skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Those stories must have been submitted "a days ago" ooops must be "a day ago" or "one day ago". Yes I need to remove the focus on the comment button when the page loads - that makes you browse upward to read the story. Thanks for your time.
This is basically the fundamental difference between the screens.
$75/hr rebilled at $100/hr doesn't really make sense for the prime contractor. That's valuing the sales effort, client relationship, billing risk, etc., etc., at $25.

Having been a prime contractor who hired subs for overflow work, we'd generally never go above 2/3 of the prime rate.

If you want to make $100/hr, you generally have to go sell yourself to a customer, not act as a subcontractor.
They are saying that because if they can prove willful infringement then they get increased damages. However it is unclear at this point that said Java programmers were the ones to implement this. And some may not have been aware of the patents in question.
I have it set as "BandwidthRate 1MB, BandwidthBurst 2MB" for now, though I'm going to monitor it and see what happens. Unfortunately, you can't prioritize exit enclave traffic atm.
Conway's Game Of Life in APL
Purely based on your own cost structure, in an apples-apples comparison to the FT job you had before, anything less than $50/hr is a giveaway.

As a subcontractor for a $100/hr project, you have wiggle room between $50-$75/hr. It's probably not a huge amount of wiggle room, because as someone making $46,000/yr FT, you're not doing anything super hard to replace.

You are a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.

(a) You need more contracts, because your current BATNA ($45/hr via contract quite possibly being worth less than $23/hr FT) sucks.

(b) You need to eat, and so you may need to take an unnecessarily low rate from your original employer. If I was them, and I was all business, I'd refuse anything more than $36/hr. In this economy, procurements not letting us raise any rates, have to be equitable to other workers, yadda yadda.
Not necessarily. Imagine that you get a performance bonus based on how quickly you finish a task, and you're waiting on someone else for something. You don't have a specific deadline, but the sooner you get what you need, the better.

You COULD make an artificial deadline and say "I need this today." But that means "drop everything for me." Maybe you're emailing your boss and don't have the clout to demand that, or maybe you want to save that demand for when you REALLY need it today.

So ASAP would be my way of saying "it's important, but I recognize that something else on your list might be even more important." The "P" gives the receiver some wiggle room. In that way, I think it's more polite than "today," while still more urgent than "sometime this week."
Fair pay for developers? Quit your whining.
The thing is, stratification into entry and premium services already exists. you can get basic cable or ADSL, pay more for a T1, and so on (I'm not going to list all the various service offerings, but there are plenty). But we've still got local monopolies, pricing has not come down all that much, and speeds and service availability have not improved all that much either over the last few years.

I'm very skeptical that auctioning routing priority at the packet level is going to lead to any great improvement. More likely the marginal increase in delivery speed of a few premium services will be cited as the justification for throttling a bunch of others to the point where people are prepared to cough up some more for the service, or customers will just get nickel-and-dimed with a bunch of vaguely specified 'routing fees'.
Amazing, Oracle's strategy seems to be to purchase good technology (MySQL, JAVA,...) and then strangle off and alienate users of that entire business line by being douches.

There must be some kind of business school thing I'm missing here.
Except that you can't really. At least for Clojure, last time I looked it was really slow. Most dynamic languages probably make heavy use of Java reflection, which seems to be rather slow on Dalvik.
Ask HN: Pagerank estimators are broken.  Anyone have an answer?
I just tried checking the pagerank of several sites using the tools that come up when searching for "pagerank".

It seems as though every single checker has lost the ability to find out the page rank of a site. Anyone have an explanation?
CAPTCHA Economics [pdf]
I think it's creepy that lots of random people can see what you're doing on the Internet, nefarious stuff or not. So I see enabling privacy wherever possible as a step in the right direction, regardless if it attracts users or not. In this case, I didn't think too hard about it. James proposed the idea a few days ago. I looked into it and set it up yesterday, and announced this morning.

