skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have hired a lot of contractors over the years, and I must say that if one of them pitched this to me I would likely walk away.

Not only does it give the appearance of someone being unsophisticated, naïve and lacking confidence, it puts the onus on me to figure out approximately how much work will be involved and what the fair market rate for that would be. It would put me in a totally awkward spot and would be a lot more headache then simply knowing that a person will do X work for X dollars.

In short, this has the appearance of being a gimmick. Basically it says to me “I don’t really know how much to charge for this, so I am going to put the onus on you to decide and hope that you won’t want to appear stingy and so will pay me more than I feel I could ask for without being embarrassed.”

A true professional knows their value and the value of the services they provide, and is not shy about making it known. In fact, that is part of the service they provide – estimating is a skill.

Maybe it is unfair, but if someone pitched this to me, I would immediately think they were fairly junior (and somewhat desperate) rather than a professional, even if I had worked with them before. It tells me you don’t have anything else on the go right now, because if you did, why would you take the risk to work for an unknown reward?

Just my thoughts…I would really think this through before adopting it as an approach.
Now you are mixing two things. I am stricly opposed to Government forcing anything on individuals as it doesn't lead to any good. So if Government forces everyone to buy TV (or for that matter anything else), obviously it's no good for society.

I was talking about any voluntary, legal action by an individual which benefits himself. Such an action always leads to improvement in society as society is made of individuals.
How to Choose an Essay on Death
Life and death are both surrounded by rituals. As long as mankind has walked the earth, there have been both societal and religious factors involving death.
People have heard of RedBeacon.
It seems that Larry Ellison ought to love OpenOffice. It's a really inexpensive way to constrain Microsoft's air supply.

When OpenOffice reached feature parity with Office 2003, Microsoft was stuck between a rock and a hard place. If it didn't do something semi-profound with the suite, it risked being compared side-to-side with a free competitor. However, if it innovated, it risked alienating those users who found comfort in the familiar. Could the 2007 "ribbon" have been a competitive response? Or, was it just a way to differentiate its next version so users might want to upgrade?

Also, because of OpenOffice, it's harder for Microsoft to extract high prices from Corporate America for Office. If it gets too greedy, CIOs will start to consider what the retraining costs would be to adopt OpenOffice.

What's the total development cost for OpenOffice per year? $50M? Its existence probably costs Microsoft $1B in lost revenue opportunity compared to a world in which no feature parity competitors exist.

The real threat to both OO and Office is obviously the web, but killing .doc and .xls as exchange formats will be as tough as killing off the fax machine. It's not like Oracle cares if OO dies -- as long as MSOffice dies along with it.
The iPhone Walks Into a Bar Debacle - Could it be Planned? -- Omegasoft Blog
Personal loans: a cure for all financial problems
I can respect your point of view entirely. And you may very well be right: I could be leaving money on the table by establishing a baseline risk above which I won't go.

That said, my cynicism is hard learned. I generally think the best of my fellow man, but I've been burned enough since striking out on my own to tend towards cynicism when it comes to client work.

For me, things have worked out best when I've set a fair price on my work, eschewed flat rates for time-based rates, and set hard boundaries on the client-contractor relationship.
That's the whole point of studies. While it might seem that a lot of psych meds are just guesses, saying it's just a personal choice is wrong.

If there are several main types of strains, then well, I suppose your study needs to include more people -- not that hard. If strains change over time, that seems like another area for more study. This is what studies are for, and I cannot figure out why anyone would be opposed to it, or say it's not feasible.
There's one huge caveat to that:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/19/health/policy/19marijuana....

[If] a researcher wants to use a variety of marijuana that the University of Mississippi does not grow -- and there are many with differing medicinal properties -- they are out of luck, Dr. Doblin said.

"As the National Institute on Drug Abuse, our focus is primarily on the negative consequences of marijuana use," said Shirley Simson, a spokeswoman for the drug abuse institute, known as NIDA. "We generally do not fund research focused on the potential beneficial medical effects of marijuana."

