skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Way to long. First customer took forever. I almost wrote it off. Then I went from 0 customers to 3 in 1 month. A little blogging and google ads is all I've done so far.

All told say 12 months from building it to the first $100. Say another 4-6 months to hit $1000. Obviously its a side effort and I'm not getting rich off of it. But I don't put a lot of effort into it either. If you ignore the development time costs, its pretty profitable right now.

I'm going to start doing some real marketing and hopefully it will start gaining more traction. One thing I still find strange is how customers come in bunches. Nothing for a while then a bunch all at once.

The monthly cost will be a big difference in when you hit your revenue goals. I have an idea I'm toying with right now, that if I implement it and it works, would be $300-500 a month per customer, so I would be able to hit those numbers a lot quicker. But then again it would be a longer sales cycle.

What is your app?

Good luck and enjoy. That first customer is a very rewarding experience.
That's still not a risk-free approach, you could trust John Romero and get Daikatana.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daikatana
Work: Tuesday, international flight to a customer to gather requirements for new product version - enough work for a year. Thursday, try to integrate WordPress and Facebook Connect and curse loudly - the architects who return either a userID or a WP_Error object and the plugin writers who just (int) $result without checking if it's an error.

Free time: reverse engineering a C++ game and extending it. http://img180.imageshack.us/img180/9215/devenv.png - IDA to rev/eng it, Eclipse C++ with a custom build tool to compile, Rose Tyler background just because.
I think the point is that no one is going to take their jobs.

This is brutally hard work for anyone that has never tried it. It is probably more physically demanding than anything most Americans have ever done. I know it would be one of the last things I'd want to do to support myself.
Depends on how many files you have. In my line of work (web archiving) I frequently have more files than '*' can cope with - so need to use find even for mundane tasks
Visualise BP Oil Spill in Bangalore,India
Isn't there supposed to be some HN standard of keeping the original article's title? What's the justification for changing the post title in this case?

EDIT: I don't mean to pick on this poster, I just have been noticing changed titles a lot lately.
Seems to have gone dead (coincidence?) -- related links:

http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2010-07/nsa-wants-p...

http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/200768/nsa_per...
> I assert, instead, that appropriate compensation is proportional to the productivity of the work.

Productivity puts a ceiling on the compensation (If the farm owner is only getting $10/hr of productivity out of the laborers, there's no way they're going to pay more than $10/hr in the long run because they lose money if they do.), but supply and demand in the labor market decides the rate. It'll generally below the value that employers get from the workers (meaning that the employer profits from the arrangement).

Now it's a little more complicated than that because of imperfect information (the farm owners don't know how many people are going to come around looking for work or how little pay they'll take) and imperfect competition (Even if a worker hears that he could make twice as much 500 miles away, he might have to take the job where he is if he has no good way to get to that area with better jobs.), but that's how it works in theory.
http://railskits.com/ looks decent, but I have never bought or used anything from them.
C++ is a pertinent example of terrible syntax design. Not only does the complexity make it a nightmare to write a standard compliant compiler, it also slows down development because you need much non-contextual information to read code.
Getting security/QA audited (& drug tested).

Yes, on a Friday. Apparently men with clipboards have no idea what POETS day means!
"Unable to understand some basic sentences"?
People who think the US agricultural sector couldn't survive without illegal labor are generally less interesting than the people who understand that the US agricultural sector could survive without illegal labor but encourage it anyway.
I think we are in agreement about the morality.

This is why I think it is wrong to live rent free in the house. It is acting in bad faith to sign a mortgage on a house knowing full well that you do not intend to pay back a cent and live in it for a year.

On the other hand, maybe we could just label it strategic renting and blame the mortgage broker for signing the contract :P.
Hey,

thanks for you advice. It seems more and more we have to consider paying for a designer (It isn't an idea we haven't thought of, it's just hard to justify that cost when we cut so many corners to keep costs low).

I have been looking at the same options that you have put across. Right now, we are prototyping with a 960 grid system so it should be okay temporarily.

