skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Many colleges publish average salary data; just google: "[University near you] career services salary", and you can get an idea about what an average college grad from your area will make. For example, here is Indiana University's: http://www.informatics.indiana.edu/careers/hiring_statistics...
While I definitely sympathize with you more than the original poster, I note that the idea that salaries should be competitive with bill rates is kind of a pernicious trap. In exchange for a steep discount on your freelance rate, a salary gives you, in rough order of value:

* The employer's half of FICA

* A paycheck when you're not utilized

* Access to group health and some contribution towards your monthly payment

* Someone else to hunt down and close gigs for you

* Vacation and sick days

Take your freelance rate, knock off 30% for health and taxes (your "fully loaded" rate, which might include office space), and then another 40% for unutilized time, and you're ballparking what a salary looks like before you factor in the amount of effort you put into marketing, sales, and contracts.
Or you can use a qr-code bookmarklet and use "Barcode Scanner" to get it into your Android phone.
So existence of A-bomb or low-tech genocide somehow justifies creation of new means to kill people?
This is why I prefer startups.
Figure out how to do the bit I don't know how to do. The rest of the application is mostly just stuff I know how to do and only need to make sure I do properly.

Figuring out how to do something is always more exciting to me than actually coding it, although normally the two can't be separated. Sometimes I need to implement a minimal framework first in order to have a setting to solve the problem.
>come in at 1 and work till 10

I did an internship at Google, so I have only seen one team in action for a small period of time. That said, there were a shocking number of meetings-- daily standups, one-on-one meetings, video conferences with California, weekly team meetings, cross-functionals and a few extra bits of coordination bureaucracy. These were scattered throughout the day in a way that put firm limits on how free of a schedule you can make for yourself.
How many people on here are non-tech founders?
I'm a non technical founder, started my own company (Around a web based app) a couple of months ago. I am just wondering if there were any other non technical founders on here..and if so what kind of challenges you are facing?
Pertinent facts from one of their papers: http://www-clmc.usc.edu/publications/K/kalakrishnan-IROS2009...

The robot drives its motors at 400 Hz based on control signals coming in at 100 Hz from an external computer. 100 Hz is probably the limit of the sensing system they're using, which is a motion capture system external to the robot. (Notice the reflective marker balls on top of the robot and also on the terrain.) My guess is that's the limiting factor here, though supporting a higher rate would probably also require faster software, and I have no idea what the limb speed/precision limits of the robot are.
I think the proverb "you have to learn to walk before you can learn to run" applies quite literally here.
Ask HN: How long was your web app beta period?
For those of you that launched a web app, how long did it spend in private beta before official launch? It seems that the general consensus is to just put the product out there to test and iterate. What's your take?
When you applied these ROMs, can you easily upgrade to any Android version?
Iirc there is not necessairily a legal requirement to honour those orders. So kudos to them for choosing to do so!
Foray into Ruby Syntax
Check your ego at the door. Do some sketches. Have some conversations with friends and other people about the idea. Focus on initial reactions and gut feelings. Sleep on it. Wait a week. See if it's exciting after a week. Do some more paper prototypes. Sleep on it. Wait a week. Compare both sets of sketches. Focus on common elements. Write something down. Get advise from domain experts. Sleep on it. Wait a week. Have some potential users do some sketches. Compare with your sketches. Focus on common elements. Sketch some more. Learn Ruby or Python. If you don't know HTML / CSS use Photoshop and send it to a company like XHTMLIZED. Use Rails or Django. Host it in the Cloud, preferably with Engine Yard or Heroku. Use MySQL. NoSQL will come soon enough. Review all of your sketches. Test it. Ship it. Check your ego at the door.
List of blocked websites in pakistan
This is a pretty biased account.

“Things that will destroy our economy” is primarily the financial services sector taking up 30 or something percent of the entire profit of the economy for several years, and decreasing tax rates for the last 30 years until by now they’re lower than they’ve been since the 40s, to the point that the federal government pays for things by taking loans instead, including sucking money out of the social security fund and using it as a general revenue source. Schools are less well funded now than they have been for decades, especially where I am in California where the public school system has been on a consistent tragic slide since Reagan was governor, from once being among the best in the nation.