As for the service being used exclusively by law breakers, I think that hypothetical is far-fetched. DDG has plenty of users now that don't care much about privacy, and I don't think most Tor users are law breakers. So I see this whole line of reasoning as a non-issue.
Nothing's "for good" until you're dead.
That reminds me of Pixel Qi, a display that's a mixture a normal LCD and E-Ink: http://www.pixelqi.com/home
Sure, I see them trying in the future (and maybe failing at that point).
Why would this surprise anyone? The "tea-party" people are independent-minded socially and economically conservative Gingrich-style limited-government Republicans. (I'm not one of those, but those aren't epithets; those words describe many of my friends).

People who fall into that region of the Nolan Chart tend towards the conviction that the markets are private concerns, and that regulation is a cure worse than any conceivable disease.

I should add that while I'm a "big government leftist" on those charts, even I have reservations about net neutrality as a government policy issue. It looks like a slippery slope to me.
The Lord Of The Rings: War In The North Travels To Germany
How Mobile Phones Are Transforming Indian Agriculture
Mirasol, a color screen that has the battery life of E-Ink and can play video
Building muscle doesn't require lifting heavy weights
Well, there's also the issue that the economy refuses to provide honest reliable jobs for honest reliable people...

If your dad or mom is a professor, maybe you can get a tenure track job, but if you're anybody else you've got take what's in the marketplace... And "playing it safe" means the odds are 100% that you'll get screwed...

The only career path that seems possible of providing any security of all is an "all in" bet on something that might make it big.
Branchr, founded by a 16yr old, surpasses $1 million in revenue
Only DDG traffic exits from the node. The rest is just encrypted traffic relaying.
The Github founders were working on something like this (famspam) before they founded github.
There are plenty of good people out there who need anonymity. People whos lives depend on it. Just because you don't need anonymity doesn't mean you should deprive everyone else of it.
Well, good luck as always... Just remember what happened to Reddit.
The users probably include democracy activists struggling against dictatorships. You know, people of higher moral caliber than your average child molester.
No, they definitely leave out the chicken part.
I can't say I'm surprised that three of the top 5 features on the post are Javascript :|
I would say that depends entirely on the subcontractor and your relationship with him/her. Someone you're bringing on just to meet availability demands, maybe.

Someone who is already well known and respected for what they do, you should be prepared to offer a better deal for. In fact, you may end up being able to raise your own outgoing rate if you find folks willing to work for you who are really great.

But of course, the risk does end up in the hands of who owns the contract. And if there isn't sufficient trust with between you and your subs, a premium helps protect you from that.

But this practice may be keeping you locked into a cycle of only getting help from low to mid skill level developers, who end up going elsewhere once they've grown a bit more.
While seemingly similar that would be an entirely different concept. What flattr does is enabling small donations for things you already like. One of the nice things with flattr is that the users are already "sold" and have already payed the "fee". If they like what you've done they are going to flattr you, not thinking "is this really worth x". There are a lot of potentially nice things that differs from other revenue models, like making it harder for "link-bait".

I can't really explain entire concept (as I see it) in a good way, you'll have to "get into it" yourself. You also have to keep in mind what the founders are coming from. I don't think it would be a very good fit for Peter Sunde to push for "paywalling" of the Internet with a subscription network.

Finally, the monthly minimum amount is currently 2€.
Looks neat, but I probably won't add it until there's a Geocitizer ( http://wonder-tonic.com/geocitiesizer/index.php ) or Cornify ( http://www.cornify.com/ ) mode
Ask HN: Entepreneurs, what're your favorite motivational songs? 
Songs to get you fired up, that will get you back up after you fell, make you mappy, etc.

Thanx
> What about MobileMe?

Doing something with iDisk/me.com.

