benefit

      • by avoiding maintenance of a plasmid and
        • lower expression of proteins?

      Especially considering that there is expression of the accessory genes (ex: GFP in fig.2e)-> so the protein level fitness burden still exists, albeit at a lower extent.

      How much of this burden is attributed to keeping a plasmid around?, maybe this could be tested with a low copy pSC101 type plasmid or by deleting all the accessory genes and repeating the evolution experiment to specifically look for the integrants this time

  4. Oct 2020
    1. Handling all these requests costs us considerably: servers, bandwidth and human time spent analyzing traffic patterns and devising methods to limit or block excessive new request patterns. We would much rather use these assets elsewhere, for example improving the software and services needed by W3C and the Web Community.
    1. One of the primary tasks of engineers is to minimize complexity. JSX changes such a fundamental part (syntax and semantics of the language) that the complexity bubbles up to everything it touches. Pretty much every pipeline tool I've had to work with has become far more complex than necessary because of JSX. It affects AST parsers, it affects linters, it affects code coverage, it affects build systems. That tons and tons of additional code that I now need to wade through and mentally parse and ignore whenever I need to debug or want to contribute to a library that adds JSX support.
    1. The reason why we don't just create a real DOM tree is that creating DOM nodes and reading the node properties is an expensive operation which is what we are trying to avoid.
    1. This balancing act needs to take into account project complexity (size, distribution, etc.), uncertainty (risk, innovation need, etc.), and the cost of change at the project level and for each major component.
    2. Compounding the problem of iteration disguised as oscillation is the cost of change.
    3. Incurring high-cost changes isn't evolutionary design-it's oscillation caused by poor planning and requirements specification on a high cost-of-change component-it tips the anticipation/adaptation balance too far towards adaptation.
    1. This is what higher education is currently saying to its long-term casual staff. While universities are underfunded for teaching and expected to compete globally on the basis of research, then the revenue from teaching will be diverted into research. This isn’t a blip, and there won’t be a correction. This is how universities are solving their funding problems with a solution that involves keeping labour costs (and associated overheads like paid sick leave) as low as possible. It’s a business model for bad times, and the only thing that makes it sustainable is not thinking about where the human consequences are being felt.

      This last sentence is so painful...

    1. Weber notes that according to any economic theory that posited man as a rational profit-maximizer, raising the piece-work rate should increase labor productivity. But in fact, in many traditional peasant communities, raising the piece-work rate actually had the opposite effect of lowering labor productivity: at the higher rate, a peasant accustomed to earning two and one-half marks per day found he could earn the same amount by working less, and did so because he valued leisure more than income. The choices of leisure over income, or of the militaristic life of the Spartan hoplite over the wealth of the Athenian trader, or even the ascetic life of the early capitalist entrepreneur over that of a traditional leisured aristocrat, cannot possibly be explained by the impersonal working of material forces,

      Science could learn something from this. Science is too far focused on the idealized positive outcomes that it isn't paying attention to the negative outcomes and using that to better define its outline or overall shape. We need to define a scientific opportunity cost and apply it to the negative side of research to better understand and define what we're searching for.

      Of course, how can we define a new scientific method (or amend/extend it) to better take into account negative results--particularly in an age when so many results aren't even reproducible?

    1. A common complaint about pure-play PaaS products is that they are inexpensive, to begin with, but become incredibly pricey as you scale apps. One of the reasons behind this is that these PaaS products run on someone else's infrastructure, and they often need to pass those costs on to you. App Platform runs on DigitalOcean’s infrastructure, and since we own the infrastructure, we can keep the costs low to optimize costs and resources as you scale. 
  5. Sep 2020
  6. Aug 2020
    1. Guo, L., Boocock, J., Tome, J. M., Chandrasekaran, S., Hilt, E. E., Zhang, Y., Sathe, L., Li, X., Luo, C., Kosuri, S., Shendure, J. A., Arboleda, V. A., Flint, J., Eskin, E., Garner, O. B., Yang, S., Bloom, J. S., Kruglyak, L., & Yin, Y. (2020). Rapid cost-effective viral genome sequencing by V-seq. BioRxiv, 2020.08.15.252510. https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.08.15.252510

    1. Sun, W., McCroskery, S., Liu, W.-C., Leist, S. R., Liu, Y., Albrecht, R. A., Slamanig, S., Oliva, J., Amanat, F., Schäfer, A., Dinnon, K. H., Innis, B. L., García-Sastre, A., Krammer, F., Baric, R. S., & Palese, P. (2020). A Newcastle disease virus (NDV) expressing membrane-anchored spike as a cost-effective inactivated SARS-CoV-2 vaccine. BioRxiv, 2020.07.30.229120. https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.07.30.229120

