skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"It is not what you do IF Google enters your market it is what you do WHEN they do If you can not answer that, then you should not be putting time and money into a business that you are obviously incapable of making successful"

- From the guy who welcomed Google Voice entering his market and seems to be winning the voice transcription race, at least quality-wise.

http://jamessiminoff.com/post/86801254/thank-you-google-than...
For anyone who's interested, one of the canonical statements of the free rider problem and exclusive/inclusive goods is Mancur Olson's The Logic of Collective Action. A short book and well worth the read.
Cold, hard reality check: If you adopt this approach with most big businesses or almost any government department, the people you are dealing with will be required as a matter of corporate policy way over their pay grade and/or law to pay you as close to nothing as the contract permits.

It's a cute gimmick, but as the article suggests, its applicability is basically limited to ongoing relationships with regular customers who already know roughly what you charge. In that case, presumably there is little scope for them to dramatically over- or under-estimate your effort, and all you are doing is adopting the risk that on balance they underestimate instead of charging a fair price for actual hours worked and gaining a fixed return for your effort.

There is a technical term in the business world for someone who adopts risk out of proportion to the expected reward: "fool".
A two-dimensional hypercube.
This was the only way I found Facebook tolerable and they shut it down. sigh Like Apple, Facebook somehow manages to regularly insult their users without suffering the slightest damage for it.

Perhaps I can cobble together a facsimile for myself with Yahoo Pipes...
Startups founded by ex-Googlers have a 70%+ chance of failing? That seems incorrect.
Yeah, I mean, it's like it's more scientific to bring all of those people into a clean room where the weather is constant and then ask them how much they want to buy lemonade -- that's even further away from proving what he wants to prove.
Or use the JavascriptCore engine that's exposed as part of Webkit.

That's how Titantium and Appcelerator are getting by.

(To answer your question: No, they must be a bunch of chickens. ;-)
QStatus licensing model might be more interesting than the app itself
In the US at least, all barter transactions must be reported as income.

http://www.google.com/search?q=us%20barter%20tax
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interesting_number_paradox
Per Gizmodo themselves, they got the phone and held onto it until contacted by Apple's Bruce Sewell who requested its return. Nick Denton has been quoted in several other news stories as saying he paid $5000 for it.
That is one I wouldn't have thought of. My personal experience -- and the standard disclaimer applies -- is that when I can't reach DNS it is because of a networking issue that would make the server unreachable even if I knew the correct IP address.

Still, thanks, I'll pencil that onto the "thing through when not 3 AM" list.
Just click through to the article I linked. Even goes into much more detail and I intentionally did not repost that information here.
I found w3schools and tizag to be two of the best free web resources. JavaScript Kit goes into things in a little more depth with, IMO, better examples.

I highly recommend taking the scripts in the tutorial apart and testing to see what happens. No matter how much theoretical reading or tutorials I did, nothing came close to actual hands-on coding.

Best of luck in your project!
Will FaceCash, the mobile payment application, kill the credit card?
No, you could keep the graphs just as tall. However, it would show that this trend is smaller than you are currently making it appear.
I'm getting a 403 Forbidden error but from what you've all said, it's about telling clients to "pay what they want"?

This is almost never going to work out for the freelancer. The vast majority of potential clients you will run across don't look at your work as a value creation, but something they should dispense with as cheap as possible.

Thinking of spending money as value creation is a fairly rare way of thinking.

Any freelancer who's worked with more than a handful of clients is going to have practically INFINITE stories of clients trying to stiff them, devalue their work, complain about how long it takes, "It's on a computer, can't you just, like, click a button?" etc.

Moreover, freelancing is not just about creating value for the client. It's about meeting their specifications. If the business value they receive is less than your hourly rate, they should have said "No." or not done the project to begin with.

Moreover again, even if the project creates more business value than your hourly rate, and even if the client thinks in terms of value investment instead of costs... they would still need to be understand the amount of work involved in making it happen.

What a mess.

People are probably excited about this idea because they're too scared to price. They'd rather wave their hands and hope the problem goes away.

When you're afraid of something, the thing to do is not run away from it, but educate yourself.
There seems to be a bit of a recent trend toward hard-coded one-size-fits-all UIs in software.

MS Office is a good example - the UI was customizable almost down to the pixel in Office 2003 and earlier. But in Office 2007, the redesigned UI - with the exception of a single small toolbar - is completely unconfigurable. An MS employee told me at the time that it was a deliberate decision to compromise customizability in order to simplify the interface for the plurality of users.

It's a shame to see Google making the same decisions. But least Chromium is open-source.
What a great story. One of the things I love most about our field is hearing from and meeting people like you who obviously love what they do for a living.
Whatever Larry is smoking, I don't want it.
How To Create A Blog Posts Ideas Incubator
We all work differently. For me, digging in and figuring out what to name the resources gives me a good feeling for the problem domain.
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/686634/soap-whats-the-poi...

