skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thanks for the mention.

At one point, we did have the sign up form available as the very next thing people saw when they clicked the Pricing/Free Price Quote but it didn't convert well. When I replaced it with a Request Free Consultation form, sales went up.

The current flow (which gets people to see pricing info before being asked to fill out the form) is a bit of an experiment. I've got early indications but it's too soon to say it works better or worse.

My theory on why asking for sale early works well for you but didn't for us is that your offering is much more productized & clearly defined so it's easier to understand. For what we offer, it's much more of a service that's pretty loosely defined.

We're evolving to be a lot more productized and more clearly defining what we offer but it's a delicate balancing act between improving our overall business model and risking cashflow.

The next phase in our evolution will be coming in about a month so tuned :D
Bonuses for an ME employee have run about 15-20% in the last two years. Stock refreshes are negligible, as the initial stock grant is the primary source of such an amount.

T4 average 100k. Senior average 125k, but have a much higher initial stock grant and a slightly higher bonus level.
They've had a few articles on TechCrunch.

http://techcrunch.com/2008/11/04/teen-bloggerpreneur-jessica...

http://techcrunch.com/2010/09/01/jessica-mahindinero/

http://techcrunch.com/2010/07/02/indinero-launches-as-the-mi...
Ask HN: Where to learn about real-time collaborative systems
I am interested in learning about real-time collaborative web applications: how they are designed, what problems need to be addressed, etc. I have tried looking around but find it hard to get the information I am looking for.

Can someone point me to some resources that I could read further?
(un?)Suprisingly, his four rules of the 'sick system' lay out a pretty good groundwork for social games and MMORPGs.
The 'best' page is really useful sometimes, I completely missed this one. What a gem!
One thing: I would consider Mercurial first, Git second. Python has a very close relationship with Mercurial already (obviously) and I find that Bitbucket is as good as or better than Github in the most important ways.
Graduate Tax in the UK
That's how all governments work. Keep your citizens as disheveled as possible and they won't know what hit them during election time.
Yeah... I don't know a single small business (not software startup) owner who reads TechCrunch...but maybe some do.
I think the number of rules reflects the ultimate simplicity of it. Rather than referencing 9 things to see if it's legal, simply go down it as you would a checklist.
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What are you looking for in an entry level programmer or intern?
Inspired by this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1677218 - "Creating an internship program", I thought I'd ask for your advice on how to prepare for an internship or entry-level position for the types of companies represented here on HN. In my specific case:

I've been a computer enthusiast since 1987; on the internet since 1994; creating and hosting websites since 1997; with my own dedicated servers since 2004. I've been programming in PHP since 2004 (not full-time) and Python since spring 2009. I'm about to man up and learn Javascript after putting it off too long. I'm competent in HTML and CSS; I do alright in Photoshop.

I interned last year with the US Forest Service, writing a Python front end to a framework also written in Python; and worked on a couple of web applets in PHP (with JS that I did modify a little) that displayed smoke and weather data.

I'm working towards getting my Bachelor's in Computer Science, but it's slow going.

If you were looking for entry level or interns, what would you want to see from me? What skills are you looking for? What kind of project might I show you that would get me in the door so I could contribute (i.e. make myself useful) and learn (i.e. make myself more useful)?

While I'm here, I might as well add: For the record, I am looking for an entry level position or internship. Seattle would be a plus if there's a chance for a permanent position, but I'd move anywhere for the right job. Certainly anywhere for a good internship.

Thank you for your time and consideration.
That's what I was thinking.

It sounds much more like startups to me than cubes. The emotional attachment, the promotion of the lack of work/life boundaries, the deadlines or the company dies and the world implodes, all features of startups, not really cubes.

(They have their own massive set of dysfunctional features.)
Yeah, having Australian YC founders is awesome for championing our local startup communities too. There was a decent turnout at the the YC Melbourne meetup in February.
For a high school summer job, I used to work at the facilities which test the emissions on cars as per washington state law. I got to see a wide variety of vehicles this way. In particular, when I worked at some of the places in north seattle, a surprising amount of yuppies would come through in very old hondas with 3 cylinder engines. They were getting 50mpg regularly in city driving. It was surprising to me at that age to see how long we've been able to get cars with such good gas mileage, it didnt make sense to me why more city dwellers weren't driving these small cars, especially since so many people were spending so much money on newer expensive prius's...
I don't know if I am a geek exactly, but by experience I can vouch for it and the reason is exactly that I will tell only time to make the feature work, without estimating for the polishing and testing.
This is the most useful comment of all, because it summarizes the software in eleven words (although it left out "for Ruby".)
I have my first@last.com just forward to my gmail address and hen set up gmail to send as the other account. That way, I keep my vanity and my sanity.
Career services are architected for the IBMs, Mckinseys and Goldmans of the world who have teams of HR people to handle the minutia.
"When Apple's iPhone4 was nearing production, Foxconn and Apple discovered that the metal frame was so specialized that it could be made only by an expensive, low-volume machine usually reserved for prototypes. Apple's designers wouldn't budge on their specs, so Gou ordered more than 1,000 of the $20,000 machines from Tokyo-based Fanuc. Most companies have just one."
What if you don't think in words? What if your natural mode of thinking is in terms of fuzzy images and funky metaphors? Looks like I'll have lots of gainful employment in the new dystopian future.
Properly written semantic HTML5 is a progressive enhancement from HTML4. With Silverlight (or Flash) the documents would just about have to be implemented twice, and few authors have the diligence to actually do that.
We have found that the signal:noise ratio via Craigslist is miserable. If you solved this, any tips? Or are you wading through lots of cr^ppy resumes?
American football is as violent as it is because of the pads. When you can throw yourself at a guy and not get badly injured yourself, that'll start happening. It doesn't happen in rugby -- there, you tackle to bring the guy down, not to knock him senseless. Forward passes encourage that kind of tackling as well.
What's the appropriate number of buckets, taking into account everywhere it's used?
My rule of thumb is:

