skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What I've observed is: you have to be on the radar of the reporter somehow; PR firms can help but other buzz/connections are just as important. Helping the reporter with the right kind of quotes, supporting interviews, framing that helps the story seem like an interesting trend, etc. makes coverage more likely and better.

(For example, the WSJ article's major news hook is Quora's opening, but that's presented as part of a trend, "[Startups] Racing to Fill Gaps Left by Google". Many outlets would want to cover Quora's opening, but by giving the WSJ a little early notice of the change, and interviews with the founders, and pointers to some outsiders who could provide good 'reax' quotes, media-savvy startups can ensure a meaty story in a marquee publication.)

Stories in a mass-market paper can drive a lot of traffic, and traffic that's usefully different (or more mainstream) than other avenues. A positive mention by a big-name reviewer (Mossberg, Pogue, etc.) is gold.

(edit: parenthetical 2nd para added)
How Planes Can Fly
You are right, and I don't know why you were downvoted: this is the claim that would be made, and it would be asserted as the reason you are not allowed to take your blue-on-white license plate and repaint it to be hot pink on lime green (at least, not while it's mounted to your vehicle).

However, I don't think this idea will go anywhere, since it potentially creates all sorts of first-amendment issues - you love coke but your plate keeps showing ads for Pepsi, as it were; as DMV is a state agency they are subject to constitutional limitations, and as the owner/occupant of a vehicle people are inevitably going to associate any license plate messages with you, so forcing you advertise something you don't like (or indeed to advertise at all) is arguably an infringement on your freedom of speech.

I'm all for creativity and lateral thinking, but I think this is a really, really stupid idea - it's straight out of Idiocracy. The sad irony is that while the idea is a suggestion for balancing the state budget, it's taking up resources being proposed and debated in the legislature, and if it passes it will take up resources in the conduct of feasibility studies.
Agencies Roll Up to Form BlueGlass
I agree. It obviously possible to spend that much, but many apps could be a damn site cheaper (you can put together a lot in something like Lua/Corona in a few days).
It reminds me about from in 2000, people were saying the average e-commerce website costs $250k-$1M to develop.
I think it depends who you ask. If you ask the average BigCo, how much it costs, you might get that answer, but the average hacker will probably give you a very different one.
Does Apple offer free shipping in your area? Rather than wait an unknown timeframe, just order one online - then keep checking with WorstBuy and if they get some in before it ships you can just cancel the order. Worked for me :)
There is an old expression that captures what he learned; "If you want something done, give it to a busy man".
Pick up a copy of "Working for Yourself: Law and Taxes for Independent Contractors, Freelancers and Consultants." It's an excellent book that provides detail on legal forms (LLC, S-Corp, etc), tax issues, insurance, record keeping, client agreements, etc. I highly recommend the book for someone just getting started as a freelancer.
That sounds to me like rationalization, not reasoning, I have to admit.
Think and Act Like Your Customers
Hofstadter's Law http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hofstadter%27s_law :)

Seriously though. I usually do work breakdown structures (e.g. HTML+CSS for layout is one task, content styling is another task, widget styling, javascript to drive each UI element are quoted individually, forms individually, etc etc.

The idea is that you should be able to estimate tasks that you do often fairly accurately since you do them often.

In addition, I increase the estimated time by a percentage to account for things like bug fixes, back and forth with the rest of the team, client feedback, etc. Each item has its own multiplier (e.g. a client might be difficult, so you up the multiplier for that)
UX lessons from a Swedish wedding
Hip Hop Word Count: Linguist Talks Data And Lossless Communication
Does your number of instances scale up and down frequently, or does it monotonically increase with growth?
Thanks for pulling this together, I'll forward it on to my friends around town. There are a lot of smart & motivated people around here.

I was just thinking about trying to pull together people who are doing social media development in the triangle, but this might cover my bases well enough.