[Disclaimer: I answered here http://stackoverflow.com/questions/686634/soap-whats-the-poi... ]
Tyler, thanks for reaching out. I'll email soon. I'm wondering how intensive the location-based functionality would be to incorporate, because beyond that, I'm finding As RX'd to be really useful.
I'm in favor of reposting this forever or until every JavaScript developer knows it. Whichever happens first.
Ryan, I completely disagree. I am surprised that you would think that the society benefits more from the education than the individual. According to me, if I have higher education, I get a better job, better salary, more respect in social circle. Compared to this, what does society get if I am educated?

He never said more goes to society. He just said some of the benefit cannot be captured by the individual.

This is trivially true. Employers pay an individual somewhere between nothing and the value that individual contributes. If an educated individual contributes more than an uneducated one, then the educated individual is likely to get more salary than the uneducated one AND the employer has a larger gap between salary paid and value captured. (Incidentally there is typically a gap between the value provided by the employer and the revenue collected, which provides yet another layer of more broadly spread societal benefit that is not seen by the individual.)

That excess value is captured by private companies that may or may not even have existed at the time that the individual was being educated. That is value going to society that is not captured by the individual, and hence which can't be recouped through any kind of student loan program.
A Hypocube?
And those are 1987 dollars. That's roughly $1.4 million today.
Amen.

Actual, the competitive situation I described is already in place to a degree. Companies can go public in a different country, which many are doing since the oppressive sarbanes oxley regulations went into effect.
The original Apple Newton Messagpad did this for basic shapes. It worked much better than the handwriting recognition.

To erase a shape, you simply scribbled it out.
Yes, just take a look at the recent subprime mortgage crisis, or the massive short Paulson and Company made on those CDOs.
That's mostly correct, except that there are three classes of payers: Medicare/Medicaid, cash patients, and insurance. They form three separate supports that must together cover the expense.

In practice, Medicare/Medicaid form a near monopsony -- they're the 800lb gorillas, and can demand capitulation to their reimbursement rates. On the opposite side, cash patients are few, and many of those are expected to be bad debts, and so contribute little. Thus, the pressure release must be through private insurance payments. And that's why your insurance rates are increasing.

This is also why many experts fear that Obamacare's plans will squeeze private insurance out of the business, despite the "public option" being putatively off the table. If regulations hold government reimbursement down to a fraction of real cost, private insurance is forced to take up the slack. That necessitates raising rates, and thus forces customers out of private plans. But they're required to be insured, so they must move into a government-controlled plan.

Edit: awkward phrasing in 1st para
A few of the rest of us resent the heightened uncertainty it makes in buying decisions for non-trivial expenses.
Promote your business with Google Places/Tags
Diapers.com On Its Way To Selling Half A Billion Diapers
Ask HN: Frameworks for real-time collaboration in a web application?
I spent some time looking for frameworks that make making a real-time, collaborative web application (like Dabbleboard or Etherpad) easier. From what I could find, there are various frameworks that handle the real-time part, but not the collaboration part (XMPP/Bosh/Sophe.js, various Comet solutions like Tornado, APE, Node.js, Orbited, APE, and WebSockets (which may or may not also be a Comet solution depending on your view)). Then there is Google Wave which seems like it does most of what I want (handles operational transformations for me), but is currently restricted to other wave (or wave sandbox, if you use an embedded wave) users. Then there is mobwrite, which does synchronization for me using differential synchronization, but as far as I can tell, this won't apply to apps that use structured data (my data is in JSON). I'm leaning towards building a custom solution on top of WebSockets that tries to deal with real-time edits from different clients, but before I go at it, does anyone know of any other frameworks out there that would help me build such an app?
...list of modules are neat but some combination of: underused, slow, unstable, epic hack nobody wants to use

Thats a sweeping statement. Lets have a look...

* My opinion is only just that. The list is informative to what prior art there is. Always go and test and come to ones own measured conclusion.

* I postfixed old to modules that may have issues.

* Everything else I use and have no issues with (as listed elsewhere in thread)

* Haven't used MooseX::MultiMethods much recently but I do use MooseX::Declare regularly and find this and whole Moose type system a godsend that I couldn't live without now.

* re: Regexp::Grammars is new because its dependant upon 5.10 (replaceable RE engines). So it will have no other modules dependant on it yet but it looks like a worthy successor to the venerable Parse::RecDescent to me.

* re: Devel::Declare - I've already said its no "Perl6 macro" so comparing to a Lisp macro is a tad unfair :)

Hopefully that covers my value of "already" :)
"Reallocation from the general public to an individual can benefit an individual, but be detrimental to society"

Repressive copyright laws the take ideas and culture from the public domain and give them to individuals.

"Also some things may benefit an individual, but only provide marginal benefits for society."

