skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
An interesting site. So far there hasn't been too much success in self-serve ad platforms (aside from Ad Sense / Ad Words / Facebook ads), but I don't know why exactly. I think that CPM campaigns work for building brand awareness / brand lift, but your typical mom-and-pop isn't really interested in that, and they aren't savvy enough to really make use of CPC / CPA. Maybe once they reach that level then having a template builder isn't really a big deal - they can make their own creatives too.

There is so much money in online ads that you are just a pivot away from major success. Adify, for example, started off as self-serve, then pivoted and sold to Cox for ~$300,000,000 a couple years later. So definitely be willing to try different things!

As for UI, the lightbox really kills the flow of the app. I think I'd rather have the user click on the template they like and go directly to making the template, and have the preview there. Also, most of the templates look pretty low quality - have you tested them out to see how well they convert? If I had to go down this road I'd start with just a thumbnail and text, ala the deck network or facebook ads. Just my $.02 though.
Progress, extra time, efficiency, and consumer goods
The problem with ToS is that by the time you reach the point where they show you a ToS you were already otherwise sure you wanted to do the desired action in question. Then they show the ToS, and while yes you have the option of not agreeing to it, the dilemma is that by declining you would then not get the bright shiny thing you've already clearly indicated you wanted by the fact that you reached that point.

Also, they are incentivized to make a ToS long and use a small font precisely because the user is less likely to read it and just hit Agree anyway. So they can bury whatever evil things they want in there. Therefore, the whole thing is a sort of pox or anti-pattern.
Funnily enough, I'm in maybe the opposite boat as you.

I currently live in a quiet suburb of OKC, maybe 20 minutes drive from downtown. Rent is cheap, around $0.75/SF/month. Bandwidth isn't terrible, but it's not like SF or NYC.

I'm a freelancer. If I wanted to, I could probably cover all my "necessary" expenses working one or two days a week. Instead, I work 6 days a week, and save almost all my money. I want to move to SF or NYC once I have some serious savings.

To be honest, I just don't like the culture here. Although I've grown up here and have friends, gf, etc. here, "professionally" I feel alone. I'm one of only very few tech-minded entrepreneurs. I hack alone. It's not uncommon for me to go 48 hours without leaving my apartment.

I was in SF on business last week and it struck me at just how easy it was to get contacts and network in a place where there are other hackers. There's no awkward "So, what do you do for a living?" conversations where you have to start at "what is a web application". Even for a hacker, I am really, really independently-minded. That said, it would be great to have a partner on a couple of things. But I won't find one here.

tl;dr If it's a short-term thing and you're tight on cash--go for it! But you'll get lonely after awhile.
"Prior to the Spring 2007 semester, the instructor of the class offered students the opportunity to participate in the experiment. Of nearly 1,600 registered students, 327 volunteered to take part and, in return, were given a half letter boost in their grade at the end of the semester.

The volunteers were randomly assigned to watching the lecture live or to watching the lecture online. Measures were taken to ensure that instruction delivery was made only in the manner in which students were randomly assigned. "

This experiment, by its very design, precludes many of the largest benefits of online education. By reducing it to a matter of watching a lecture in person, or watching essentially the same lecture online, it's not surprising that the students actually in the lecture were more engaged and did better.

Where online education really shines is when it enables students to get more supplementary material or more interesting material (such as podcasts for language students), or where it allows students to solidify fundamentals without embarrassment (e.g. Khan academy).
Zzz... device porn. Nothing new to see here, move along.
I live on <800 a month in Pittsburgh, soon to be <700. It's actually becoming a pretty big tech city, all the major companies (Microsoft, Google, etc) have stuff going on here, and there's a lot of opportunities to make connections to help with whatever project you've got going. It's right near some great parks, and the city itself is packed with trees and grass...
They say it quite clearly in the ToS in paragraph 37. In Arabic.
It is so. much. better. than other US cities, though!

Seriously, though:

(1) People either love or hate NYC, and they love or hate SoCal. They love or don't care about Chicago. It's a biased signal.