NIDA controls the supply, the strains available and the research on a proposal-by-proposal basis. They admit that their first priority is not accurate science, via their active discriminating against research into beneficial effects.

While I'm not going to declare all the research they've allowed is necessarily bad, it's clearly limited and incomplete to a dysfunctional degree.
This Is Apple’s Next Stapler
For a better idea of how bumping actually works inside the lock, here's a decent video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kUJWc7rIj8I
The holes in Gizmodo's iPhone story
The server appears to be down, but google's cache [1] works

[1] http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:2VuRPkGxvVUJ:thefreelan... (google mirror)
No gain from brain training
Okay, so I fell for this one, which takes me to my facebook page - although what the status bar showed suggested it would take me to page of one "uyabelumau" ( http://www.facebook.com/uyabelumau ).

Sure, he's kind of cute, but rather dyspeptic looking ;)

Is the lllooonnnggg url that this HN noob has used trying to run something destructive? capture pw (of those not logged in), etc.?
I agree. Whilst Apple knows who he is, and the guy will be under pressure anyway, I think its very unfair to go to the lengths they have (even saying on the latest post that it was the guys birthday when he lost it). I hope the pressure doesn't get to him too much. We all make mistakes
This was a pretty interesting view into the direction that people think the project is going. I think the points made about leaky abstractions are key here.

The lowest common denominator of SQL is pretty well defined and even though it's the "lowest" it's still quite useful. There are also hooks to hang advanced features onto and ways of digging into db-specific features if you want without throwing everything away.

For Django to start building a useful layer on top of NoSQL db commonalities, the common features of those db's will have to shake down a bit. Even the list of db's that are targeted will have to shake down a bit more.
Shouldn't you have taxed it as non monetary gain?
"Reallocation from the general public to an individual can benefit an individual, but be detrimental to society"

I am not sure if I am following the above example. Could you clarify?

"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!
I don't know anything about Perl 6 (or much about earlier versions for that matter). Can someone explain how close it has gotten to Lisp? What macro facilities does it have? Can you munge the syntax tree after code is parsed?
If there's one book every js developer should get, it's that one.
Functional Programming Patterns
Based on his royalty agreement ($7.50 per unit) and the stated total sales of around 100,000 units, he made $750,000 in royalties. Nice! Sorta wish I got royalties for my projects....
This link

http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100420/full/4641111a.html?s=...

may be out from behind the paywall for many readers.

The story is interesting and important.
PS: here's the unsanitized (but disarmed) link he offered:
www(dot)facebook(dot)com/uyabelumau?ref=profile&fb_sig_locale=id_ID&fb_sig_in_new_facebook=1&fb_sig_time=1271760829.7448&fb_sig_added=1&fb_sig_profile_update_time=1270217615&fb_sig_expires=1271764800&fb_sig_user=1764883489&fb_sig_session_key=2.aCqAK8zn7uCUVLBU3ScNQA__.3600.1271764800-1764883489&fb_sig_ext_perms=email%2Cauto_publish_recent_activity%2Ccontact_email&fb_sig_api_key=c756401cb800e295f21d723b7842ea83&fb_sig_app_id=2413267546&fb_sig=3ad460d0c365e0671872383d449d8946&artist_qp=the+white+stripes#!/?ref=home
Agreed: http://www.tuaw.com/2010/04/20/apple-we-want-device-back/ this is more concise and well said than I could ever be.
I'm starting a new project as soon as my current one is finished based on php + javascript. Can anyone suggest good books and/or websites for those two to get started as I never really worked with either of them?

Edit: Apart from the two already mentioned in this thread. (Javascript the definitive guide and javascript the good parts)
There is an excellent book that no writer should be without: "On Writing Well," by William Zinsser. A joy to read -- it flows well and instructs without being tedious.
80legs makes it even easier to crawl the Web
To learn about the future, study the past (1930s technology and finance)
Ask HN: Please review my OpenCourseWare Search Engine
Hell all,

I've been hacking at this for many weeks and I'd love your feedback and guidance on how to improve it.