Thanks again!
Would you recommend creating an LLC for part time freelancing as well? I have a full time job, but planning to freelance to supplement income. I know, YANAL
It’s Not The Device Or The File, It’s The Internet, Stupid
How West Germany and Austria hacked the World Cup rules to both advance (1982)
We invented the idea of Prime Numbers. They're an arbitrary creation. As are patterns in them. Random is -NOT- the same as even distribution. Patterns are inevitable. Las Vegas makes a fortune on people who don't understand that. If you flip a coin a hundred times, you'll see patterns in the result. People are good at seeing patterns.
Google Voice open for everyone (In the US)
You can view content on the site without an account, but you need to use Twitter or Facebook to create an account right now and edit anything. We might change this later.
English is interesting in that we almost have two independent vocabularies. When speaking informally, you tend to use Germanic words more, and when speaking formally, you tend to use Romance words. I'm writing this formally, which is why I'm using words like "speaking" (which comes from Latin) instead of "talking" (which comes from Middle English).

For example, compare "I need to pick up bread from the store when I'm finished." (Romance words, sounds formal) to "I must get bread from the shop when I'm done." (Germanic words, sounds informal). Both mean the same thing, but (ignoring the stiff wording) the first sounds like something you would say to your grandmother, and the second sounds like something you'd say to your pal at the bar.
Google Voice for everyone
Me too. My exact thought was, "this is a personal blog, not the NYT." It put a dent in the initial impression I had of the blog as handrolled.
HashMap is implemented as a dynamic array, and you could probably get "good enough" random performance from accessing the underlying array, picking a random element, then iterating over that bucket and picking a random element. In the average case this will be pretty much constant time.

I'd be a little worried about the randomness of the distribution, but if you need a proper random distribution, you shouldn't be using a map.
> [all] apps trying to make money are not free.

No, 3 of my 4 apps are paid, even though I'm not making a serious effort to make money. Why shouldn't they be? I don't mind making a little money.

Just because filtering the numbers to get useful results is infeasible doesn't mean we should pretend averages across the entire store mean anything for a person who sets out to build an app store oriented business.

It reminds me of all the psychological studies that use inadequate controls just because adequate ones for what they want to do would cost trillions of dollars. Then they claim to have done legitimate science. But the standards of science don't lower themselves to what data we can easily get.
If you want random elements, why don't just store it in a simple array?
مشاهدة مباراة الارجنتين واليونان
مشاهدة مباراة الارجنتين واليونان
Taking systems like this that purport to be secure because of strong encryption and tearing them down is literally my day job. In no set of circumstances would we accept a project for which the terms are "here's an encrypted file, DECRYPT IT!". You could encrypt the file with FEAL-4 and still blow $5,000 of attacker budget "analyzing" a "system" like this.

Meanwhile, there is no trivial way I can find to get details on how your system works, or on the details of what aspects of OpenPGP you use or how your system is configured to use it. To download a white paper on your security, I was asked to fill out a form. No.

As a practitioner, this contest doesn't demonstrate to me the resilience of "modern encryption". It demonstrates to me that you've never had a professional assessment of your system and that you don't understand how "modern crypto" actually breaks. To someone with a basic understanding of how cryptosystems work, your contest has the impact opposite to the one you intend.

Having said all that, the fact that you use OpenPGP instead of a vanity "AES plus RSA" scheme might be a plus. You know, if you documented it anywhere.
The arduino doesn't seem that expensive to me. It's sure no $4, but $29 seems fantastically modest. You say 'thats too much to put in a product', but I don't think it was ever meant to be in shipping products.

The whole shields part gets expensive though.
Oh yeah good point. In my app, you can manually bookmark links that aren't from feeds. Also I like allowing users to see the full article contents when the feed just had a one paragraph summary.