(2) Chicago is the closest thing in the US you can get to NYC if you want "major urban center", "top population center", and can't actually deal with NYC. That's me. I can't deal with NYC, but I appreciate what everyone else does in NYC, and Chicago has 80% of that. This would be "just another thing people who like Chicago say about Chicago" except that "proximity to the NYC experience" is a huge deal for city lovers.

(3) People, especially tech people, underappreciate just how small San Francisco, Seattle, Austin, Portland, and even Greater Boston are. I say that not to put Chicago on a level above them, but instead to note that those cities have fewer boosters just statistically.

(4) That said, most of the "Chicago is amazing" stuff comes out in conversations with NYC-ers and SF-ers, and we tend to concede that, say, Portland is a nice place to live too.

Oh, and by the way? We didn't bring Chicago into this. That original douchey blog post did, with its commentary about how everyone in the third largest metro area in the country "works for or knows someone who works for the parks district". But now you know why 'tptacek thinks Chicagoans act like that.
Hosted idea organizer?
Wha? We are talking about internet freelancing here, aren't we?
Tony Woodlief: The Case Against Happiness
Ditto. I do mostly Django development, so I'm tied to 2.6 for the moment, but I'll upgrade the second that I can.

Also, Ubuntu ships with 2.6 and I'm too lazy to switch
I'm imagining you hitting refresh waiting for the first reply to CTR-V that into. ;)
That site looks great too, but looks are subjective. :) In this case I meant "fantastic" more in the context of an early project launch. I believe a site needs to communicate its few key messages to a new visitor quickly, and clearly as well as be easily accessible from a UX perspective. Gigayo does that IMO.
Cool, but I'll just say it. Impractical.
It's a slow evening with high chance of thunderstorms...
If security is a priority, I would recommend FireHost (http://www.firehost.com) without hesitation. They have been great for us to work with. I also recommend Wiredtree - which has been flawless for us over the past 2 years.
This was on HN a bit ago, and you reminded me of it: http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~damian/papers/HTML/ModestProp...

Basically a fully-fleshed out version of your idea.
It is true that one of the advantages of overloaded methods is that the cost is payed at compiler time, but it does also limit its flexibility, since it can only dispatch based on the information available at compile time (this isn't enough to implement oop polymorphism for example, except if you know no derived class override the method).

Python makes this much more complicated, because it doesn't have types (actually all the variables have dynamic types, so the type of a variable depends on what value it has) - and it is interpretated, so there isn't a compile step where it could resolve something like this.

Oh and usually multimethods dispatch based on the actual type of _multiple_ arguments, not just one.
Seriously, I hear this all the time about Chicagoans, and easy as it would be to just take it as a compliment about the city and get on with my life... don't you think maybe there's a reason why Chicago generates this reaction?

Please note: I'm trying to give you reasons that don't just devolve to "it's because Chicago is so awesome". I'm saying, "deceptively huge number of people, not polarizing, and the largest genuine urban experience outside of NYC".
No but they might be really good and deliver top work.
Big fan of Wiredtree.
Now what I do, which goes against stated policy, is keep the CustomerData variables (String name, int custId, and so on) public so I can set them easily. The only time I require getters and setters for primitive types (for example, name) is if I were to read in data from a user generated form that needed to be sanitized.

It's funny, too - though this type of thing goes against best practices, the primary argument for always using getters/setters (some day you might need to validate input or do other sorts of logic, and it's a pain in the ass to put that in after the fact) is pretty much 100% shattered these days, because any IDE worth a damn makes it possible to switch from public field access to getters/setters in a couple of keystrokes ("Encapsulate field" and "Inline method" are typically all you need).

Though it's worth keeping in mind, most of the Java best practices tend to assume that you're writing code that other people will have to use, people whose codebases you won't have access to after you release your code, and that's a much more difficult context to program in. It requires a lot more bureaucratic nonsense to leave your API flexible when you have to worry about breaking other people's code with each edit you make, and extreme paranoia is more than justified when that's what you're worrying about.
Hi nfriedly, this is Nicole from vWorker (formerly known as Rentacoder).