URL:
http://www.ocwsearch.com/

What is it:
A search engine for OpenCourseWare. Right now only MIT courses are indexed, but more universities and textbooks are planned.

Edit: It indexes all the lecture notes, the PDF files in the zip files, not just the course descriptions.

The blog has a poll for you to vote for what should come next.

What I'd like feedback on:
Anything you see broken/improvable/missing. HN readers are the perfect target market so your feedback is going to carry a lot of weight.

Please get in touch: I've seen a few HN posts about OCW projects, and I'm very happy to connect with like-minded people. The email is pierre@(the domain name).

For the curious: The technology stack warrants its own blog post, so briefly: PHP, MongoDB, Redis, and Sphinx.

Thanks!
A Guide to Cloud Computing on Linux
Cheat sheet for Lisp dialects (Common Lisp, Scheme, Clojure, Emacs Lisp)
You don't have to parse Perl 6 's grammar ... the parser is written for you.

How it goes ... you add rules for new syntax, and your macro-handler receives a syntax tree. And you transform that into a regular AST that the interpreter can understand ... more or less as in LISP.

The difference is that in LISP you work directly with ASTs ... while in Perl you can access the compiler's pipeline.

This idea is not new ... for instance it's also implemented in Boo (boo.codehaus.org) ... although I don't know how effective is.
Memcached SPOF Mystery
My guess: some VP decide this could be a way to reach his targets.

Any company must be acutely aware of execs sacrificing long-term survival for a quick buck.

Not that I think the ODF plugin is important for Oracle's survival, but, if left unchecked, this kind of attitude is very, very dangerous.
I think it's probably a big deal to their competitors, too - although the coverage was thing on technical details, there are some internal pictures with part numbers on a few components too. If we were competing to sell almost identical products, you would probably prefer me not to get my hands on the debug version.
VIA release ARTiGO A1100 tiny desktop PC Kit
Derek Sivers had a blog post about this as well.

http://sivers.org/livecd

His post is about offering CDs after a live performance and asking people to pay what they want. They band in question went from $300/night in CD sales to $1200/night.
Facebook Shuts Down Facebook Lite
There problem with government regulation is that people get inconsistently burned. And that seems a consistent problem with government regulation.

There were plenty of people pointing out the bad practices of Enron, Madoff, AIG, but nobody was listening.

Politically driven regulation is incented to not rock the boat. They have no brand to protect.

And when the shit hits the fan, they'll just keep pushing the ultimate consequences into the future, because they control the Fed and the Treasury and everything.

There is no accountability. No one ever gets fired.

No one's perfectly rational. But we are not perfectly irrational either.
Unusual Business Card Designs
Chirp in Review
I was just typing a similar comment when I saw yours. In general, learning how to use "apply" is a very useful technique for someone coming up to speed in Javascript.
I hate every single time I see that. JSON as a data format has been in use forever in various languages.
There's also the fact that a single message can be blasted to multiple recipients.
I wonder which one is least special.
What is your dumbwaiter pitch? One word that describes your business
JavaScript doesn't make the same distinctions between numerically indexed arrays, string-indexed associative arrays and objects that you would see in most other languages. This explains a lot of the perceived oddities of JavaScript to programmers coming from backgrounds working with other programming languages, e.g., why calling sort() on an array of numbers doesn't do what you might expect and why the for-each loop in JavaScript iterates over indices rather than values.
Now and then I pay the $50/year fee to be able to use the library at the school where I got my masters. I've never looked into whether this would provide on-line stuff. You might want to see whether your university offers anything comparable.
From a Perl point of view, I think it's the right way to go. There are a few "standard" tricks to simulate extending Perl5, but they often feel hackish. From my understanding this will be more flexible and explicit. I don't have the Lisp experience to compare the two. My guess is Lisp macros will still be more flexible but the gap will be significantly narrowed.
On the flipside, take a look at Creatly, which is closer to what most folks here will be selling.

http://creately.com/blog/experience/how-much-to-charge-for-y...