Any suggestions for a good designer who is startup-friendly?
Tesla Hires Former Gap and Apple Executive to Make Stores More Inviting
First I would say that using a template is a sure fire way to make your site look boilerplate and out of place

Depends on your audience. I bet 99% of people would never even notice.
Blizzard scraps plans to display real names in forums
That was last week for me. You have my utmost sympathy, but at least you can browse HN in the meantime. I was once stuck doing that without anything to read and no browsing capabilities. It was mindnumbing, but I was at least being paid.
Working on a variant of Etsy's Deployinator, with a bunch of extra things we need at work.

http://codeascraft.etsy.com/2010/05/20/quantum-of-deployment...
Why are liberals so impressed by China and Singapore’s school systems?
It is a fun app. It mostly said I write like Issac Assimov except when I gave it a bunch of python code it said I write like Edgar Allen Poe. I guess this is a clear signal that I should drastically improve my Python programming skills.
Do you really believe that securing a border is impossible?

Or are you simply suggesting that the US military is less capable of securing a border than the Indian, Chinese, Israeli or South Korean military?
So build a better fence! Ever heard of the Berlin Wall?

OK, that was only through Berlin, but the East/West Germany border was apparently pretty successful.

One thing that's way better than a fence: two fences, half a mile apart, with a minefield in between.
Where do I start Clojure?
This is a lot of fun but the great variety of results I received left me without any sense of who I may actually write like. I analyzed a series of correspondence, all written within several weeks, and similar in tone, and I was told that I write like: Dan Brown, James Joyce, Isaac Asimov, Stephen King and Douglas Adams. Anyway, I love the concept. Please add Robert Louis Stevenson (Strange Case) to your collection. Thank you for the narcissistic pleasure :D
Not sure if this is exactly what you're looking for, but try http://www.refineryhq.com. Very simple, and does what you describe.
Have you tried the free dating sites, like plentyoffish?

I ask because I read an article recently pointing out the economics of paid dating sites, and how it leads nearly every male to have the experience you described.

Couldn't find the link again but I think it went something like this: people sign up for the "free" offer, and their profile goes up. But they can't respond until they pay. So you ping a few people, and in a lot of cases don't get a response because they haven't paid yet (but the site doesn't tell you that). Then you ping a few more. As time passes and you broaden your scope, you're no longer sending carefully crafted, personal messages, you're using a shotgun approach. (Or at least, most guys are.)

Meanwhile, the women aren't initiating usually, they're letting the guys come to them. Since the guys are all shotgunning, the women are getting flooded. If they're even reading all their messages, they clicking through fast looking for any excuse to reject each one and move on to the next.
I think Java, C# and Objective-C are the languages that most need or benefit from IDE's.
This Wednesday, July 14, is the Cold Start Happy Hour. We're meeting at the Bulldog NE at 7pm. Grab a beer and talk with other founders and entrepreneurs about what you're working on. For more info: http://coldstart.tumblr.com/
Web MS Access?
... which is likely if you use an Apple laptop and trivial if you don't
- solving Facebook algorithm/career puzzles
- waiting for my wife to get out of surgery
- enjoying the warm weather
Client side image resizing for an image uploader, part of a larger web app build. Saves a ton of time/bandwidth/CPU. So far its turned really well.

Its pretty easy actually, thanks to the most recent beta of SWFUpload. If you want to implement yourself, make sure to grab the patched .swf or you may have trouble queueing uploads.

SWFUpload 2.5 Beta: http://code.google.com/p/swfupload/downloads/detail?name=SWF...

Patched SWF: http://code.google.com/p/swfupload/downloads/detail?name=swf...

Demo: http://demo.swfupload.org/v250beta3/resizedemo/index.php
EFF Celebrates 20th Anniversary With New Animation by Nina Paley
I would say the first step is immigration reform: remove the incentive to come here illegally, they'll just do it legally, and the problem goes away.
I am not sure why this is a big deal. NSA has been watching the internet for a long time. A lot of those operations are probably shadowy classified ones. That kind of information is good for high level decision making and sensitive projects, but is not very useful in bullying regular citizens who might post something "anonymously" on some forum.

