skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Zero, unless Amazon implements advances. The time inherent in writing a book is immense, some best selling authors only manage 1 entire book inside 3 years, whilst some are rather prolific with multiple titles inside a year. You're never going to attract anyone's attention, even paying high royalties, if you can't pay them for their time in advance.

The real issue is though that self-publishing means self-everything. Advertising, marketing, cover design, distribution; everything. You're turning a writer into a contractor, they either have to do everything themselves and take forever, or they have to sub-contract. As most writers are writers by choice it seems, quite frankly, moronic why anyone would think they'd want to be anything else. It took years for most authors to ever get published, so why would they ever accept a deal that meant they'd only spend 30% of their time doing what they wanted? They had that when they were doing a real job.

This isn't even concerning the major fact that all the talent is in the publishing industry already. Authors aren't going to be able to release the brilliantly edited books that are well marketed, distributed in multiple countries and often in multiple languages, with artistically designed covers. Doing all of those to a professional degree is as lucky as shooting yourself in the head and having no brain damage whatsoever despite a visible hole through your brain; I believe walking on water is more frequently reported.

Simply put a mass self-publishing route would inevitably end up with everything been done by the publishing industry, now retitled as the 'self-publishing' industry that takes an 85%-90% cut of your book sales. Only this way, you don't get an advance and you'll likely have to pay the 'self-publishing industry' thousands to get them to cover all the work in advance of any foreseen profits.

Essentially authors have the choice between the publishing industry where you can get paid anywhere between ~$5,000 and $2 million to write a book. Or you can choose 'self-publishing' where you'll likely have to pay a minimum of ~$50,000 to get quality editing, distribution, cover art and most costly of all marketing.

With $10,000 being an average advance in the industry for a first novel, who's going to pay $50,000 potentially for nothing? Especially considering that if you go with the industry, if your book doesn't sell a single copy they're out $90,000 plus the $10,000 they gave you and you are legally entitled to keep.

Right now the publishing houses don't buy out the first electronic publishing rights from the author or the electronic republishing rights. It's only going to be a matter of time before they do, which means authors advances will increase accordingly. If the publishing industry takes on the similar 70/30 to the author, then the advances could potentially increase dramatically if e-book sales really take off. However, again, after editing and marketing, this would likely be closer to 30/70 to the author.
> On the other hand, it would completely obliterate poverty in the US.

No, it wouldn't.

Most lottery winners end up bankrupt.
Big-budget movie spam.
> and then the second response comes in. At this point, the user is at an "oh shit" moment, finally comprehending the implications of Google's labeling

I am having trouble understanding what the problem is, here. I also suspect this may be a Gmail problem rather than a tagging problem.
We're going to be using SendGrid http://www.sendgrid.com
Probably, but all I see is a graph and the abstract. It also depends on how the model is being used in the paper. Unless I'm mistaken, Nature puts papers through peer review, which for me personally, anyways, means I'd want to actually read the whole paper before fire and pitchforks.
I'm sure the technical and emotional arguments that Flash sucks had an important role to play in why Apple didn't include it, but I like to think it's almost simpler than that: Flash expects (and often requires) the traditional keyboard and mouse interfaces. The iPad has neither.

Sure, the big Flash sites like YouTube could easily get away with translating touches to clicks and it'd probably "just work" for them, but how do you handle the millions of sites that depend on rollovers to reveal menus or full keyboards to control game characters? You can't. There's just no elegant way to translate that to the iPad.

HTML/CSS was designed to degrade gracefully in the face of changing client capabilities. Apple can more freely create a new environment that can still acceptably display HTML/CSS content because of that core design decision. Sure, some sites will do things that break even on an iPad (or iPhone or Android - there's no right click, still no ever-present keyboard or mouse, unusual screen resolutions, etc.) - but for the vast vast majority of HTML/CSS sites, the necessary information is still conveyed or available in some useful way almost by default.
Farmer's dilemma
[BitBucket](http://bitbucket.org/)

That's my favorite at present.
Apple Tells A Developer To Erase Android Mention From App Description
It's easy to validate UTF-8. The danger is if other implementations crop up that are more permissive and your users are complaining that they can't get mail from those people. I think you could probably manage to avoid that, but I don't know if it would really be preferable. I want to claim that in asia and europe there are some widely used non-unicode encodings used.
Facebook - Introducing Your New Navigation
Temp-to-hire is hiring a person for a temporary period say 3 - 6 months as a temp with the expectation that if everything works out they'll get a job offer at the end. If it doesn't then the contract is finished and they leave.
Well . . . nothing worth mentioning in the last few months, but I have some stuff in the queue. Does that count?
Also a blog post from the author about Arel here:

http://magicscalingsprinkles.wordpress.com/2010/01/28/why-i-...
Good point, bad example. The entire NYT pay issue is a lot deeper than he lets on. I for one will pay for the NYT. In the past I could have said the same for the WSJ, though these days not so much. Other than those two I can't think of any other news source I would pay for. To say CNN.com and NYT.com have the same content on them is just untrue, especially if you live in the New York area.