They told their customers "Pay what you want!" and got a median of $3 and an average of $4 ~ $5, both of which are well under the prices of the cheapest plans of the vast majority of SAAS products and insulting next to the prices their competitors charge.
cool dude ..all are great
Google cache version (since site seems to be down):

http://74.125.77.132/search?q=cache:2VuRPkGxvVUJ:thefreelanc...
Even though it only has the MIT OCW data so far this is a most impressive and user-friendly interface. Congratulations, I'm sure it will appeal to a wide audience. Sorry but I'm not in your market niche so I do not know what's available from other institutions.
A Letter: Apple Wants Its Secret iPhone Back - Iphone 4 - Gizmodo
Wouldn't that then become a self-fulfilling loop?
That number's non-specialness would be something special about it, so you'd need the next non-special number, and so on until they were all covered.
He says: "I’ve been writing JavaScript code for much longer than I care to remember."
And he didn't know about "var direction = x < 200 ? 1 : -1;" ?
Really?
Music is already in the cloud, who's buying it?
Court allows Irish ISP to cut off illegal file sharers
> Constructing macros in Lisp however /is/ something you do lightly

For all the ease with which one can create macros in LISP, I haven't seen anything comparable to LINQ yet.

And while I've seen useful macros here and there, I haven't seen anything groundbreaking ... macros are mostly used when you need laziness.

Powerful? Yes. Easy to use? No.
With Foursquare, FB and now Google, I think there is room for a "neutral" competitor that lets businesses set up shop with their own domain and integrates easily with the other sites.
they are lexically scoped, so as a non expert, I guess they are closer to scheme than to CL
Do people still do royalty based contracts? I wish they did.
Yes some people will fail no matter what cause it's a probability. But it doesn't negate the fact the more you do it the higher the probability you will win.
Churchill is probably getting at the distinction between Germanic and Latinate root words in English. Hemingway used to write with a obvious preference for Germanic root words, which were short and tough and had a pleasing sound. Latinate root words are usually long ten-cent words lacking the same utilitarian grace of their Germanic root analogs.

I always thought it would be a fun project to use an etymology database to make a Latinate-to-Germanic thesaurus, something you could use just like spell check on a document to suggest Germanic alternatives to Latinate words.
I love the concept of "affordances" (that is, stuff you can do), and with it, "perceived affordances" (stuff you think you can do).

One of the major challenges of product design is figuring out how to teach users what actions are available to them. Designing the UI in a clear and consistent way (obviously clickable buttons, etc.) helps users understand which simple actions are available. What about teaching more complex actions?

Documentation (including tutorials) is one way. Listing possibilities either at startup or when a process is loading (say, while the ATM is verifying you can withdraw money) is another. Many video games use awards -- you're introduced to the awards list by accomplishing something simple (logging in for the first time, shooting your first zombie) and can then read over the list to see other possibilities from the most basic to the most advanced.

I'm curious to see if there are other common ways to teach users about their "affordances".
One is too difficult, but with 3 words you can focus on your niche. For me it is
Internet marketing Langley
I looked at masterlock's "patent pending bump resistant technology," that one of their locksmiths called "an elegant piece of engineering." It looks to me like they just put a tougher spring behind the cylinders so the bump doesn't have enough energy to force the cylinder up.

Can anyone explain if there is something more interesting going on with bump resistance?

edit: (this is the video linked below - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kUJWc7rIj8I&feature=relat... - didn't realize)
I should clarify this - I meant that the hospital is never reimbursed by the patient. Medicare generally pays only a fraction of the bill, though the bill is often inflated in anticipation of this fractional payment (from medicare or HMOs), so the numbers aren't straightforward.