What the government needs is a plausable cover for "we see what you did there... on that forum ... on that date that is why you are denied this and that or put on some black list."

Another reason for using such an inflamatory name is to test public's response to such _kind_ of a project. Basically test the media and public's outcry level. Possibly in preparation for expanding one of their existing projects even further. Otherwise they couldn't have given it a more ominous Orwellian name.
I do my own crawling & indexing in addition to using third-party APIs. It's a hybrid approach where I focus on the places I think I add the most value.
BTW, your games look really nice. Do you do the artwork yourself?
I don't mean that they will recognize the template, I mean that you are going to be shoving your app into a template vs. designing something built for your app. You will haves spots to fill in a template and just put stuff in there, or if you leave it empty then it looks strange. It's the Lorem Ipsum curse, designers will put it everywhere and then you end up filling it with useless content to make things look right.
If you agree with the design decisions. It's rather expressive, but not exactly a minimalistic approach to OO.

Did they ever improve the rather steep performance penalty? (esp. startup)
It's applied game theory. If they did this right I bet you'll be surprised at how effective it is.

Not to mention people will just spend more time looking at, and building their todo list in order to play the game in the first place.
Downwind 2.5 Times Faster Than the Wind
This is the comment thread for this item: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1494023
i had pictured something elegant like Lisp. but no it was just hacked together in Perl? Somebody needs to link to the famous XKCD strip. :)
You're mistaken if you believe that "discipline, enlightenment, and intellectual invigoration" are at odds with being an interesting and attractive person. I suspect it's your particular narrow interpretation of those pursuits, combined with this huge chip on your shoulder and entrenched disdain for females, that sum to a self-fulfilling prophecy of your frustration and celibacy.

You've described several qualities and characteristics that a lot of guys would be envious of. You have all your limbs, a good brain, a singing voice. Drop the self-defeating attitude. Many men have made a success with less.

Best of luck to you.
I'm sure your observations are much more relevant than anything else that exists in time and space, but it might shock and amaze you to learn that:

1. Many "average American workers" are still farmers, and

2. Before the supply of labor was manipulated via deliberate government policy, almost all farmers/farm workers were "average American workers".
I've thought about that before, what trips me up is thinking about incentives. If you have a really great date with someone, chances are you don't want to increase your competition by giving them a good rating.
people are going to start feeling less and less comfortable about being locked in to the whole Apple ecosystem.

What is this lock-in that people keep talking about wrt to Apple? I can export my iCal data with .ics files. I can export my Address Book data with standard .vcf files. iTunes uses MP3, AAC and WAV files. iPhoto handles jpg, tiff, and png files. Mail.app grabs mail over IMAP and/or POP and data can be exported as mbox files. iTunes plays nicely with my Nokia E71. DRMd video files from the iTunes store are the only thing I can think of that can't be easily used outside of Apple products, but at least I have the alternative of using those videos on Windows (and it doesn't affect me since I don't buy videos from the iTMS).

The thing that keeps me "locked in" to Apple's products is that I like them better than the alternatives. But the moment that stops, there's nothing keeping me from moving over to Windows, Linux, *BSD, etc.
Fixing one last firmware bug so a major customer can ship!
Awesome! This is just what I was looking for.
A former co-worker of mine in Germany has a small farm, and required some workers for the asparagus harvest. Most of them come from Poland or the Czech Republic. But now the government had a program where long-term unemployed people had to accept any job or be penalized accordingly. So for the first day of the harvest, a big percentage of his workers were Germans for the first time.

On the second day, none of them returned.
Ha, I had an idea for an easter egg that would tell you that you write like Guido van Rossum if you put some Python code there, but decided against it to avoid false positives :-)
Programming languages force programmers to think clearly and express ideas unambiguously. It's not a bad thing we should avoid; it helps us write robust software.
You don't need to send the data to cars for wi-fi equipped traffic lights to be useful.