Feel free to use my blog, but I imagine you can find a much better looking blog from a designer somewhere.
My main issue with this article is that the author assumes that all developers operate equally. He averages the individuals who build apps in their spare time and might make thousands of dollars as 'extra' income, with the large app companies who spend tremendous resources on building apps that get high returns. When he crunches his numbers, he gets results that are probably very far from the actual reality of things.
The author mentions HERI schools which he used as a subset of universities to represent all universities. Furthurmore, the HERI schools were chosen based on which schools allowed him to collect data, or had publicly available data.

This automatically biases his scale towards public universities and colleges. Private universities would be less likely to allow the author to conduct a study on their campus or provide data.

Additionally, schools range in difficulty and "study time." The reason some schools are known as "party schools" and others are known as hard schools are because some require more work than others. I'm sure MIT, CMU, Berkeley and Stanford are much more time consuming that schools like Cal Poly, Penn State, Michigan State, and Texas A&M. With a biased sample, you can't make broad scale assumptions. This paper is just poorly conducted research.
As an attacker of middling intelligence, crypto is the place I look first in custom designs for failures, because lay developers are absolutely awful at deploying it. Your stunt harms end-user understanding of how security works.
The answer is simple: The key is never stored in the cloud. Period. The key is in your control - we don't trust the cloud for storing keys. In fact we do not trust ourselves (we do not keep a copy, unless you choose to give it to us). The only person who has access to the decryption key is you.
I have been using it for a while now.

1) It feels a little like the LinkedIn discussion groups.

2) It will most probably be used for self-promotion more
than anything else.

3) It will have a hard time competing with the quality of HN, SO and the rest of the Stack Exchange network.

I don't care about whether they use Twitter and FB for login. In fact that is what I liked about it.
9th Slide:

While the demand for the dynamic or scripting languages such as Perl, Python and Ruby lags behind that of Java and more mainstream languages, the popularity of these languages is growing and there is a need for programmers in each of these communities.
Many of the people I invited to Quora felt this way, this was when FB was the only option.

One thing to note is that after you login, you can disconnect your twitter and/or facebook account. I disconnected FB.

Even if you don't plan to join, I would recommend the HN crowd to check out some of the questions under startups -- excellent info.
We have a HR20 from Direct TV. What a pile of sh. This thing sounds like its grinding coffee non-stop. It also locks up and jitters during play back. I would also like to know what designer thought it would be a good idea to put a circle of blue flashing/rotating LED's on the front of this thing. He should be hung by his nuts!
Good idea. I guess signup was the most commented on issue so that's definitely a priority now.

Thanks!
Article summary: "I like shiny things that move, and classic license plates are the opposite of that!⸮"

I had to fix that for you. That right there is the Sarcasm Mark.

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Irony_punctua...

Because it is often difficult to identify satire nowadays.
Are you sure we didn't discover them? Numbers and mathematics wouldn't cease to exist were we to disappear.

Your use of the word "random" seems to be a non sequitur. Could you explain that connection?
Julius Caesar Essay Thoughts
There are two methods to consider when writing the Julius Caesar essay. It can be written on the actual person or based on the play by William Shakespeare. Whichever method you use to write the essay it requires you to come up with good Julius Caesar essay ideas. These essay ideas will provide you the ability to write a good essay.
I've had steady work for the past few months and I'm working with other design firms/agencies that seem to have a steady flow of work. They're impressed with what I do and I'm having to turn down work because I don't have time to complete it. I realize that I need to put away a nice amount to be ready for dry periods, but I have that.

To answer your question, I could spend more time freelancing than I can while still at my current job.
Twitter logins I don't mind, but I dislike FB enough to avoid logging in there or maintaining my account there (beyond specifying in my bio that I don't really use FB). I've never used FB connect for anything. shrug
close dupe: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1452442
ChromeKit: HTML5+CSS3 window chrome.
Quick link to demo: http://devthought.com/wp-content/projects/chromekit/
What would you build with this? [genuine question]
Yes, I did. What I was expecting to see for free apps was something along the lines of using, say, AdMob metrics (http://metrics.admob.com/) and his estimate of the number of free apps to come up with some rough idea of what the average iPhone ad-driven app makes as revenue. That would have been more in line with the section of the post about paid apps.