The tests available at Elance are the same tests available at many websites, including ours. As a vWorker, you can get ExpertRating certified with one or more skill tests available at http://www.vWorker.com/RentACoder/ExpertRating/ExpertRatingT... at no cost.

If you have any questions, please let me know. You can also call in to talk to a facilitator 7 days a week, or email us.

Nicole
vWorker.com
Yes, I am sure there are reasons why Chicago generates this reaction.
and with TS RemoteApp support!
Here this post loses me, despite the lively prose:

At the same time, more companies seeded means more full-cycle money required to break through the noise and competition, which while drive dilution of seed investors who can't follow-on in subsequent larger rounds. And, importantly, don't forget to add-in the consumer-centricity of so many of these funds, all chasing a financially anaerobic U.S. consumer who is shopped out and indebted to death.

* The notion that huge numbers of seed companies smothers the market with competing firms assumes that (a) most of these firms compete, (b) that they do so with attention/promotion, and (c) that they're all destined for the meat grinder 1/10-chance VC system.

* As amusing as the words "financially anaerobic U.S. consumer" are, is there any evidence that the people who bought things from startups 5 years ago are buying less now? Because what I see is people lining up over night in the summer heat for a phone literally designed to allow AT&T to soak their bank accounts dry.

It seems to me that the reality of seed-funding is just too boring to write about: more companies getting more ideas exposure to the market with a pretty-much constant (low) success rate --- of course there are going to be a lot more failures. That's the point, right?
You just think one of them is "inferiority complex". =)
the author is a redditor

http://www.reddit.com/r/javascript/comments/c0ifv/guacamole_...
Crash-only Software
iPhone 4 antenna problems were predicted on June 10 by Danish professor
The ironic thing is that you could also use FaceTime while walking on the street if you're walking with a friend that has an Android phone with the ability to make his phone a WiFi hot spot.
The C extension are one reason why some features are so hard to implement. E.g. reference counting will always be with us, because the current interface to the C extensions rely on it. And you had to change all of them, if you wanted to get rid of it.
Yes. First they replace the world wide web, the largest single coherent computing resource in the world, with the iPad, a device that represents fractions of a single percentage point of the computer market. Then: they take over the world!
The pragmatic bookshelf books are all pretty good. Just buy one and get started. Once you get oriented, you'll find apple's documentation to be pretty good, especially if you're used to typical open source documentation.
The USA is very special, because they happen to own the printing presses for the reserve currency of the world. Most other governments can't go that route for that long.
And that reminds me of this article: http://news.discovery.com/human/human-touch-emotion.html

It is a really interesting look at how the feel of an item affects the emotional attachment to it.
Your comfy chair might be making you soft
Alternate (that works) is drop your data plan from $25 2 Gbytes to $15 / 250 Megabytes, and go buy a $60/Month Sprint MiFi/5 Gigabytes (Wireless HotSpot).

Total Net Cost is $35/month above what the iPhone normally costs.
$60 (Sprint) - $10 (Data Plan Savings) - $15 (Tethering Cost)

The net costs are less if you have an iPad AND an iPhone, as you don't have to purchase a 3G iPad or a Data plan for it.

Advantages:

o Data Limit is 5 Gigabytes instead of 2.
o iPhone, iPad, Laptops all can (simultaneously) use it.
o You now have Sprint and AT&T Data Coverage.
o All of the "WiFi only" rules work on the MiFi
(Facetime, AppStore download Limit)
If I relax and continue with hallucinations I start vibrating and having an out-of-body experience. It's fun and great but I like normal reality more :)
Yeah I've considered this too actually. I was kicking around the idea of relocating to Vietnam for a while this way. I wonder how much more difficult working remotely from that far away would be. I imagine there are programmers already living in places like that that would be happy to get contracts at first-world salaries, so hopefully being a native speaker and understanding first-world cultural conventions would be enough to justify asking first-world salaries.
Oh, yes, so we are. My mistake.
I hear good things about Pittsburgh but for some reason I picture it as a cold, dangerous, post-industrial city. Is this just CA bias?
Refresh Firefox on Vim save
Or Lastfm.
Holography without lasers: hand-drawn holograms
The real problem is that my 'preorder' system sucks. I've got a link that I ask people not to use unless I email them to tell them it's okay. The idea is to give people who have emailed and asked a chance to sign up before I open ordering to the general public.