Blaming teachers (or blaming “scary teacher unions”) for that is a tremendous distortion; teaching is only a reasonable profession because of a long history of hard fighting for decent wages. Most of the teachers work their asses off, for all of our children, and heaping scorn on them is one of the most reprehensible of the talking points of the right in America over the last 30 years.

(disclaimer: my mother is a teacher)
Funny that they found the error at 6am.
The figure I gave was net. After paying my Internet bill, after buying my WWDC ticket and a couple of ipads, a development machine or so a year, and finding all my gigs.

Plus factor in that OP wants someone to maintain existing apps (far from bad, but not terribly exciting work) and you have what would be (for me) a really crappy deal.

There are certainly people out there for whom
this would be a good fit. I'm simply not one of them, and I suspect there are quite a few people out there my age who make more than I do between the app store and consulting.

With normal programming, you can sort of snag developers right out of school before they know what's competitive pay. All qualified iPhone devs already have a paying gig with apple, and many consult for decent pay.
hmm, so maybe test driven development can actually save you big money
Do you maintain full text indices for parts of the web and which parts, or does it all fall back to external services like Wikipedia search, Yahoo BOSS, etc?

If you have some indices on your servers, how do you build and search them? Is it your own technology, or open source (Xapian, Lucene-based, etc)? In what percent of searches do you display results from your own indices?
"Adding play to corporate culture is like safe, legal doping!"
Somebody really lucked out. http://www.6pm.com/dsquared2-boot-paragnosta-cusna-t-moro
Draw a mockup on paper and figure out how you want your app to work. Once it's done, get the simplest case working in real software.

I find that by getting something simple working helps me keep motivation whilst going forward, even if the code is crappy. Conversely, I've started a non-trivial number of webapps by designing a DB schema and an application architecture, each of which left me burnt out before anything of value was even written.
I thought it looked very insectile.
Definitely. I will add it to my list: http://creepyrobots.tumblr.com/
15 minutes :)

We really jumped the gun and it is something I probably shouldn't have done but I never ever anticipated the kind of response it got.

By morning the server was a molten slag heap, I didn't even know because I was sleeping.

We mailed about 1,000 people that we were trying something new after building it, what we didn't anticipate was that they in turn mailed all their friends and so on.

A bit of performance testing before launch would have definitely helped.

The odd thing is, every time you do a lot of performance testing you end up with a dud :)
Quite often a person believes they understand something when they don't. In this case, no amount of exhortation to understand the chain of reasoning will help. Unfortunately, I think there's a false dichotomy here; you have to understand the problem well enough to write useful tests, and if you don't understand a failure mode, you're probably not going to write anything to test it.
good PR vs $1.6M and bad PR. Any doubt what the zappos people would do?
Less interesting that he is leaving microsoft, more interesting is where is he going to ?
There's also a companion piece on PersistentHashMap based also on the idea of chunky bits:
http://blog.higher-order.net/2009/09/08/understanding-clojur...
I find it amazing HN readers believe walking is a trivial task.
Manufactoria - a game about Turing machines
Sounds like a $1.6 million unplanned marketing event. I'd bet it pays off better than $1.6 million in traditional advertising.
(a) I'm not trying to sell you anything. I don't know the original poster.

(b) All I'm saying is that an FT salary and an FT freelance rate shouldn't be within throwing distance of each other.

(c) By my math, you indeed should actually be getting something like $8k * 12, because if you're well utilized and paying part-timer-bracket taxes, you're probably undercharging.
Chrome gives me a "The website at getfans.info has been reported as a “phishing” site" warning. Maybe look to see if there's an XSS hole on your site?
mkdir mynewapp
cd mynewapp
git init mynewapp
mkvirtualenv mynewapp
echo Django > requirements.txt
pip install -r requirements.txt
noooo freakin way, amazon.com would never let that kind of stuff happen.
Man Goes Home With "Total Artificial Heart"
Regarding the X3, I agree with Jeremy Clarkson that it's pointless: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u2LLMxlkT-Y It's not really good off road, and as a car it's worse than a normal car.