>So you prefer society over individuals. Seems like it's >1922 again and USSR called!

Where did I say that? You said that everything that benefits an individual benefits society. I was pointing out that in some cases that the benefit to society is infinitesimal.
Twitter and Facebook can hurt Sales
Fred Wilson: 10 ways to be your own boss
Anonymous functions are your friend.
unfortunately, can't access it. Getting a 403 error. Is it just me?
Explore a whole new way to window shop, with Google and your mobile phone
How fitting: http://www.cs.vt.edu/~scschnei/pictures/42.png
Sending Email with Netcat
Download Windows Media Player 10,11,WMP 12 Free For Windows 7
So what's bad for the individual doesn't benefit society either.
Blackberry OS 6.0 Screenshots
Slate Wars: 15 Tablets That Could Rival Apple's iPad
indeed! Nice story!
Intel outs 3.6GHz dual Core i5, 2.8GHz Pentium
Chirp - A Developer's Perspective - Part 2
a person in one of a tiny handful of US states where it's even possible under state law to have it prescribed, and with a doctor who may well be putting his career on the line by prescribing marijuana. (Actual prescription is illegal under Federal law. They can "recommend", but I'm not sure if merely "recommended" pot is kosher with particular State laws)

Who has ultimate jurisdiction over this, then? If a State considers it legal to prescribe (and use?) marijuana, then under what circumstances/to what extent can the federal level of government enforce federal law? Shootout between federal agents and the local state police? :-)
That's not the tragedy of the commons at all. The problem with this method of pricing is the client might underpay. This is explicitly why the article recommends you only use it situationally. It's not a tragedy, and it's certainly not of the commons, since nobody else will get hurt if some one person or company is undercharged.
This was a good summary of RedBeacon. They are bright guys, and work extremely hard. They had the same TC traffic bump and have been working to gain traction in the cities they have launched in. Looks like they are starting to go in the right direction.
http://siteanalytics.compete.com/redbeacon.com/

Where they fall short IMHO is that the existing market is being satisfied (personal referrals, yelp, yellow pages, craisglist, angie's list, service magic, etc.) and their offering is not compelling enough (at least now) to customers/service providers for them to switch conventions. If they want to succeed they will need to hire an armada of sales people to compete with their rivals one customer at a time.

They have done an A job in getting press, but frankly they have all the press they need. Not sure how much runway they have left, but I'd like to see them focus more on getting local traction instead of all the ego boosting press.
What you are describing are simply the gains from trade. They exist for any good or service which is voluntarily traded.

Therefore, if we favor subsidies for education, we should also favor subsidies for purchasing industrial machines, computers to automate labor, or any other investment.
Proof of O (n (log n)^2) at: http://www.inf.fh-flensburg.de/lang/algorithmen/sortieren/sh...
Is there a context behind the posting? Are we all saying this is prior art for some UI patent somewhere?
Thanks for the resources! I agree with regards to hands-on coding. I usually use books to learn the best practices of a certain language and to get a basic understanding. Nothing beats learning something new by solving a real problem.
Do you have providers that you recommend?
I suffer from chronic insomnia due to disabling anxiety and recently started using a Phillips goLITE BLU (http://www.amazon.com/Philips-goLITE-BLU-Therapy-Device/dp/B... ; note there is another SKU for outside the US power plugs), a very cool 6x10 array of blue LEDs, which has made a tremendous difference. I clearly need to do some fine tuning but I'm now able to on almost all nights get the 8 hours I need.

If you have insomnia or an internal clock that's just plain wrong for your external needs, be sure to check out light therapy.
Reading the article, the author especially warns about doing this with anyone and instead suggests trying this technique with long term customers who you trust (and trust you back), find the project to be important for their enterprise (not just a corner of the table site), etc.

The author also gives example stories where he got much less than he expected and whatnot.

Look around the comments for the cache link -- the post is better written than I would have expected and it's not just evangelism.
Do you get told frequently that your ideas are far too complex? This is probably the biggest sign that you're an abstractionist (or at least are more of one than your team). One thing that I've found helpful is learning to translate "that's too complex" into "I don't understand you", unless it's provided with a very clear explanation of why it's too complex.

Once you learn to do that, it becomes much easier to tell if you actually understand something they don't or if your ideas are genuinely really complex.
I really liked the idea of Facebook Lite, but it always felt significantly slower, and content was often quite stale, rendering a product that seemed awkward to use and possibly even incomplete.

This eventually drove me back to regular Facebook. Guess it's time to stop hoping for improvements so I can switch back.
It's a problem that these things were surprises to him late in his career. Judging from the comments in this thread, even amongst a technical crowd there is still a relative lack of understanding about JavaScript. What can we as an industry be doing to make sure that more people are learning their tools properly and not reinventing wheels?
Fake Steve on Gizmodo
For PHP: PHP and MySQL Web Development, 4th Edition by Welling and Thomson. Learn about PDO and parameterized queries and such from the online docs; the book treats security poorly. The Web Application Hacker's Handbook would probably be a nice third book if you're feeling indulgent.