As for the comment "It’s reported that the NYT site network has 40 MILLION unique users, yet they can’t seem to make enough money to support themselves without charging?

I literally CHOKE thinking of what kind of marketing and sales I could generate with that kind of audience. I know people who regularly generate millions of dollars in sales with a mere fraction of that traffic."

Having been in the NYT office a few times, I know that you need to make billions with a B to pay for that place. They have one of the biggest buildings in Manhattan, with literally dozens of floors of employees. I can't even estimate how many people there are, but it is in the thousands.

The problem is not that they suck at selling ads, the problem is that the ad-supported model just systemically won't work for a paper their size. They either need to shrink expenses massively or find a new revenue model. So their calculation is that they can make more money off a few million paying subscribers than tens of millions of advertising viewers. We shall see. If they gutted their payroll they would be just another weak news agency so lets hope they can make the pay model work.
On the Iraq war being over, I would have doubted it before yesterday when I started reading George Friedman's new book, The Next 100 Years. He would be the first to say that his predictions at a granular level are often wrong but that his methodology is a decent way of understanding how the world works and what might happen next.

Anyway, he states that the current war in Iraq (and perhaps Afghanistan) (against the "Islamist Jihadists" as he calls them, revealing more about his politics than is necessary) is not going to be a priority for the next 10-20 years. The primary purpose was to destabilize the region, not win the "war on terror", which certainly seems to have worked.

The next conflict, as he sees it, will be with Russia as it once again tries to gain greater access to the Atlantic, becoming another global power with access to both oceans.

I'm not well-informed enough to do more than repeat what I've read so far, but it is a thought-provoking thesis. And recommended reading.
Wow, thanks for bringing highscalability.com to my attention. Awesome breakdown of sites.
my point was basically exactly what you've said - except for the second paragraph. I was pointing out that the original word is spelled googol so they copied the bit that is unique to google, I'd say yeah they are done get a new name
Beggars to be removed from road
New Delhi has launched a campaign to clear the streets of beggars, as the city prepares to host this year's Commonwealth Games.
What Pregnant Women Won't Tell You. Ever.
Thanks for all the responses. The quality of feedback you get from HN is really amazing.
Is The Government Building a DNA database?
In fact, you can see in MA we have a universal healthcare bill much like the one being proposed and let me tell you it's causing all sorts of problems.

http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/art...
They still have the best experience for playing with your friends.. the ps3 is a total PITA
Yes, but it wouldn't be old-fashioned polygamy.

For legal reasons, most polyamorous people separate their lifestyle from the legal institution of marriage. As another post implied, poly people are a few decades behind the gays in terms of social acceptance--it's not likely the marriage laws will be fixed enough for poly people to use them in the near future. (Lots of poly people are married, of course, but only to one person.)

"Polyamory" is kind of a neologism anyway. Kind of like when the gays decided to be "gay" instead of "homosexual". Polyamorous people are in fact polygamous in the sexual and romantic sense, but not in the technical sense of marriage.
Worth noting that I agree with your points, more so than could be conveyed through my light-hearted parent. I'm not a developer, I'm a business coach, and absolutely business people respond positively to applicants with confidence / cojones.
Related submission http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1045366

Recent Slashdot discussion http://science.slashdot.org/story/10/01/10/1936240/The-End-O...
thanks... Your description of Ballmer as a cheerleader has now given me a mental image I'd rather not have :/
Link to a paper on arxiv about the idea. http://arxiv.org/abs/1001.0785
Prom Dresses
In an effort to make HN more like reddit, its users are complaining about the old news aggregation site they used to go to before they found this one.
I think I'm going to start redirecting a portion of my savings to some sort of a basket of foreign currencies.

If in 10 or 20 years, we don't clean up our act and a huge part of my taxes are just servicing debt, I'll just move somewhere else. I don't even care if the taxes are higher in another country; so long as I get good value for my taxes paid.
Black art
Our site is dedicated to bring to light the work of an online art gallery specialized in selling Contemporary African Art, including Black Art, African paintings and Contemporary Art by the best African Artists.
I'm not a developer but the guys in the shop are saying that the new active record is a lot different... but, man, I can't remember all the buzz words... I'll ask them about it tomorrow. They were excited about it today though. They were loading and testing and playing with it and they seem to like what they see so far.

Now I remember.. it's "Data Mappr" or something close.. That's what replaces (or will replace) active record in RoR Ver. 3.0.
I don't really care on a cheating and legality level as they are just doing it to themselves and there are so many doing it I really just can't care.