For an off roader can get a used Range Rover for about 20K EUR. It has a BMW engine http://suchen.mobile.de/fahrzeuge/showDetails.html?lang=en&#... If you want a car for the road with all wheel drive, a 5 series BMW like this works better as a car http://suchen.mobile.de/fahrzeuge/showDetails.html?id=129766... and has all wheel drive too.

Personally I'd rather have a used luxury car than a new Yaris. Instead of a Yaris for 16k you could get a used BMW 3 series for about half. For instance this http://suchen.mobile.de/fahrzeuge/showDetails.html?lang=en&#... Even though it's older than a new Yaris it's more comfortable.

Even a BMW 7 series for about 10k (in Austria). http://suchen.mobile.de/fahrzeuge/details.html?lang=en&i... A 7 series uses more fuel, but if you are not driving much, fuel costs aren't a big part of total costs. Insurance and service costs would be higher though.
Anyone want to venture a guess as far as what kind of bug would cause a price cap like this?
Not really. A bunch of people got great deals but the blog post is from two days ago and I've yet to see any coverage in traditional media outlets. It seems like $1.6 million can buy much better exposure.
"“Things that will destroy our economy” is primarily the financial services sector taking up 30 or something percent of the entire profit of the economy, ..."

That's the past tense, what tanked our economy in the past few months. Looking forward, what will kill us is unfunded mandates. You know how I know this? Because even if we completely fixed the financials industry, completely and utterly tamed it and turned it entirely into a non-profit organization while still somehow retaining its efficiency, we still choke on our unfunded mandates in 10 to 20 years, tops. They're growing faster than inflation, faster than the economy, and faster than any conceivable first-world economy could possibly grow even if $YOUR_FAVORITE_ECONOMIC_THEORY was perfectly instituted and it worked exactly as you expected.

All of the unfunded mandates are gloriously sweet and wonderful things. Money for teachers. Money for old people. Money for retired firefighters and police. Money for public servants. Money for sick people and especially money for sick old people. Our political inability to say no to the sweet and kind and needy people is what brought them to us in the first place. But it doesn't matter how gloriously wonderful they are. They are unaffordable. We physically lack the resources to fulfill the mandates. When I say "physically", I mean, physically. We lack the energy and materials and manpower they are. When I say "physically", I mean that one way or another we will not pay those unfunded mandates, because we are actually, factually incapable of it. The only question is how we will fail to meet those mandates.

Yeah, the teachers have had a role in that. Not much I can do to prevent that from being the outcome. I can point out there are hardly alone, though. There's a lot of people lined up at the trough of unsustainable mandates. Thanks to Social Security and Medicare, that list is "Pretty much every citizen of the United States and a fair number of non-citizens". Outrage changes nothing. Here we are.

("Defined benefit payouts" ought to be striken from our vocabulary. They are physically implausible. What happens when you build huge chunks of the economy on a physically-implausible primitive should hardly be a surprise.)
Nethack: The Greatest Game You Will Ever Play
One, of the many, interesting quotes:

"We must shift America from a 'needs' to a 'desires' culture, people must be trained to desire, to want new things even before the old has been completely consumed. We must shape a new mentality in America, man's desires must overshadow his needs."

Paul Mazer, Lehman Brothers (1930)
Internet blocking app?
Hi, I find that my productivity takes a significant hit when I have internet access, and much of the work I do doesn't require it. Can anyone recommend an application that will allow me to disable internet access for set periods of time during the day?
until your dog falls in love with it ;-)
Given breakpoints and the ability to test arbitrary inputs, this game would be a lot less frustrating.

(Unless those have been added since I last played.)
I didn't understand what happened with the template and what it was.
They're only horrific if they're misused.