For JS: JavaScript: The Definitive Guide, 5th Edition by Flanagan. Until Secrets of the JS Ninja (or the Rhino book's 6th edition) comes out, then get those.

Out of curiosity, what have you worked with previously?
Io & Ioke are like Lisp here. You have full access to the parse tree and don't need to anything as crude as passing raw strings to eval().
Ask HN: How would you feel if you were Gray Powell?
We've all read about how Gray Powell lost the iPhone prototype, but how would you feel in his shoes? Obviously the day after he lost it he had to admit to his boss what had happened, but now that Gizmodo have put his name, his photograph, his Facebook and Twitter accounts for all to see (including the latest 'news' that he lost it on his birthday) surely there must be a lot of pressure on the guy. I feel quite sorry for him which is why I'm posting this, but wondering how people here would deal with such media attention/intrusion into your life?
It's difficult at first, but many people who "freeview" (as it's called) find that cross-eye is the ideal way to view 3D images on screen.

An alternative is to do it Magic Eye-style, looking through the screen so your left eye sees the left image, and the right eye sees the right. This is hard to do with large images: your eyes more easily cross than diverge. To help view it crosseyed, try looking at your finger 4" from your face (you'll go crosseyed), then try to focus on the screen behind it while keeping your eyes trained on your finger.

There are other good things about this way: You get true full color, unlike with red/cyan glasses. Since both eyes are viewing a different set of pixels, the resolution is effectively doubled, so the image appears sharper than normal.
whois archivd.com

Domain servers in listed order:
NS1.WORLDWIDEDNS.NET
DNS0.MTGSY.COM
NS2.WORLDWIDEDNS.NET
DNS1.NAME-S.NET
NS3.WORLDWIDEDNS.NET
DNS3.MTGSY.COM

The only other smallbiz-grade service I've used is DNSPark. They are decent but their management interface is painful and has not changed in 7 years (!).
Here are some examples from Jakob Nielsen concerning perceived affordances on the web (or applications in general): http://www.useit.com/alertbox/application-mistakes.html

There's a pretty standard language, I think, for those in hardware design for interaction. Maybe it's never been documented (that would be an interesting project). I'd say things like "bevels surrounding text" is a fairly standard "I'm a button; please press me" concept. I think after that point, though, it rapidly deteriorates.

Obviously, a button sitting over a linear trench says "I'm a slider," but what about things like the iPod clickwheel? Doesn't seem like a standard interaction, but it was immediately graspable and usable by a huge majority of the population.

Interesting stuff, if you're willing to dive into it.
I would argue that public education doesn't even benefit society. At least when you compare it to the private alternatives, even considering the massive subsidies the public version receives.

Public education stifles innovation. It wastes a lot of resources. Its far more geared towards instilling an obedient population than an inquisitive one.

If government were to heavily tax all private learning (formal education is just one kind) to pay for the "public option", we'd have very few private magazines, websites or other vehicles that currently keep us learning our whole lives. Would we settle for one magazine or website for each town?
Lots of things are human readable. Chinese for example.
Lunascript(http://www.asana.com/luna) looks pretty exciting but I don't think it has been released yet.
Oh definitely. My wife took a bunch of creative writing classes recently, and one of the biggest things she took away from them is that there is no "right way" to write a book. I'm pretty sure the same is true of writing computer programs!
The problem with this is how to decide which students fail and which pass a course. If you just use a cutoff on the z-score you will be consistently failing a certain proportion of the students, which might sound reasonable but completely ignores the fact that one is supposed to pass only the students that display knowledge on a minimal amount of the material. Theoretically, and A student completely knows the material, a B student mostly knows, with some less important parts missing, etc, and completely relativizing grades will lose this validation.

Another problem is that being a slightly-less-crappy student in a crappy class will give you a better z-score than being a great student in an excellent class.
New troubleshooting software from Microsoft – “Fix it Center”
Fortunately, neither appear to be behind the paywall. In fact, it appears that the original article is free, as well: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vnfv/ncurrent/pdf/natur...
Moose for ruby programmers (video, 18mins)
Facebook Kills Off Its Lite Version
Operator error and the use of checklists to avoid it is spot on; too many people learn this the hard way.
Does the 1.2 ghz VIA Nano have enough "oomph" to decompress streaming video? With an HDMI port and at <$300 I can see one of these in my living room with my TV plugged into it for watching Hulu. With cable/satellite >$50 a month you'd pay it off pretty quick if you dropped paying for TV and stuck with Netflix and Hulu.
via http://www.bofh.org.uk/2010/03/10/falling-out-of-love-with-a...