Simply saying that targeting an iDevice leaves out 97% of the total population might be meaningful to an advertiser trying to gain a wide reach, but it means less to a developer, who is mostly interested in 1) getting an app installed on the device and 2) getting impressions. The fact that the average iPhone user has downloaded 80 free apps is a good thing for a developer.
To me, that read like: demand for Perl, Python and Ruby lags behind Java, C#, C/C++ and PHP
Posterous Targets Ning In Massive Switching Campaign. Who Is Next?
This is wrong. Humans discovered prime numbers. They are not an invention. They fall naturally out of the integers, and would exist regardless of whether humans did or not. Prime numbers are are some of the most fundamental objects in all of mathematics, and the fact that you can find them on diagonals in these graphs probably indicates a pattern that we can't explain yet.
A New Approach to the Personal Website: Life Stream Remixer
I ordered my 3G version online on May 29 and received it by June 16th. I found that to be easier (albeit longer) than camping out in front of Best Buy.
You can get a lot done avoiding the things you should do.
Numbers, yes, but Prime Numbers are dependent on the idea that being divisible by only one and itself are important. There are infinite such ways to group numbers. We do Primes partly because they're useful, and also because they're cool.

I used the word random because the distribution of Primes is random as far as we currently know.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prime_Numbers#Distribution
"Quora's business model is currently unclear. [co-founder] Mr. D'Angelo ... said "if I had to guess, it would probably involve some kind of advertising at some point."
By that reasoning, all ways of grouping, analyzing, and considering numbers are discovered. And those ways are infinite. That primes are important is of our choosing.
Humans may have invented them, but they are a pretty natural concept.

Once you have a system of numbering, one of the first things one does is to see which numbers can be arrived at by simply adding other numbers to themselves a bunch of times.

I have a pretty limited knowledge of number theory, so I may be completely off mark, but I don't know that people have yet arrived at a nice fundamental theory that can encapsulate the way that primes arrange themselves along the number line.
Do independent web apps have a future in world divided into walled gardens?
Today, most computation is still done with general-purpose computers. These machines, primarily laptops and desktops, are "open" in that you can install and run on them whatever you like, and you can build for them whatever applications you like and distribute them in whatever manner you like. The inherent openness of these platforms has also served to make them incompatible with each other and even with themselves; just getting an application to run on different versions of the same platform (eg windows) can be a pain. For this (and for other) reasons, over the last few years much application development has shifted to the web.

But now it seems the tide has begun to recede. Application development is heading back towards native apps, particularly native apps for a single, closed platform. It appears we may be entering a future where the whole technological landscape will be partitioned into any number of walled-gardens.

My question is basically this: if the future is the iOS and other closed platforms like it, does it still make sense to build a business based on web apps with the expectation that such a business will still make sense two, three or five years from now, or is one better off taking the plunge and basing your business on a platform like the AppStore instead?
This (LadyAda) is what I used, and I turned out fine.
τὸ σὸν γὰρ ἄνθος, παντέχνου πυρὸς σέλας,
θνητοῖσι κλέψας ὤπασεν.
That's curious.

The angle brackets on this png are fine, unlike on the examples on the original page.

I've just downloaded Mensch, and on my box too the angle brackets are fine, with an angle between the lines of about 55 degrees, as opposed to about 85 degrees on the original page; so it would appear the downloadable font is different from that described no the page.
ModSecurity Handbook Review
Their entire store seems to be bogged down right now, probably give it a few hours.
I guess in the future, you are going to need to create "throwaway" facebook accounts to sign up for new/ untrusted services in the same way you need a "throwaway" email address today.