Either way, the taxpayer is on the hook. If some ERs are profitable in spite of a high percentage of bad debt, this just means that the taxpayer is carrying an even higher debt burden.
A subset of the World Bank development indicators is available in Google's public data explorer here: http://www.google.com/publicdata/directory
Also read about Prospect Theory: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prospect_theory
Runtime processing of HTML5 video
OK, on those grounds I agree that well-designed, long-term studies would be useful.
Oh that's rich. This can't be the same John Mackey who spent years anonymously trashing a competitor's stock so he could scoop them up on the cheap: http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSN1133440820070712
I wish they would at least make it optional, e.g. turn-off-able in the browser's settings. Yes, more functionality to maintain. But this would provide the option of continuing consistency with other browser UI's and with existing workflows.

Remember, Google? "Opt-in". Or in this case, at least "opt-out-able".
Best Smartphone Voice Recording Apps (COP RECORDER)
Though I think it unlikely, an announcement of Verizon support would definitely do it for the US audience, good call.

More screen changes seem unlikely though [1]. The density/resolution is already a huge, attention-grabbing update. Apple tends to parcel those updates out.
E.g. they didn't jump straight into HD video capture. They released a slightly-better camera first.

New form factors strike me as about as likely as a convertible tablet MacBook or an attached-keyboard iPad update.

The internal specs... Apple doesn't talk about those much. Surely it'll be even-faster with more flash. But beyond confirmation of an Apple-designed SoC [2], they wouldn't even mention those specs. Let alone hype them to the press.

[1] Does PixelQi even have samples at the pixel-density the update is boasting? Let alone at volume? I honestly don't know.

[2] Something that would have been spoiled by handing the hardware to Gizmodo btw
HTML5 Video Destruction
Thee's definitely some truth to that. And debt issuers are paying for their own ratings.

I think, though, that perception of risk is highly distorted by bubbles. Its the success of risk takers that's convincing everyone else to buy and join them in taking even greater, but misperceived risks.

But the rating agencies still give all different kinds of debt different ratings. Not every bond is getting rated AAA. Plenty get a junk rating as well.

And with government and quasi-government Fannie and Freddie encouraging unreasonable lending and hiding risk through repackaging, it doesn't surprise me risk was hidden even from these agencies.

But I don't know if misperception of risk is quite the same problem as regulators being influenced to ignore questionable practices.
Good work Patrick. I'd point out another, tricky source of failure: crappy dns hosting. It's worth it to buy dedicated dns hosting from two different providers. The cost is about 50 bucks per year.
> Same entrepreneur

Sure.

> same personality, more or less same skills, same contact networks

Absolutely not. The process of becoming changes your personality, your skillset, and who you know.
I do not disagree completely.

> For instance a gardener can charge more per hour in Los Angeles than in Ohio, even though the productivity of the two are identical.

Yes, that's because gardening isn't traded.
So weak.
Rubyonrails.org taken over by domain squatter
Yes, he did. JSON is absolutely positively NOT "whatever Javascript eval will accept as input and return a data structure for". It is a rigidly-defined subset of that, and the rigid definition of it is one of its significant advantages over several competing formats. Crockford created the rigid specification and JSON is the better for someone with experience having created it. Someone of lesser experience might have specified it less rigidly and lost much of the advantage thereby.

(YAML died on fuzziness in the specification mistakenly perceived as virtue. "YAML's not dead!" Compared to JSON, it is, and thank goodness.)

Incidentally, if you aren't using it strictly, you're losing some of the advantages yourself. If your parser accepts single-quoted strings, or even worse if your serializer generates them (ick!), just as one example, you're in some trouble, even if it all works for you right now.
Fly MC105 Dual SIM Mobile in India
Excellent points - the only thing i would add is the additional noise generated by Exceptions and Exception Handling code. Java is verbose enough, we need less not more visual noise.
It is (IMO, IANAL) illegal to pay money, record or share details of, or derive commercial gain (via disseminating the story) from something that constitutes a trade secret.

http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/18/usc_sec_18_00001832----...

I am not convinced a free speech defense obviates this. While people are clearly interested by their report, that's not the same as it being 'in the public interest'. As far as Apple's interest goes, their stock skidded 1% this morning on opening, although it'll probably bounce back up when they release their earnings statement later today.