    1. Vogels, C. B. F., Brackney, D., Wang, J., Kalinich, C. C., Ott, I., Kudo, E., Lu, P., Venkataraman, A., Tokuyama, M., Moore, A. J., Muenker, M. C., Casanovas-Massana, A., Fournier, J., Bermejo, S., Campbell, M., Datta, R., Nelson, A., Team, Y. I. R., Cruz, C. D., … Grubaugh, N. (2020). SalivaDirect: Simple and sensitive molecular diagnostic test for SARS-CoV-2 surveillance. MedRxiv, 2020.08.03.20167791. https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.08.03.20167791

  7. Jul 2020
  8. Jun 2020
  9. May 2020
    1. For the past few years, we've run GitLab.com as our free SaaS offering, featuring unlimited public and private repositories, unlimited contributors, and access to key features, like issue tracking, code review, CI, and wikis. None of those things are changing! We're committed to providing an integrated solution that supports the entire software development lifecycle at a price where everyone can contribute. So what's changing? Over time, the usage of GitLab.com has grown significantly to the point where we now have over two million projects hosted on GitLab.com and have seen a 16x increase in CI usage over the last year.
    1. Internal platform groups (those focused on a non-user facing part of our product, like a set of internal APIs) tend to create heavy coordination costs on other groups which depend on platform improvements to deliver valuable features to users. In order to stay efficient, it is important to ensure each group is non-blocking and is able to deliver value to users directly. This is why we avoid internal platform groups.
    1. In general, bucket owners pay for all Amazon S3 storage and data transfer costs associated with their bucket. A bucket owner, however, can configure a bucket to be a Requester Pays bucket. With Requester Pays buckets, the requester instead of the bucket owner pays the cost of the request and the data download from the bucket. The bucket owner always pays the cost of storing data.

      Request Pays

  10. Apr 2020
    1. If you are want pups and/or to support us and our artists but can't afford full price, you can back at this special half-price level with reduced shipping ($2), no questions asked. You'll still get the game + stickers, because we want to get cute pups on every table we can this summer.

      It's interesting to observe that

      • 149 backers backed at this half-price level
      • 656 backers backed at the full price

      What I want to know is, did everyone who backed at full price realize there was the option to get the same reward for half the price? Anyway, that's awesome that they're willing to support this project at that level.

    1. “Even if experts are saying it’s really not going to make a difference, a little [part of] people’s brains is thinking, well, it’s not going to hurt. Maybe it’ll cut my risk just a little bit, so it’s worth it to wear a mask,” she says.
  11. Mar 2020
    1. Yes, it’s been deprecated. Why? Because too few people were using it to make it worth the time, money, and energy to maintain. In truth, although I sometimes disagree with the operator changes, I happen to agree with this one. Maintaining ALL of the synonyms takes real time and costs us real money. Supporting this operator also increases the complexity of the code base. By dropping support for it we can free up a bunch of resources that can be used for other, more globally powerful changes.
  12. Jan 2020
    1. How much money does this machinery cost i know it cant be cheap with how huge these things are

  13. Nov 2019
  14. Oct 2019
    1. money

      Whose money? Important to determine whether the student or the institution is the winner here. Are we increasing access to high quality resources? I think the answer is yes, but I think it also bears thinking about.

      Another type of savings to consider: the technical debt that students of all ages incur when they encounter a new technology that may or may not be well supported. If OER is trapped inside proprietary technologies with unique logins, it's worth considering how many of those resources we ask students to grapple with over the course of a degree.

  15. Sep 2019
    1. Estimated economic benefit of data linkage

      the potential value from linking Census data to administrative data sets is only beginning to be realised and holds immense potential.(In other work for the Population Health Research Network, Lateral Economics concluded that data linkage generated over $16 for every dollar invested).

    2. Cost reduction suggestion

      there may be ways to reduce costs associated with the development of Census-equivalent statistics, including relying less on the general public to answer questions every five years

    3. Economic benefit of the Census.

      Our estimates suggest the benefits of running the Census easily outweigh its costs in the order of$6 of economic value for each $1 it costs. On this reckoning, the cost of the Census would have to rise to six times its current cost –to around $3 billion every five years –before it startedto become cost ineffective

    1. How to Make an App – What No One Told You Before Ever!

      What are the things you don’t know about app building? How to make turn your idea to be successful? Get to know about how to make an app here.