I can imagine hooking up a traffic light with both a wi-fi device and cameras to measure traffic flow. Traffic light A could communicate with traffic light B to let each one know how much traffic was on the way to the other light, so that it could adjust its programming. If you did this on a large scale, I would expect it to reduce traffic by a lot.

Of course, I don't know if the reduction in traffic would be greater than the cost of equipping all traffic lights with wi-fi devices and cameras.
You mean this one? :)

http://xkcd.com/224/
Working on redesigning Notifo's website. I started by nuking all the css from the last design, removing divs I didn't like, reorganizing the site with a page div, some wrappers for header and footer so I could stretch them out 100%. Worked on the logo a bit to get a slicker look that blended in with the background, in addition to a subtle letterpress effect.

I still have lots left to redesign in terms of content pages, in addition to adding a few new sections to the site but I've been tinkering around with some typography recently. I really want to use TypeKit but last night Chad and I found that - possibly related - scrolling on the site is incredibly slow when TypeKit is enabled than when it's not, or when using a Google WebFont instead.

Using lots of CSS3 throughout - combined with Sass it makes it super easy. for example, my box-shadow mixin:

@mixin box-shadow($ho, $vo, $b, $c)
-webkit-box-shadow: $ho $vo $b $c
-moz-box-shadow: $ho $vo $b $c
box-shadow: $ho $vo $b $c
filter: "progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.dropshadow( OffX=" $ho, "OffY=" $vo, "Color=" $c ")"
-ms-filter: "progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.dropshadow( OffX=" $ho, "OffY=" $vo, "Color=" $c ")"
So would the fact that they have (sensible) ethical issues about extracting money from grieving relatives.
I think that's a really good point, to which I think the answer is that the cheap labor force isn't naturally occurring.

It's caused be the combination of economic disparity between nations (natural) and US legislation that motivates foreign people to break the law to enter the country (limited legal immigration AND amendment 14 of the US Constitution).

I agree, there is nothing wrong with cheap labor. What is wrong, is motivating people to break the law, then using their illegal status as a way to stifle the natural behavior of labor markets.
Try crowdspring.com

I have competed there before and the quality of work is greater compared to other places.

The other advantage is (not necessarily fair) that you can walk away with your money if you're not fully satisfied. the website will cover a min. payment given to the best designer for their effort.

Here's my profile if you do sign up, i'll be glad to compete
http://www.crowdspring.com/user/faramarz/ratings/
This topic was discussed some days ago:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1491766
A good reason to dump OpenDNS... It's SLOW
Mice living in an enriched environments less likely to get tumors
More dead than alive
what happens if I drive it down stairs?
If that shocked you, then you haven't been paying attention to how different different parts of the US are, and how much of the US has never really digested science.
When I first started out with Clojure on Ubuntu I honestly had no idea which packages to start out with. It's not a huge deal and I was able to get it right through trial and error but it's one more step where a potential user could get lost.

I wouldn't mind contributing to some official getting started documentation if that was possible. Seeing an HN comment as the go-to source for getting started upthread disappointed me.
In general, people don't dislike the establishment just because it's the establishment, they dislike it when it makes bad lazy stuff.
This is the exact argument an economist uses to argue for unregulated immigration.