That seems like a hassle to me and will make me significantly less likely to sign up for anything, but maybe most people really don't care.
Also interesting http://www.structuredprocrastination.com/

All procrastinators put off things they have to do.
Structured procrastination is the art of making this
bad trait work for you. The key idea is that
procrastinating does not mean doing absolutely nothing.
Procrastinators seldom do absolutely nothing; they do
marginally useful things, like gardening or sharpening
pencils or making a diagram of how they will reorganize
their files when they get around to it.
Duh.. tried to order it, but TI's e-store is missing my country (Estonia) :S
Have you tried http://estimator.astuteo.com ?
Why is your kit $80 when the individual components can be bought for less than <$40 and even less in bulk?

Maybe $50 or $60 would be a reasonable price, but $80 is pushing it.
Car Covers Now 
Well here it is the first of April and the weather is changing, Now is the time to think about purchasing a car cover and to start protecting your vehicle from the spring weathe
They do. Amazon does as well for the same price. I just received mine yesterday.
I'm baffled why I cannot sign up for the waiting list now.

Does it take a month to actually build a waiting list form?
jbk - Thank you (and the rest of your team members!)

Does anyone have links to who I should talk to to volunteer as an Intel gfx hw tester? Netflix+Silverlight+Win7 is using GPU acceleration for video on my netbook, it would be great to have VLC take advantage of the same.
Can't we just fire the lot of them and start over? Good lord what a pack of idiots.
Agreed, but the end result for many was being acquired not bankruptcy, so it wasn't necessarily bad for all shareholders.
You are going to see a pattern along the diagonal because every other number is even and never prime (excluding 2). So the only way for two primes to be touching is along a diagonal. Given that and our brains tendency to group items which are closer together as being related, anything along the diagonal will stand out more and appear to be a pattern. A more interesting picture would be one where all of the even numbers are omitted.
Good plan... if I didn't have gift cards to Best Buy.
Ancient legends once walked among early humans?
I hate not being included in "everyone".

(Google Voice is not available in your country.)
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1263512
Here is what I would like to see.

The Freecycle Network is brilliant - lots of stuff gets rehomed that would otherwise get dumped in landfills. People get their redundant stuff taken away, people get free stuff (computers, toasters, clothes...), it's good for the environment, it's all good. Technically speaking, it's in the dark ages though. It runs via mailing lists, which are operated by Yahoo and apply to discrete geographical areas. It works well enough, but I think it could be improved on, or at least supplemented.

I would like to see a system based around open standards. I envisage:

* A structured way of listing spare stuff - ie. hListing or some variant.

* A way of managing a network of people whose stuff you're interested in - Portable Contacts? Whatever the state of the art is, not sure. Ideally something that can be somewhat integrated with people's existing social network info. Or, screw it, just a list would do for now.

* A standard way of managing who can see your listings - OAuth?

* A web application that you can use to manage your listings (or in time any number of applications, since the end result is standards-based output)

* A web application that aggregates, filters, searches and displays other people's listings (these last two bullet points are probably functions of the same application)

This is a bit sketchy but If it's feasible, I think such a system has a number of advantages over Freecycle or the various balkanized web-based databases of free stuff. I vaguely intend to look into doing this myself at some point, but I'm hoping if I pimp the idea about a bit somebody else will do it for me (or with me).
That's been for a while now, atleast on the versions i have.
I don't really like it, but well.. Especially since, when you copy the url, the http:// is added again. It's kind of inconsistent.
This is a device that received a strong negative reaction from many in the (non-Apple-worshiping) tech press. It just goes to show you how out of touch many of them are with what really excites users.
How is this bad news? The consulting firms charging 35K per app are making a killing!
The Kindle Won
TI's site seems to be down. Are there any vendors selling these?
$40 for parts, $40 to support their customers in a satisfactory manner. Charge what its worth to your customers, not what it costs to make it. Add $40 in value and you'll have plenty of takers.