skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm working hard to be polite here. Apple was removing private APIs and so on months ago. NOW, as in TODAY and YESTERDAY, they are removing apps like the ones created by the service linked to.

I just said something true. You "rebutted" it with something totally wrong, somehow assuming that I was wrong. Why would you even do that?
Works for me too. I often spend less than 5 hours a week working, and I have a 6 figure income. My web applications compete directly with Google and Microsoft, among others, so the "no competition" argument is out.

I generally buckle down for a few weeks of hard coding (meaning 4 hours a day for 3 or 4 days a week), once or twice a year, and the rest of the year I'm just doing customer service, system administration stuff, and limited marketing. Just maintaining the architecture for the sites is the biggest time sink -- one of the webapps has two different kinds of database servers (MongoDB in the front, MySQL in the back), web servers, worker servers doing incremental processing/rollups... and I keep things PCIDSS compliant which means self-audits, lots of security patching, etc.

Running affiliate programs for my products and encouraging customers to use them to refer others has been extremely important. Affiliates do all the PPC marketing, article marketing, social bookmarking FOR me, with their affiliate links.

Just goes to show there are a hundred ways to run a successful business. The venture backed 60-hour-week startup isn't the only option.
Excellent article, I especially loved the quote "I'd rather write programs to write programs than write programs."
I recommend checking out the site of Ask the Headhunter: http://www.asktheheadhunter.com/

Specifically, start with this page on the "New Interview": http://www.asktheheadhunter.com/basics5.htm

The philosophy is very straightforward: show them you can do the job by doing the job.
A great Mixergy interview with Shai Reshef not just but two weeks ago.

http://mixergy.com/shai-reshef/
interesting. i realise that there must be much more evidence and study than is contained in that article, but it struck me that for the particular experiment they gave the people with the harder task may have a stronger sense of being "owed" something, since they made more effort, and that maybe this stronger sense of entitlement leads them to take more rewards...?
Huh? I don't know why this has been voted up and the parent's reasonably logical explanation voted down. The app in question even had something about it only costing a dollar in the description - even though the price climbed ever higher. IMO, what this guy did was fraudulent in spirit if not in fact.
I just said something true. You "rebutted" it with something totally wrong, somehow assuming that I was wrong. Why would you even do that?

Because I don't believe that what you said is true. I don't see how It has been all over the news that apple is removing these type of apps from the app store. is a factually correct statement. So I went and said why I don't believe it to be the case.

NOW, as in TODAY and YESTERDAY, they are removing apps like the ones created by the service linked to.

Now, see, this is the first that I'm hearing about another mass removal of applications from the App Store. I just went and looked at the past few days worth of TechCrunch articles. We can argue the merits of TechCrunch as a journalistic source, but they do like to report on what Apple does. They didn't have a single mention of another app removal, on a mass scale or otherwise.
I've spent some time off and on over the past few weeks implementing what's essentially a structured write cache with MongoDB for W3Counter.com. It handles large volumes of writes, and counters (the equivalent of SQL UPDATE table SET col = col + number) very, very well. This is something a lot of the other NoSQL data stores, like SimpleDB, don't handle very well. I might just have to go to this conference.
The difference between you and me is that you have absolutely no idea, and you're just talking because you want to say something. Instead of saying "oh, I did not hear that", you say "that is not true". But you have NO IDEA if it is true or not. I know something, you don't know it, in this case, do not go about saying it's not true, just say you don't know or just don't say anything.

I've been speaking daily with Apple reviewers about this, and I assume you have not been doing so and they have not been telling you it's not true.

TechCrunch even spoke about this: http://techcrunch.com/2010/03/07/apple-cookie-cutter-apps/

When you have no idea, don't pretend you know.
Then do it.
Sure but in most markets I'm guessing the majority of flow is between institutions who already have credit lines with each other (or alternatively use clearing houses like CLS or the DTCC).