On another side I really think it is stupid and takes away from what sports used to be, it was already a hard thing for people to get into but now you have to be amazing and impossibly good to achieve anything that many probably feel the need to do steroids. On top of that you have coaches and players that are payed way to much money even for the risks of the game that they take ( more risks for games like American football).
Imagine you have to write a computer program to visit every page of every website on the entire Internet.

Sometimes you are going to make a mistake, and someone on the Internet is going to notice.
What do you think would be the most tactically sound method of actually showing the price difference between dead tree format books and their eBook equivalents? It seems this is the clincher that appears to absolutely terrify the publishing industry, but if it can't be done it reduces the value proposition for eBooks substantially.

Sure, there's still corner cases like it's much easier to store/carry/access/organise an eBook library than a paper book library, and delivery is intrinsically much faster, but I can't help thinking it's a huge fail on the part of the eBook market if they can't also push the massive production price per copy advantage they have.

Oh, and as an addition to that, region locking availability of eBooks is extremely frustrating as a consumer, but I assume that this is something the publishers are also forcing on Amazon? I bought Programming the Universe yesterday via Amazon, it initially wasn't available from Australia, but as I'm moving to Tallinn in a couple of days I just changed my address on amazon a little ahead of time and it immediately became available. It's these kind of tactics that force the market to just circumvent legitimate channels entirely.
Teeth marks at the rear end
Ok, that is great so long as you are processing XML. Actually, it isn't great even if you are processing xml.

What is the functional way to get the 3rd - 8th li in the 2nd ul where the ul has id="foo" and is in a div (either directly or as a decedent) where the div is directly before the 'comment' <-- content area --> ?

You use XPath, or CSS after finding the comment with a regex. People get incredibly retarded about functional languages, but in reality the only software that I have used that is written in one is XMonad. So in your mind everyone who actually gets things done is using the 'wrong language'? Or an inferior one?

Name one big success story of functional programming. There isn't one. Nobody uses it who actually cares more about getting things done than reading self congratulatory blogs between CS classes.

[in no way toned down]
I don't think this is a huge deal. There's a difference between writing a location based app that happens to pass along your location information to your ad network when it requests an ad, and writing an app that has nothing to do with location, but pulling location data out of the GPS solely so you can get better targeted advertising rates. The latter may be considered wasteful use of the GPS.

I don't think this has any implications for Foursquare, Gowalla, or any of the other half dozen location based apps out there.
"Name one big success story of functional programming. There isn't one."

Map Reduce. It is implemented in C++ (and other languages) but MapReduce itself is very functional. The users of mapreduce do "functional programming". Maybe you wanted success stories of functional programming languages? (which is a different question).

Another : SpreadSheets

Yet Another: SQL . SQL is (at the core) relational rather than functional, but functions are relations. This keeps getting rediscovered every now and then (witness all the noise around Rails3 and Arel)

"Nobody uses it who actually cares more about getting things done"

It must be nice to be so certain and knowledgeable about such things. You are a lucky man ;-)
Except that the headline quite clearly tells us that the charge is 20x higher than that (it's a $20k reason not to hire "someone", not "$20k reason not to fire 21 people").

Surely the headline would lie for the purposes of exploiting partisan anger?
Related to what some of the people are saying here, focus on what problem the customer is having. No small business needs a "PHP developer to create an e-commerce system" - they need a solution. If you can show them that you can solve their problem and help them MAKE MONEY, it's a much easier sell.

It sounds very infomercial-ly but I think it's true.

Also if you sell yourself as a PHP/MySQL developer, clients might not know what that means or what you can do, so you'd be limiting your clientele who are knowledgeable enough to know that PHP developers can do X. What you should be doing is to say you can solve X, Y and Z problems, and that you've done that for A, B, C clients.
In general, it's OK to use more parameters than data points even, if you properly use regularization (such as weight decay), for example. Other times, even significantly fewer parameters than data points can be wrong.
LLVM's Clang Successfully Self-Hosts
I've been a freelance-only web developer for 10 years.

Honestly with only general web dev skills and mostly PHP you'll be hard pressed to get over $65/hr. I know Django and I still strike out at getting Django projects pitched at $65/hr. But I think it has mostly to do with the economy.

Once you want to cross a certain threshold you need to have more structure in place as a business (with project rates and lots of time spent coddling clients and doing documentation), some really specialized and in-demand skills or a long-running career with some impressive success behind you.

I've pulled in $100/hr+ in the past, but it was due to a complete package of project management, design and creative direction and oodles of documentation and meetings etc. Operating almost as a shop, not freelance

I don't know who all these folks are that claim they're getting $125/hr rates but I suspect they have more up their sleeve than just run of the mill web programming. You take what the market will give you or you lose projects its that simple.
> Well also Lisp macros are more comprehensive. Ruby can only make DSLs that look mostly like Ruby. In Lisp, you can literally drop in a new parser if you really want to.