Given that this whole line of research is funded by the US military, what do you mean by "misused" ? Wouldn't "used" be more accurate?
Functional programming, APL and UNIX pipes
It is definitely a legacy of the industrial revolution. It did make a lot of sense in a world where you had to be physically present at a place to get work done. It is still being practiced even in new organizations where it does not make much sense.
Build an API should be down at the bottom somewhere.
Don't worry, we're much farther from that than you might think from this video. This robot can't see where it's going. It requires external cameras watching it from known fixed locations to figure out where it is. Not only that, but the cameras cannot look at a piece of terrain and figure out the 3D structure; the terrain must be mapped out in advance as a 3D mesh, down to the millimeter.
1. Write 2-3 sentences about each potential user type for your app.
2. Assume each of the users will spend a max 1-3 minutes on your app, do just 1-3 actions. Which would these minutes be spent on, what are those key actions?
3. Find some white paper and a thick calligraphy pen. Draw the flow in very broad outlines, as a storyboard. Max 3-4 screens per flow. Paper and pen are the best. Forget computers. Forget details.
4. Think if those key flows are something users are willing to pay money for. If not, start over from 1.
5. Once you have a few short flows where users would go mad and pour money over you, start thinking about wireframes and details of the mockups.
My mom's a teacher AND I'm a Democrat, and no matter how hard individual teachers work, a system that:

* forces teachers to be layed off in seniority order

* spends decades failing to come up with a measurable actionable definition of teacher effectiveness

* squelches any attempt at merit or incentive pay

* proscribes any mandates to put in effort above the lowest common denominator of class prep and student intervention, and then

* attempts to enforce a monopoly on school management

... is naturally going to distort and retard any attempt to improve the system, which is demonstrably producing poor outcomes.

It's not about the teachers, it's about the system. Unfortunately, the things that are wrong with the system are all framed in terms of the welfare of individual teachers, so we're all jammed up.
Consider it a good advertisement.
I don't know about that (it seems like doing it in general would be impossible, but some easy cases might be manageable), but there's a nice converse: QuickCheck (http://www.cs.chalmers.se/~rjmh/QuickCheck/) takes Haskell programs with contracts and effectively generates its own test suites.
Ability to test arbitrary inputs exists, I think. Press the wrench button.
He's selling downloadable software. He's got an item on there about plugins, which might be considered the desktop equivalent.
Private betas should only be used for products/businesses that really require private betas. I'm thinking that most startups don't really require private periods. We just go public and promote and see what happens.
As I see it i's just part of the elastic bouncing between extremes.

Just 10-15 years ago privacy was a huge issue between parents and their children. People assumed -any- personal information made their kids targets for predators (which isn't necessarily untrue, but that's another discussion).

That view morphed into people blindly shouting personal details of their lives at the Internet.

The natural trend is to become more privacy aware. As more people use the Internet those people are more concerned with who see their content (my addition to the examples is Daughter: O_O I'm pregnant. Mom: WHAT). Sure, people argue to only post what you want everyone to know; however, Facebook is artificially stretching the concept of privacy from blind shouting into radical openness.

This artificial manipulation in one direction causes the opposite side to recoil (perhaps violently) in an attempt to maintain a sort of homeostasis.

That and people don't like having some faceless corporation take control from them.
In mid-2007, Amazon.ca listed Lisp in Small Pieces, an $85 textbook, for $3.95. A guy I know ordered it at that price and it was fulfilled without incident, so I posted it to my blog at http://xach.livejournal.com/133661.html - it quickly became the #1 seller on Amazon.ca for the day. Amazon cancelled the orders and gave everyone a $10 credit.
Unusual Friendship
Interesting friends.
Perhaps they meant to cap prices at 5 thousand dollars but it turned out to be 5 thousand cents instead?
if price > $49.95 { price = $49.95 }
1. Draw some ideas out on paper, and work out the minimal viable feature set.
For some people this is just a buzz word, but I'm a firm believer in it.