Obviously, the link remains the same, so there's nothing stopping someone from signing up for a bunch of domains I don't have available, or cutting in front of other people in line, but so far it hasn't been a problem; people on the waiting list get a day or two to sign up before I open up the main waiting list.

but, then you were asking why I treat ordering for large domains differently from small domains. When I open up orders for large domains, I sell out like /that/ - It doesn't take very many 4GiB sign ups to fill up a 32GiB server. I mean, I can handle a few right now, or, at least I could at that point, but I want to severely rate limit those until I have satisfied the demand for small servers and have a bit of extra capacity.

Right now, I'm on the edge of opening orders for large domains. (I've got a 16 core, 64GiB ram, 8 disk monster at the co-lo I'm configuring that will host only 1024MiB and up domains.) and I've got most of two 32GiB, 4 disk, 8 core boxes either online or in burn in ready for smaller domains.

I prioritize the small domains over the large domains for two reasons.

1. the small domains are more profitable per amount of hardware I buy ($4 per account plus $1 for every 64MiB ram.) and right now my bottleneck is capital for new hardware, so I'll serve the less capital intensive customers first.

2. I am still focused on the hobby user. At the moment, I think I can serve the needs of the enthusiast market better than the 'serious business' market. I'm trying to change that, but I'm not there yet. I do want to get there, so I do like some of the more adventurous businesses trying me out and giving me feedback, but I want to make sure that I don't serve the business market at the expense of my current enthusiast market. I want to keep that base.
The difference between method overloading and true multimethods (see CLOS, Dylan, Perl 6...) is that multimethods are resolved runtime (depending on actual argument types or even their values itself).
Having Trouble With Your iPhone 4? Solution...
Desktop monitor resolution is still at ~100dpi because no desktop OS has solved the scalable UI problem satisfactorily.

I'm under the impression this isn't a problem. Scaling is a problem when you have bitmap images and try to scale from - say - an iPhone to an iPad. But on desktops, monitors aren't growing in size by a factor of ~2.77.

If you leave the screen size the same but increase the DPI, bitmaps will look exactly the same. They might seem visually out-of-place next to crisper UI elements. Is that what you mean?
Maybe this is well known, in that case disregard this submission. However, if your like me and never thought to do this and you do a lot of Sass or css editing in vim then this article is a huge help.

Note: make sure to include .sass, .erb in your .vimrc if your using Sass and Rails. For example

autocmd BufWriteCmd *.html,*.css,*.gtpl,*.sass,*.erb :call Refresh_firefox()

2nd note: Make sure to start MozRepl:

Go to Firefox Tools menu and select MozRepl → Start
The Swiss tax system benefits people taking a mortgage on their house. When you own a house you have to pay taxes around what you would pay to rent the house. So when you don't have a mortgage on the house you pay twice. Once the "rent" plus the normal property tax.
The smart thing to do is to get a mortgage, so you don't have to pay the property tax. The interest to pay will be far less than the property tax.
Does Our Education System Stifle Entrepreneurs?
Yup! This capability is built into 2.2 and if you're still on 2.1 and your phone is rooted there are great apps like Barnacle which is completely free (there is also a paid version for donation purposes).
Disney might sue them?
I hear Boulder, CO is nice. It certainly ticks a number of your checkboxes: rural, cheap, and next to a lot of beautiful parks and forests. I've never been, but it's on my short list.
Ruby certainly has some rough edges. I don't find the redundancy of end/} a big deal in practice but I do wonder what Matz was thinking when he put them both in the language. The omission of parentheses from function calls can occasionally add some confusion but it makes uniform access to properties transparent without the property hack that Python had to add to accomplish this. It seems like Python has had to add a lot of new, non-orthogonal stuff over the years to catch up to what was elegantly possible in Ruby from the beginning.