There are already equity dark pools which operate on the basis that everyone has credit lines with everyone else rather than taking on the counterparty risk/margin management themselves.
What a fascinating article - rarely do you run across such well written math material! I've got to disagree on the intuitiveness of Cantor's diagonal theory, though; that was one of the most beautiful and intuitive proofs in set theory for me: make a list (denumerable) of decimally expanded reals; change the digit on the diagonal of each; you've now created a number not on the list: QED. Bam.
Spreedly has worked really well for us. They have at least 57 services using them, through their kickstart program ( http://spreedly.com/info/kickstart/ ), but I imagine there's a good deal more that simply don't have / want to put $699 upfront (to avoid all monthly flat fees, and reduce per transaction fees to $0.10).
That's easier. But I still wish there was a way to go back and replace the top item with something smaller. Right now, if I get to China, there's nothing bigger, so the "Something bigger" button stops working, and I'm stuck on China forever. I could just use the back button, but I'm not sure that's intuitive. Anyway, just nitpicking.
As some already noted, there are other animals like this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negligible_senescence
This is a great concept and Shai is to be applauded for his efforts here. It is a bit of a bummer that they need 5 MM in funding to keep it going. Anyway, even here in the states, you can cut the cost of education significantly by testing out of courses. Through the College Level Examination Program you can test out of most of your freshman and sophomore year courses for $75/per test. Most private colleges are now b/n 30-50k/year, so saving can be pretty significant. If you go to a state school saving can be really considerable as well. e.g., 1200 vs. 8k. +++ you don't have to take 15 weeks of a course to test out of it. More info can be found here: http://www.collegeboard.com/student/testing/clep/about.html. Education inflation is insane. We see this as one way to keep educational costs down.
I'll bet that's the future of the desktop/notebook, when cell phones become a little more powerful.
No, idiots buy iPhones just as much as smart people do...
A BitTorrent archive of early podcasts from late 2004 and early 2005
Don't feel bad about not giving them money—they need to be free to read to sustain the level of net-positive impulse-edits they get (similar to how chewing gum needs to be at the checkouts of grocery stores to sustain its level of purchase.) Encouraging Wikipedia's free use, as a side-effect, makes more people likely to edit it, and thus makes it more valuable.
Another interesting mathutation article on HN... Nice.

I've got to say, both in CS/hacking and math, I find myself spending a lot of time carrying out computations to get a feel for a problem. I poke around a problem until an answer begins to form in my mind - enough evidence pointing me in one direction heavily sways my opinion and even approach to solving a problem. But is computation math?

I suppose it's purely semantic, but I still see a difference between hackin' away at a problem and finding an irrefutable proof of a problem; though often the former leads to the latter.

As a NB, I'd like to add that Mathematica can be used to do "pure" mathematics, too.
I'm finishing up my final project for university (which is FPGA based), and I'm stuck with the supplied tools, so I can't really compare different vendors.

All the FPGA tools are closed-source though, and the free versions treat you as a criminal. I'm using Quartus II Web Edition. Altera finally came out with a Linux version, which is nice of them, but the list of annoyances is long:

1. Incremental compilation is disabled. You'll wait at least 5 minutes to try each change.

2. The signal analyzer is disabled. Debugging is a pain.

3. The source code for the supplied Altera components is encrypted.

4. Your design is on a timer, and stops working 1 hour after being programmed into the board. There goes that hobby project.

This is for the trial version, which I supposedly would use to learn. Yet they make learning about as painful as possible. I simply don't have 3 grand for the full version of Quartus.

I can't comment on Xilinx or Lattice, but I suspect the story is similar. FPGAs are hostile to hobbyists.

Oh yeah, boards :) Get a full-featured dev board. Sparkfun has simple breakout boards, but you have to add your own power, clock source and flash for storing the FPGA config, at least, before you can do any work.
My private college would have made me pay for the credits even if i tested out.
I consider this advice to be evil. Are people looking to show that Toyota actually caused these accidents, or are they looking to pick apart potential flaws in testing processes and use those to imply that Toyota did something wrong? Truth, or smear for cash?

Simply put, this sounds like someone with an axe to grind who is more than happy to "stick it" to Toyota if it gets their point across.
Looking at AppWhirl, it is slightly more then a glorified RSS reader. You can make a template (choose text and background colors as well as the background image) for your site and throw in tweets as well. No, its nothing complicated. Yes, it can generate apps from a template. No, it is not just an RSS reader for a single site.

TechCrunch even spoke about this: http://techcrunch.com/2010/03/07/apple-cookie-cutter-apps .

Two weeks ago is a far cry from NOW, as in TODAY and YESTERDAY. And it could be argued that it is different from the type of applications that the link you pasted mentions; twitter integration, maybe more options for the template as well? I never looked at the "old" way of generating apps.

And in the TechCrunch article, it does seem to imply that templates are OK, as long as they do more than simply RSS.
Would you please stick to counterarguments instead of resorting to personal attacks?
Ask HN: would you give us feedback about our saas directory ?
Yes, you're correct, I am in Iceland. I was hoping to use a merchant account in Iceland with Authorize.net. I'm still waiting for an answer from Authorize.net's customer support, but I'm hoping it's possible.
a very good point.

don't really get this study and line of thinking.

Are they saying there's an optimum sweet spot because if you don't exercise self control at all then it's hard to have a decent amount of it.
I don't think you can infer much from this article. It was a half-assed attempt to cut and paste a program from one platform and language to another. He uses a horror movie motif throughout the essay, but the right horror story for his development style is "Frankenstein."
Reminds me of this comment too:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1012496

I thought I was pretty good until I worked with the guy who made Winamp. It took me a couple weeks to make some enhancements to their add-ons site. It took him a couple weeks to write his own version of Pro Tools.
The best cheapest and easiest one is Paypal.
The problem is this: Apple is removing Cookie Cutter apps that are very close to what that service describes. I said that, and you came and said "NO, they are removing private API apps". That is inaccurate and misleading to anyone who wants to use that service.