Much better.

I haven't worked much (almost at all) with macros. How easy/difficult would it be to create a Ruby-esque DSL in Common Lisp? I'm just curious.

> This allows you to inject whole new programming paradigms into your code. If you need a special kind of OO, you can easily create it. This is actually incredibly-hard-borderline-impossible to do in Ruby.

Really? I dunno, I've seen (for example) some really interesting functional paradigm idioms implemented in Ruby, such as a lazy evaluation module.

> Especially when you get into anaphora injection and complex closure manipualtion.

I admit I haven't done "complex closure manipulation" much anywhere. I do use closures from time to time in my code, in a number of languages -- including Ruby. I'm not entirely sure how "complex closure manipulation" would look, actually, so I have no basis for comparison in that regard. I guess I'll just have to take your word for it.

> I had the same reaction this morning when a teenager asked me, "Okay so I get pointers. I get what they are. But they don't see good for anything in the real world." If you find this offensive or dismissive, I apologize.

I don't find it offensive or dismissive. I understand your perspective. I just don't think it helped anyone understand anything. I'm sure it all looks a lot more natural to someone who has done a lot more CL and Scheme coding, but it really doesn't to someone who has pretty much never touched a CL or Scheme macro in his life (or even for me, who has touched them a little). In fact, what Lisp macro experience I have is mostly limited to UCBLogo plus a light sprinkling of R6RS.

> I am simply saying that I think you and I are operating at entirely different levels of abstraction, and bridging that gap is difficult for me.

That's understandable. To some extent for my benefit, and even more so for the other guy's, I decided to explain some of where the gap lies -- so that you might find it easier to bridge. I hope.
Ask HN: What should Microsoft do to get its mojo back?
The recent NYTimes article has generated plenty of discussion about Microsoft, most of it negative. But instead of focusing on what they've done wrong, I'm curious what people think they should do to gain back some of the relevance they've lost. And please, no "Fire all the management" comments. Here are a few ideas to start the conversation for better or worse:

1) Streamline the product line. Get out of the markets where you've just gotten in from being panicked. This largely means the content businesses and probably music. Stop being so fucking insecure about businesses where arch rivals are doing well and identify markets to get in to where you already have a natural advantage. This probably means other business markets vs. consumer. Bing seems to be doing pretty well but it should just be a hobby. Just going through your main nav on Microsoft.com shows you're spread WAY too thin. There's over 100 products on there.

2) Redo your website and come up with a consistent look and feel for everything. Your branding totally needs to change to give people a new vibe about the company. For the amount of money you spend on marketing, your website sucks. Fire whoever is in charge of it and start over using some boutique firms in New York or S.V.

3) If you can't outright cut projects/products, spin them off and give them their own identity. McDonalds owns Chipotle but you wouldn't know it from Chipotle stores, their focus on organic meat, etc. Given the polarization of your brand, this could work well in other areas.

4) Invest in some yCombinator/TechStars type incubators and create a more well known pipeline to the startup community.

5) You generated a ton of bad karma by keeping IE6 around for 8 or 9 years. Seems silly, but you lose a lot of cool points and generate a ton of frustration among the developer community you're trying to woo. Make sure future versions of IE rock, maybe even go to a webkit rendering engine instead of what you've got now.

6) Flatten the organization, introduce some perks not even Google has and publicize the hell out of them. Encourage more employees to blog and be open about the culture there and the good aspects of working there. Make Microsoft a cool place to work again.

7) Put up a pirate flag a la Apple in the eighties or some other rebel move for show. You need to look like you have an edge to put your competitors on notice that you're still the 800 lb gorilla in the room and you intend on kicking some ass once again.
This is an internet problem. Which government should be dealing with this?
The State of Rural 3G Access in Canada
Ourselves?
Windows 3.1 in JavaScript
This implies they had some mojo to begin with.
That sounds pretty ad-hoc. Sure, you can throw an L1 or L2 regularizer on your objective function, but it should be well-motivated.

Should probably just use Gaussian process regression if you want to do inference over the space of all[1] functions in a principled (i.e. Bayesian) manner.

1. (or the space of all polynomial functions or something. I forget)
I'm no Microsoft apologist by any means but come on, they rule the business world; they had to do something right to get there. Any company in the world would kill to have their products have 90%+ market share.
Don't be so obsessed with what Google and Apple are doing. Stop entering markets that they have defined. Instead of focusing on crushing the competition and stealing market share, focus on creating a new market according to your own vision, where there are no other players.
BlueBrain - Year One - Modeling the brain
An Amazing Project.
ASUS 90-NAA1B1000 Li-ion for Business ASUS notebook battery
SEC Demands U.S. Firms Disclose Global Warming Risks to Shareholders