> I'd say they've tried

I don't.
Why did this get downvoted twice? It's completely reasonable, and I happen to agree that it would be useful (and not just for 'hypersocial crm')
Here's a ruby script that checks PR from the command line. It's working - I just tried it.

http://snippets.dzone.com/posts/show/3284
Here's another article I found DDG-ing "mirasol qi" which lists 4 new competing new color display technologies.

http://besttabletreview.com/a-comparison-of-second-generatio...
Relays (no-exit) are published and stupid ip blocklist admins happily add them to their "service".
What if there is some kind of solar event that renders the population unable to generate electricity. Does this leave paper/microfiche/stone as the only options? Surely this kind of possibility must be accounted for when determining the viability of digital options.
Ask HN: How do you (would you) assess an ecommerce application?
I'm the lowly developer on an ecommerce selection team with a large group of business people who are focused on the eye candy and features. I'm trying to explain that the features and presentation, while important, is paint on the house compared to the overall architecture of the application/solution. There are a lot of important aspects to consider (Security, extensibility, performance...) How would you come up with a definitive list that would define 'What defines a good ecommerce application?'
The problem that privacy is not a standard online.
> eLisp is the only widely used variant with it

I think you mean it's the only widely used variant where it's the default. It's available in CL and Clojure when you want (need?) it.
So I should take away from this post that Oracle has given you more than Google did?

Because that's what it sounds like to me. Personally I admire companies that are giving me value.

> yet they back off that principle when it's inconvenient

Regarding both net neutrality and Chinese censorship, Google did what nobody else did.

So I really don't get this line of reasoning.

Personally I take away from this that my company shouldn't give a crap about anything other than money, because all you're achievements don't mean squat in the end apparently.
Society places pressures on every one, male or female. It has been great for feminist movement to try to identify counter some of the pressure that has made women miserable, but there isn't really an outlet for men.

In fact, I think pressure on men are growing. Being smart, funny, successful and as good looking as Brad Pitt. Men are doing more cosmetics surgery and getting eating disorders now too.
So you think that karma has no benefit to the quality of the community? I'd love to see more high quality comments on HN, and an optimal karma system can help.
I think what you're saying is "Google, Just Cut The BS And Give the Gordon Gekko Speech Already":

http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/13/google-net-neutrality/

I am not exactly a starry-eyed admirer of the Gordon Gekkos of the world, but I tend to agree. It would be refreshing if people stopped pretending that these inter-corporate battles had anything to do with either morality or the public good.
API Anti-Patterns: How to Avoid Common REST Mistakes
Chatting in a web browser is an abomination of an idea, and only serves to illustrate the limitations and inanity of the "web" as some kind of universal platform.

If this is ever to occur, then at the very least the browser as an application must disappear, leaving "web applications" as first-class citizens.

Of course this is impossible when "web developers" target the browser as if it were an unchallengeable precondition rather than thinking about how people are actually using their computers. As long as JavaScript interpreted/JIT'd by a web browser is the language de jure, you will forever be second-class citizens.
I'll quantify it for you. It takes me more clicks and presses to do the same things on android vs iphone.
Talk about niche markets...
I use it for my "distractive" browsing. I access reddit/slashdot and other alike sites only through it. On the one hand it slows down, making me more selective and aware of what I do (ie I do not "wake up" 10 wikipedia links later) and on the other I have total privacy.
Support the Eyewriter Project
This is a terribly-formatted, poorly-worded article.

Maybe he should have gotten a VA to clean it up some before it was posted?
I can surf the web for hours on end, but when I try to read dense text I find my eyes rebel.
I had forgotten they also owned BerkeleyDB (obviously I know that Oracle own Sun, is that why I'm getting downmodded?).

But my point still stands: makers of replacement engines for MySQL could be in violation of MySQL-related patents, which Oracle could then sue over.
Browsing upward is now fixed.
I've never used a VA, but from what I've read, it seems that they can do your menial tasks for you really well (spreadsheets, basic research, etc). In other words, they offload a lot of of the stuff you have to do and let you focus on real work.

But expecting them to be good at “creative image selection” and “positioning of text for posters for better readability” is silly. That's important user-facing stuff. Check their work before printing or get an expert.
I don't know how much it matters what the screen looks like under magnification.