I'm not interested in arguing any further, so I'll no longer answer here. If you wish to vent, do so to my private email.
There is a lot more evidence.

http://lesswrong.com/lw/10x/the_physiology_of_willpower/ -- exerting willpower leads to glucose-depletion.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=848839 -- this topic has been on here before, though it was a different paper.
A few months back we were looking for a place that would keep track of saas building-blocks that we find useful to build applications (we = Sébastien Gruhier and me).

So we finally decided to build this little directory and put it online.

We're working on adding more content to it as we go.

Please note I'm aware other HNers are working on similar stuff! We just happened to work on this during the last couple of months, it was time we release it :)

Any feedback will be most welcome!
Only if you look at things at a high enough level of abstraction - at which point all sorts of different things start seeming similar.

I would expect course scoring structured along game design lines to look significantly different to current course scoring structures, which are usually based around projects and tests at pretty widely spaced intervals. But games don't work that way: you get positive feedback almost immediately after successfully doing something. The feedback is in smaller but more frequent packets.

Lee Sheldon frames it as XP. But XP doesn't work like test grading. Every time you do less than perfectly on a test, you have permanently lost the potential to make that up. If a project is worth 20%, and you score 15/20, the best you can do out of the whole course is 95%. But with XP, you could do something extra to make up the gap - the equivalent of XP grinding. Perhaps an extra project, an extra presentation, etc.
I love compendia like this: Knuth's TAOCP volumes, NVIDIA's GPU Gems books, the HAKMEM memo, Hacker's Delight, Programming Pearls, etc.

Has there been anything like these centered around the web?
That's awesome, getting downvoted and commented on for the one word I put inside quotation marks. I was referring to hackers as in Hacker News i.e. the "startup community". Also it's pretty much impossible to do anything political, especially in the US, without the help of influential people. I could tell you the details of how it's done over here, but something tells me you're not interested.
It's important to point out that there are still certain standards you have to adhere to in order to earn the achievements/XP. In fact I wouldn't be surprised if, in order to gain the experience for completing an assignment, you actually have to complete it to a 100% rating (which, of course, makes sense in programming assignments, but not as much in English papers.) No bugs, no errors, no unclear thinking—you have to demonstrate, through that assignment and that assignment alone, that you understand every line and every word that went into its construction, and all the topics it covered.

There are many students who scrape by with a 60-70% grade in classes—this means that, after completing the course, there may be 40% of its content that they have no idea about, yet still managed to pass, and therefore are considered to know for having "completed" the course. This would be impossible an experience-based system—you'd do each assignment, over and over, until you got it right, and then you'd be done that topic. You wouldn't have to later do a test, or an assignment covering the same topics, because you had already proven you were capable of doing everything required.

It's almost as if right now we're passing or failing kids using fuzzy logic like a spam filter, when there's a simple set of discrete rules (for some subjects) that would give correct judgements 100% of the time, instead of 80%.
A new way to do presentations with audience feedback
Not all manipulation is evil - on the contrary, all sorts of everyday manipulation is entirely benign and positive in nature. See e.g. http://www.predictablyirrational.com/?p=235
The main "vision" of the UI seems to be "you're looking through a small viewport onto a much larger area". Which doesn't seem like a feature to me ... having a too-small display and having to scroll a lot has always been really unpleasant in my experience: using remote desktop to connect from a small display even to one that's only moderately larger always gives this uncomfortable feeling (perhaps not unlike claustrophobia?) of being in a cramped space and always being partially blind to your surroundings. Additionally, one naturally tries to keep a "full size map" in one's head, which is a lot of extra cognitive load.

I believe this effect is mitigated when most/all of the offscreen elements are just more instances of the same type of thing as those already shown (example: repeating table views), and also when the offscreen portion of the elements are along a single axis only (i.e. you would only have to lengthen the device in a single direction to be able to see everything at once). Somehow this type of scrolling doesn't cause the same "looking through a keyhole" response in me.

Many of Palm's advertisements for webOS portray a similar effect (screens tapering into offside infinity on either side of the device) which seems to me likewise unattractive and poorly considered, though the actual experience of the device doesn't appear to be like that, and certainly isn't designed around it as a feature like WP7S is. Regardless, the ads emphasize complexity and overwhelming amounts of data -- to their unfortunate detriment, I expect.
It's not open source though. It's an open standard listing (all?) the items that one could access using Bloomberg's internal standardised naming scheme from a Terminal.
Ask HN: How much to charge?
I learnt programming, web development and all IT things myself. Lately, I have started to work as a freelance. I'm 19 years old, I started programming since 12, I was and I still an amateur developer.