People sometimes do go overboard with DSLs in Ruby too but the big problem I have with Python code is that it all looks the same. The shape of Ruby code is usually a good indicator of what it's doing, partly thanks to DSL. Python seems to have gone just far enough in making all code look the same to defeat quick visual intuition. Why not take it a step further and get a completely regular, homoiconic syntax and all the Lisp-y benefits it brings?

To me Ruby hit the sweet spot exactly between Lisp and Perl. If I had to code in Python I wouldn't hate it though. There are far worse languages.
The article does say that the motor is a GE automobile motor, patented 1889.
It may be more convenient for the other party, if they don't have Skype or don't have a computer but there's a hotspot to use FaceTime. It's a good alternative and if it's this easy for the party w/ a computer than it might be the more practical option if you want to video chat.
It's petty but I can't get over that gigayo is phonically so close to gigolo. As others note the cow seems wrong, rather too lighthearted and not professional enough.
These are good questions...

I want to start a startup because I:
- Want to do something I care about, slash it's meaningful to me. I'm tired of realizing other people's ideas.
- I want to make important decisions and have responsibility for their repercussions.
- I want to create a lifestyle that I'd enjoy more for myself, including not having to be tied to a specific location.
- I want to do something 'important' (a relative term, I know). I'm tired of wasting my time and talent on silly projects and bug fixes.
- Money is important but not everything. Ideally I'd be earning as much as I do now from my corporate gig but that's not even necessary.

I'm willing to gamble a couple of years of my life, but as I said, I'm not sure what to do/make. I agree that working for options is a sucker's bet, hence leaving a previous startup after working there a year.

Thanks for getting me to clarify this.
~Henry
> PLAYBOY: What's your problem with [the Apple Newton]?

> GATES: It was supposed to do handwriting recognition. But based on the initial product, people are skeptical about whether handwriting recognition really works. They did some nice technical work on the product. Unfortunately, it's not a useful device as far as I'm concerned, so it'll probably set the category back.

Gates, in the article, also described wallet-size pocket computers that, he hoped, would serve also as keyless entry systems, ticket stub replacements, etc. It’s up to the reader to wonder if his reaction to the Newton was partially disappointment to its lack of physical-world interactions/value, partially the competitive mindset, and/or really due to distaste for its handwriting recognition.

Of course, the Win CE / PocketPC line is susceptible to a lot of the same criticisms.

* * *

I find it interesting how much Gates talks about people ascribing certain motives and goals to him, Microsoft, Disney, and other companies. He says really, they are responding to competition and customers.
Pretty much the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error

This is part of why corporations can be so dangerous: not that they are evil, but that they aren’t guided by morality as much as simply responding to environments in potentially harmful ways.

* * *

(Aside: Boy is it weird reading articles on Playboy.com. Here's something for the intellect, dear reader; may we up-sell you on some pornography? Thank goodness for the Readability bookmarklet. At least in the magazine — I understand — the articles get pages to themselves!)
This is part of what holds me back. I have a lot of ideas for startups but I'm not sure that some/any of them will be revenue-generating.

Maybe a better starting point for me is to post some of the ideas and see what kinds of responses those get.

However, picking a project that will generate money does not necessarily mesh with making the project that is most interesting to me, which adds to my confusion.

~Henry
Do you believe banner ads are the future? If not, how much life do you think is left in banner ads?
This is interesting. Thanks for the suggestion.
It seems like this could be inefficient in the short term but perhaps the best way to get things rolling.
~Henry
Ever since high school stop forever, I been sleeping whenever I want, without the use of an alarm clock.

I find that I naturally wake up at 9 PM on a normal day. Sometime, I only sleep 3 or 4 hours a night. However, that is compensated by another 3 or 4 hours of sleep.

But the best thing is that I am no longer sleep tortured by the school system.