I think it's a matter of preference and which best suits your lifestyle; there are pros and cons of both.
This is bit of a deviation, but I am reminded of how my super Nintendo system has turned colors in part because of UV light.

I am curious if the kindle, in your use case, will- at the end of it's life- have distinct hand-prints where the original color is intact (if not physically smoother).
Metaweb joins Google
Can we stop with the Ninja and Rockstar hype already?
whoa, +1 uptown. i'm sort of bummed that I didn't know about that before. Seems like I should have found that.

1. Have you used this (and did it work)? I just tried registering an alert and I never got the notification from yahoo, despite the fact that the alert condition was met. I was also able to set an alert to get notified when SPY fell to $500 (currently trading 108.70). I also got a 404 in the 3rd step of the phone registration process, but it somehow saved the number anyways.

2. I got a 404 in step 3 when i registered my cell phone to receive alerts.

I guess I'm trying to figure out if this service is still operated at all by yahoo. Of course, it could be equally damning if yahoo decided that its not worth supporting and just nexted the product.

Regarding brokerages offering alert capabilities: I'd be interested in finding out more. I use Interactive Brokers personally and Quote Sentinel was originally actually a python script hooked up to the IB api.

Obviously trying to monetize a service that is being offered for free by many more established parties isn't the smartest idea... Can't really make excuses for why I didn't find that earlier though (functional or not).
Inactive windows shouldn't have 'close' buttons.
When I have multiple application windows open on my desktop, tiled one over another, more often I happen to close the wrong application by accident. Does this happen with you as well? Regardless, please vote http://poll.fm/25gyx
Exactly. See https://www.torproject.org/torusers.html.en for a list of the type of people who use Tor:
Another perspective on Yahoo
Twitter spam test: we caught some spammers
As someone who's interviewed dozens of yahoo's fleeing the big purple Y over the past two or three years and I have seen no evidence what so ever that yahoo has a hacker culture.

I've primarily been interviewing people from search and ads, so perhaps my view is skewed.
Of course it's not ok. At some level getting rich is a life-or-death issue. How do I get enough money to retire? How can I possibly afford health-care? What if I or my lovely wife get cancer?

The reality is, the later years of your life are going to be significantly more secure and happier if you make a lot of money.
Lost interest in programming
I currently have a job with a big company with a decent income. I do my job pretty well, but it is clear that I lack initiative and could be more proactive. I can implement and build things fast, solve complex bugs and problems, but all I want is to get it done - I don't do anything extra to make it better, or find out if what I am asked to do makes any real difference, or find new things I could work on to make an impact.

Over the years I have sort of lost interest in technology. I know enough to do my job well, read hn and news and stuff, but that's about it. I don't try out new things. I have an attitude that it is mostly just the same 1s and 0s that I can figure out if I really want to.

I am actually going to join a startup for a lot less pay soon, but I am just joining for the experience, hoping a change of environment might help with my general apathy. I am not sure though.

Anyone else has this feeling, and how did you resolve it?
0. Write the data on an hard disk (named 0) and calculate multiple hashes for the various fragments of data.
The hard disk must contain also a minimal os which is only able to dd partitions and must be connected to a computer

1. Create some type of mechanical which is able to periodically do these tasks:

- create an hard disk (named n)

- plug it to the computer above

- transfer the data from hard disk n-1 to hard disk n

- check the hashes

- unplug hard disk n-1

- reboot the system using the new hard disk

To minimize the failure rate of this environment you should create more computer which check if something is not working
Berp: Python3 - Haskell compiler; Produces self contained binaries
There is no moral difference between the mugger's threat to shoot you for not forking over and the government's threat to take your property or throw you in jail for not forking over.

I usually don't bother responding to this sort of tripe, but it's so easy to prove you wrong that I couldn't resist.