    1. What is the average cost to build a website?

      Being a leading web development company, we have the expertise of working on a diverse kind of projects for our global clientele. So, we can assist you to figure out the average cost to build and maintain a website. Well, once again, keep in mind that such cost estimations are not accurate figures.

  16. Aug 2019
    1. The cost of a single-payer system would depend upon its design, benefit levels, and scope of coverage.

      It is impossible to provide a specific costing method, but only general methods. How is design dependent? What is the benefit level of? and the range means the limit of the "Single-payer" system?

    1. Research. As zero-textbook-cost degrees are implemented across the country, research could be conducted to analyze the impact of degree establishment on student access and success, as well as on faculty pedagogical practice. Metrics related to access and success might include credit loads, withdrawal rates, persistence rates, pass rates, and actual cost savings.

      Zero-textbook cost degrees is still a long way off as far as India goes. Our students are now extremely proficient in the use of the internet and open sources. However, compared to open access resources use of standardised textbooks in traditionnal classrooms is definitely better as teachers has a personal connect with the student. This is particularly necessary as students are becoming victims of PUBG and other such addctive games leading to either suicide or other behavioural problems. We do not need a plethora of zombie students in our schools and colleges!

  17. Jul 2019
  18. May 2019
    1. The country’s economy is completely dependent on mining. Many poor families are completely dependent on their children working the mines. That $9/day is hard for a child to reject

      its weird how people are able to exploit these people legally, and if not legally than how have people not made an effort to stop them?

    2. Walt describes how the multibillion-dollar industry, that has made some people outside Africa really really rich, is not known to workers like Lukasa. He just sells his haul to Chinese traders who have seen their profits increase 400% over the last two years.

      I wonder if the people at the top of the company even know that this is going on with there "employees"

    3. Especially one child named Lukasa who gets up at 5 AM to work a 12-hour day for less than $9

      how is this allowed

  19. Dec 2018
    1. Inflation-adjusted Textbook Pain Multiplier for Decision-Makers

      Analysis and solutions to better convey the economic impact of rising textbook costs.

  20. Aug 2018
  21. May 2018
    1. Thus, as textbook prices go up, students seem to be responding by trying to get by in at least some of their courses without the required textbooks, which could negatively impact their learning.
  22. Apr 2018
    1. an effective marginal cost of zero

      This aspect of information goods is oft quoted as a distinguishing feature whose existence supports a radically different approach from previous publishing methods.

      It's true that the marginal cost is dramatically decreased with digital publishing. But there's a big difference between "closer to zero than before" and actually zero. The marginal cost of digital information goods is not actually zero. That people are willing to trade their privacy in exchange for someone else bearing the costs of managing information is one piece of evidence of this.

  23. Jan 2018
    1. “[t]he uncertainty surrounding the Title II regulatory framework for wireless broadband services hinders our ability to meet our customer[s]’ needs, burdens our companies with unnecessary and costly obligations and inhibits our ability to build and operate networks in rural America.”

      I think it's likely that these providers would offer slower connectivity speeds as a foundation for rural areas, but their uncertainty in what is allowed holds them back from the attempt to expand.

    2. The evidence so far strongly suggests that this is the right way to go.

      This statement is underlining the idea that repealing these regulations is necessary for innovation and development of new companies.

    3. if the FCC “suddenly subject[ed] some or all information service providers to telephone regulation, it seriously would chill the growth and development of advanced services.”2

      What are the facts/logic behind this statement? In what way would it "chill" growth and development?

  24. Oct 2017
    1. engage in an ongoing struggle for the right of students to be given a free formidable and critical education not dominated by corporate values

      Point 4/6

  25. Oct 2016
    1. The first assumption we need is that the cost function can be written as an average

      How could have a cost / error function that cannot be written as an average?

  26. May 2016
  27. Apr 2016
  28. Mar 2016
  29. Nov 2015
  30. May 2015
    1. Because most of these studies were randomized controlled trials—the “gold standard” of medical evidence—they tended to have a significant impact on clinical practice, and led to the spread of treatments such as hormone replacement therapy for menopausal women and daily low-dose aspirin to prevent heart attacks and strokes. Nevertheless, the data Ioannidis found were disturbing: of the thirty-four claims that had been subject to replication, forty-one per cent had either been directly contradicted or had their effect sizes significantly downgraded.

      Here is the cost right here!

    2. Davis has a forthcoming analysis demonstrating that the efficacy of antidepressants has gone down as much as threefold in recent decades.

      Ouch!

  31. Apr 2015