2. Use Balsamiq mockups to neatly replicate what I've drawn and make adjustments
(this step could be skippable, but it only takes 10 minutes generally, so
it's nice to have)

3. If it's client work, export the mockups as PNGs and send them a link

4. Create the design in Photoshop, rarely pixel perfect, I just use it as a
supped-up Balsamiq, to get a feel for the design

5. Create a Rails or Sinatra base, depending on the complexity of the project.
For a Rails project, I git clone http://github.com/ashleyw/Slate

6. Write some Cucumber features, referring to any notes or drawings I made in
step #1

7. Design the model structure, write some unit tests for them, and then
implement each model until the tests pass

8. Once I have a model basis, I move on to the controllers and views (HAML),
going by the Cucumber features I wrote until they pass. Semantic markup is
important here, but styling is not.

9. Replicate the Photoshop design in CSS (or SASS)

10. Launch

11. Reiterate adding features which didn't fit into first version
While not likely to happen, a dual-boot system would be ideal.
Wow, only 35k users?
1. Scoble reports a claim about Facebook censoring groups.

2. Because Facebook perceives Scoble to be influential, he gets a timely rebuttal from them.

3. We know nothing more than when we started.

Summary: journalistic NOP.
Two days ago was a Friday, I think it's a little early to judge the outcome of this.
Adam Curtis' stuff is great. Thanks for putting this up. I'd recommend you check out his latest series about freedom. The points he makes in that one are even more interesting.
Surprisingly stylish site given the game itself.
South Park Episode 201 still not available
Is this a joke or not? I'm sorry, I can't tell.

It's not that the game is bad, it's just that it won't appeal to the same people the website design appeals, for example.

And it's a very strange game.
Excellent job, you've satisfied the narrow confines of the literal request while offering no insight into the actual thought processes or features that might lead to the bug.
I got an Evo at I/O and I'm new to Android. Is there any way to install a stock Google Android distribution on this phone? So far my impression is that the UI is awful, but I'm not sure how much of it is due to "HTC Sense" and how much is just Android.

I don't particularly care about losing the ability to upgrade from one version of Android to the next; a wipe is fine.
Michael: "I must've put a decimal point in the wrong place or something. ----, I always do that. I always mess up some mundane detail."

Peter: "Oh! Well, this is not a mundane detail, Michael!"

Michael: "Hey, quit getting pissed at me. Alright? This was all your idea, ---hole!"

Peter: "Alright, okay, alright, let's try not to get pissed off at each other. Alright? Let's just calm down, let's try to figure this thing out together."
> The man built TCP/IP into Windows for God’s sakes.

Before Windows Sockets, getting on the net was a technical exercise. You had to configure a packet driver and maybe even NetBIOS. Or you had to use an expensive third-part net library. Netmanage Chameleon I argue that the reason why Microsoft Internet Explorer became a monopoly was because of winsock32.dll.
Ask HN: How valuable to my resume is 5 years at Microsoft?
There have been some interesting discussions here and on Quora (http://www.quora.com/What-companies-teams-are-toxic-on-a-resume) about certain companies not being good for your resume or two much time at one of these companies not being good for your resume.

I have no college education so when I first started at Microsoft when I was 22 I decided that I wanted to work there for 5 years and do well (best reviews possible, multiple promotions). I also wanted to spend the time trying to influence Microsoft as an organization to do something interesting in the Linked Data/Semantic Web space. I am now a Senior Engineer and have pioneered the use of data semantics within Bing. This experience feels extremely valuable as I pursue a longer career working with start-ups.

I am confident that I will complete my 5 years and meet my goals but I'm interested in better understanding how this experience will be perceived by members of the start-up community that I hope to be a part of in the future.

Is it really perceived as a negative to work at an engineering organization like Microsoft? What other things will be valuable to demonstrate on my resume as I look to enter the hacker community more actively?
Unlike "sweet, wonderful, sick old people", money for teachers is potentially an investment, not a straight up social cost.