The difference is that, if you really feel that taxes are such an injustice, you are free to leave. Voila, end of problem. Would that I had had that option when I was robbed at gunpoint at couple years ago.

Seriously, put your money where your mouth is and light out for that splendid anarchic paradise you and your ilk dream of so fervently. No one is stopping you and you wouldn't be missed.

What's that? There's no WalMart or fire department in Mogadishu? Bummer...
Is Google Naive, Crafty or Stupid?
So I should take away from this post that Oracle has given you more than Google did?

Neither has given me anything that I didn't pay for, either directly or indirectly.

Regarding both net neutrality and Chinese censorship, Google did what nobody else did.

Which is what, exactly?

When push came to shove, they acted no differently than any other large corporation.

Personally I take away from this that my company shouldn't give a crap about anything other than money, because all you're [sic] achievements don't mean squat in the end apparently.

I don't understand your emotional attachment to Google.

mechanical_fish said it better than I could, so I'll just quote part of his reply here:

It would be refreshing if people stopped pretending that these inter-corporate battles had anything to do with either morality or the public good.
For fuck's sake.
Of course that means that you have to write the shell script, and then you have to maintain the box that runs that shell script, and then you have to fix that shell script when it stops working, then, inevitably, you end up rewriting that shell script because it sucks, then you have to move that shell script to a new box, assuming that you didn't forget about it, ad infinitum... I'm guilty of all of these. =)

Shell scripts aren't pixie dust, they're just more code that you have to maintain.
Seth Godin said it best: "Ironically, playing it safe is the most unsafe thing that you can do." His point is that you have to put yourself out there and take risks to be successful. Sitting back and being "safe" is akin to waiting for problems to occur. People just don't realize it... because they feel safe.
Wait, E-Ink is literally a magnadoodle?!

I must bring a magnet to barnes&noble...
Great article and really hits home. One thing that's overlooked, however, is the reasoning behind the need to earn money.

For some people, money doesn't matter. Yet they still have a burning need to get rich. This is because they have something to prove. And money is their scorecard.
It depends on the software development project. I've worked with web devs who didn't know what a finite state machine was and did fine. Right now I work at a research institution crunching genomes. Not knowing the basics that a CS degree can give you will not work in this environment.

That's not to say that you can't get these skills outside of school but I think you get a better rounding of skills in school than out in the field. I've met more devs who didn't go to school that can't work on really difficult problems than the ones who did.

Of course, selection bias and all that.
I disagree. There are discussions of Ubuntu 11.04 on mailing lists, but absolutely nothing has been produced yet.

Are you suggesting that Ubuntu 11.04 is vaporware until development starts? WTF?

Edit: Vaporware is a product that we were told was going to come out, but didn't. Vaporware isn't used to describe products that aren't even supposed to be released yet!
Makes sense, but I'd still rather lift something heavy 10 times than something light 30 times.
Id Tech 5 Rage Engine No Longer Up For External Licensing
Google isn't always non-evil, but they're consistently less evil than all of the other large companies in technology.

Also, Oracle has never created anything really significant (in my opinion) other than their overpriced "enterprise" databases. Now it seems that they're hell bent on taking everything good that came out of Sun and destroying it.
The code using LibType is code you don't control; you can't change it to use MyType instead. Indeed, you don't even have the source code to it. That's also why the extensibility happens at runtime.
If you ever tried implementing a language, you'll see that dynamic scope is actually much easier. So it's not that language x doesn't implement dynamic scope. It's that language x doesn't actually implement lexical scope so it's left with dynamic scope :)
Yes, Indeed. You could be charged with a criminal offence for that kind of activity.
I don't see how you can draw this conclusion. He basically says there's nothing Government can do no matter who you elect. That makes him an alarmist (and maybe a little crazy) but not overtly political.
Don't worry! Planned War World III by the elites, who by the way were beneficiaries of this retirement scam, will solve all problems. Now when peasants are no needed, they will rid off most of them. The Iran war drums are beating.