So my question is "How much to charge?" (the hour), right now I did few jobs (only 2) ($30/hour for a small job at Odesk and $120 for a 2 hours task). Last week, I got a request from a company to review and rewrite (some technical papers) for them. I told them my rate is $25 and they were happy with it!

I have stumbled upon few websites discussing it. M.I.T students are getting an average $20/hour for programming (http://web.mit.edu/sfs/jobs/wage_guide.html); so I thought $25 will be good considering my age and qualifications (no qualification rather than a small portfolio and apps I made). Also average freelance workers (freelance sites like Odesk) is $10.

So am I underestimating my capabilities? How can I measure my rate? If age doesn't matter, how can I evaluate my experience and charge accordingly to the market rates.

I fixed my rate for that job; but it seems that another startup may be interested on some JavaScript debugging (as I have similar experience to their issue, some event bubbling). This is why I posted this question. It seems that some freelancers are charing $100 the hour and even more. Why? Is it portfolio related? How do you set your rates?

Thanks for the advice.
I don't think XP is a simple mapping to grade numbers - see my comment elsewhere in this post. Doing less than perfectly in any single test hurts your potential grade permanently, but not necessarily so with XP.
I liked the developer side of Amazon Payments, but had a lot of complaints about them from non-US customers, who found that they couldn't pay without a US credit card or address.
Automatic Thoughts and Distortions
I agree, there must be more. It occurs to me that one might simply have a greater incentive to cheat on the second test as it involves money.
I'm pretty sure the first such device will be a future iPhone.

It looks to me that the current mobile corporations (let's say Nokia) are so used with business as usual and the tight lockin they don't want to make this step.

iPAQ "blue dock" was somewhat similar but never caught on for some reason, perhaps too early ?

Technically it's been feasible since forever. My cellphone is way faster than my Cyrix CPU that ran Windows 98 just fine. Yet, there is no hardware and software support for this.

Add a bluetooth mouse, this keyboard dock[1] and either have an extra wire for the display or go entirely wireless. That would be something nice to see in the corner of Starbucks.

1. http://store.apple.com/us/product/IPAD_KBDOCK?mco=MTcyMTgwOT...
The best thing you can do is just relax and be yourself. Seriously. If you are a good fit for the job, you'll be fine in the interview if you just act natural. If you aren't a good fit for the job, then I could give you 50 tips on how to micromanage the process and manipulate your way into it, but every day on the job will be extremely stressful and unpleasant. Not a life worth living.
DHH makes very good points about profit.

But he seems to imply that all other startups or majority of them do not get this basic point. He also thinks that 37 signals would be making the same kind of profits 20yrs later. These points do not fit in with how insightful and bang on he is with his business sense.
IPhone 4G now on Sprint
Some users have made it to the leader board and are already famous and we know their stories, other users can use a random username and put nothing in their profile page; how will you recognize them? (I think most users are already doing it)
Incidentally, higher tipping rates, and more honest behavior appears even in the presence of PICTURES of faces. Sure a live human is much more effective at applying social pressure, but that doesn't mean that the internet is helpless on this front (hell use an animated gif).
I agree, that is well laid out. The VC sphere will start to rotate towards "real businesses", not companies that will 'hopefully' make money some day by turning a magic key.
The hard bit isn't even the hardware. It's the ui. Phone ui and desktop ui going are always going to be different, so how jarring is it going to be to have two different uis on the same machine?
This is a large part of why I advocate waiting to incorporate until you can do it right. The instacorp LLC won't really protect you when you need it most.
Using the NPR model is pretty despicable if you're getting funding through more traditional means too.

For instance, Jesse Thorn (who's background is in public radio), asked for and got $15k in public donations to fund the first season of his web series: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1136753854/put-this-on-s... — the problem is that his show is itself advertising — NPR does pledge drives to avoid ads, and here he is using the same mechanism to fund the production of commercials!
People read "Dear Steve Ballmer (mozilla.com)" and expected something more other than what they got. Even though people are smart enough to understand the context after they clicked the link and started reading, that single line is all you have to set expectations before the click, and in this case expectations were set way too high. The annoyance that causes only amplifies whatever complaint the reader has about the content.

Obviously this could have been avoided by not having a personal blog on mozilla.com, or by not writing posts like this on it, or by not submitting it to the srs bzns HN crowd (which by and large can't take a joke)--but really, a more descriptive submission title probably would have been enough.
Lots of animals can do that, although the ones that can survive in a body—for example, tapeworms—usually start preferring to survive in that body (it relieves you of all the work of creating a biological equilibrium of your own), so they evolve to hold on inside instead of coming out.