More conventionally, it is also used in support of free trade, even when a foreign country subsidizes their exports: it is functionally identical to productivity improvements in the importing nation.
Specializer which propagates argument types through a dynamically typed function and gives me back a statically typed one. Polyvariant type inference ftw.
and also for the record, djm that you're replying to is one of the main maintainers of the portable OpenSSH project, which takes OpenBSD's OpenSSH code and has to add in all that "#ifdef hell" and deal with the autojunk tools to get it to build on the dozens of platforms that OpenSSH ships on.

http://openssh.org/portable.html
I'd be curious to hear what you think of CodeIgniter, I have heard good things. We've been using CakePHP for about 3 years now, and would highly recommend it as a general purpose PHP framework.
"Love" might be a little too strong for people who were only marginally connected to the deceased.
Capital efficiency in cleantech, and why Vinod Khosla is wrong
Yes, and I give it a full five stars. The Design of Everyday Things (originally "The Psychology of Everyday Things") is incredibly accessible and strikes a very good balance between selling you on the importance of good design, explaining the concepts behind it, and entertaining you with examples both good and ludicrously bad.
My apologies. The original comment was quite throwaway, so I didn't want to present too much of a formal refutation. However, I have adjusted the text slightly.
From some early discussion (and their current job listing), search engine startup Blekko also has a significant Perl component:

http://blekko.com/jobs.html
why is divorce so complicated that lawyers can justify charging so much? at it's simplest it could be a form that the two spouses sign and date, perhaps with witnesses, then you submit it somewhere. i realize there can be disagreements about who gets what and that may take time to negotiate, but why would that require thousands of billable hours by lawyers? This is not rocket science, no programming needed, just people talking to each other, and only 2 needed at a minimum. Plus divorces are so common and have been happening for over a century I imagine, so you'd think it would be highly standardized and streamlined by now. UNLESS perhaps lawyers/lawmakers were themselves trying to keep it complex and manual to preserve job security.

anybody? anybody? grellas?
My favorite was Total Information Awareness, including the creepy Masonic eyeball: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_Awareness_Office
This isn't made for "most peoples" web sites, it's designed specifically for web apps with large Javascript footprints. Of which there are quite a few - the site I work on has ~200kB-400kB of JS resources.
You are living the life Aaron
A service?

So it's good for your neighbors that you're helping drive the values of their properties down? That's good for them?

Talk about rationalizations...
Ethically. I'm ok. This is because a mortgage has pre-arranged clauses in the contract that outline what the exit criteria are for the bank and the borrower. It's a contract with a pre-negotiated process around a divorce. A prenuptual if you will. In this case, we are just choosing to execute one of the clauses in the contract, as any business has the right to do. So, there is nothing unethical about adhering to the contract.

This is one of the arguments I've seen that doesn't sit well with me. How is this different from saying that it's ethical to steal money from a convenience store, because I'm willing to go to prison for it? After all, jail time is the pre-negotiated outcome for thieves, and I might decide I'd rather have the money and do the jail time rather than refraining from stealing in the first place.

Apart from one being in the criminal realm and the other in the civil, what's the difference? Or is that the difference that justifies the one and not the other? (Why?)
Blizzard cancels RealID on forums
Don Norman's Design of Everyday Things?

Should be required reading for anyone interested in HCI. Quite eye-opening to things such as user centred design, affordances, design constraints, etc. Easy to read and thought-provoking.
I'm not suggesting either; I'm just proposing a less "asshole tech guy" solution than what the original commenter said: "I am seriously considering just dropping all HTML email."
Or AIX or HPUX. Solaris isn't quite so unpopular yet, but there's more vintage support Solaris 8 out there than there is 10, and there's almost no OpenSolaris to speak of.
What Amazon was doing was a little different. They were trying to figure out how much people would pay based on available information that Amazon had.

Evidence, please.

My memory of the event, backed up by Amazon's statements in the link that I provided, were that Amazon was randomly varying prices and no demographic information was used to do so.

Now there were lots of people who thought that they might be doing something more nefarious. But to the best of my knowledge, no evidence exists. Furthermore my understanding of A/B testing and how Amazon runs A/B tests makes Amazon's version of the story seem extremely reasonable.
Fortune: The 50 smartest people in tech
World’s First Flying Four Star Hotel, "The Hotelicopter"
It is in the best interests of the immigrants to at least approach some form of legitimacy, and regular employment can help that. It is doubtful mass deportation would happen. Also, do those folks on street corners ever get busted? If not, would a center for them get busted?