((Time Estimated as worst case * 2) * 130%) = close to true most times. I would say it's a normal distribution with a smallish variance.

worst case I can do that in a week ==> (1 Week * 2)*130% = 14days + 4.2days = 18.2 days give or take. Usually pretty accurate.
(rips up plans for echolocation-based social gaming startup)
What is the argument against putting it into debian? I am not familiar with RC.
Like other posters said, it's a generally difficult problem.

I would break the problem down into subsections and estimate each, depending on my experience.

e.g. database setup and connectivity - one day +/- one day, I do that all the time.
graphic design of final site... 4 weeks +/- 4 weeks.
Why don't you call the courses what they really should be called: Conning 101, 203, 301, etc.
I use a simple formula for pricing - what I make times four:

- 1/4 what I make

- 1/4 equipment and software cost and amortization

- 1/4 corporate profit (I have a company setup)

- 1/4 corporate cost overhead + corporate tax

so if I make $100 per hour - total cost is $400 + VAT per hour. Cost per my hour is the variable here - because some things are more expensive than others. 3D VFX costs up to $400 per hour, while a simple coding session or a gfx session might be $50. Thus it can vary from $200 to $1600 per actual working hour. It depends on the complexity of the task. Also, after a certain threshold of needed working hours I tend to switch to a billable day unit vs hours. Other things like if I need to go on location/set etc. play an additional role.

same goes for time needed, but in more loose terms: Whatever I think it will take times four - and most of the time that estimate turns out to be right (sometimes due to me, sometimes due to client).

But that is just me, over the years I found out that this metrics works best for me.
Happiness: Mind over matter over mind ad infinitum
It's really disappointing to see even engadget disparaging HDR because they think it's the same thing as tone-mapping, and because they think tone-mapping always produces freaky results. All HDR really is is a technique for gathering more information that can be post-processed.

And, from what little we've seen of HDR+auto tone-mapping on the iPhone, it could be the harbinger not of rampant pyschedelic tone-mapping, but of more reserved and tasteful tone-mapping.

One thing I'm willing to bet on, though, is that this will elicit a lot of criticism from the people who've fallen in love with the limitations of current cinematographic techniques. They'll complain about how you can actually see stuff in shadows, and that the lens flare doesn't do enough to obscure the subject, all without realizing that this advance merely makes those things optional.
One interesting study about this area, done by the JASON group for the DoD, is "Reducing DoD Fossil-Fuel Dependence, JSR-06-135":

http://www.fas.org/irp/agency/dod/jason/fossil.pdf
Right. Recursion has a problem with stack overflows, but that can sometimes be automatically fixed by turning it into iteration and throwing out the superfluous frames. Which one is the special case now?
Adobe To Resume “Dev Work” On Flash-to-iPhone Tool
Andy Glover podcast with Alex Miller on concurrency
Apple’s iOS Devices Call Back To The Mothership
Boingo caches the user agent of the first HTTP request made via each MAC address and uses that to determine what type of device it is. They also offer (or perhaps offered, I haven't been to an airport in awhile) 1 free hour per iPhone MAC address ;)
You might want to read the article before commenting next time :)
While praying together might be legitimate advice (for couples who share the same spirituality) - it has no relevance to the article in question (Which is about how to manipulate others - making them dependent on you)
Thanks for the ideas, Rkalla.

I'm curious about general trends with tech entrepreneurship among recent college grads and how it compares to the late '90s boom era. I wonder if we were looking for a co-founder back in '98 with roughly the same requirements, would it be easier or harder? The boom back then meant lots of folks were getting into compsci/hacking but the bust now means there's potentially a larger jobless talent pool.
Love your commentary.well done
This isn't exactly true. You can force it to bypass the spam filter by adding a few whitelist IPs in cpanel.

<-- Administers a ~19k user domain and had all kinds of problems with this.
We're not looking, and we're in Australia :P

However, in my previous role we hired a lot of grads and entry level developers. I was, in part, responsible for interviewing and hiring these grads.

When you ask a grad to rate their skills out of 10, they almost always have unrealistic impressions of their skills. Just about every kid whose done a year of C call themselves "expert" or rates themselves 9/10 for skill. I want to laugh at them. Nothing wrong with enthusiasm, but if you claim you are an expert, I need more than your self-appraisal. Show me project you worked on, show me a product that you contributed to, show me somewhere you volunteered "just to get some experience".

For the most part"skills" are redundant in an entry level/grad position. Enthusiasm, a history of "having a go" and an ability to learn are the most important traits to me. The reality is that you learn most of what you need to know whilst on the job, so the ability to learn is critical. If you've learned half a dozen languages, there's a pretty good chance you'll learn more even if you don't know them now.

In short, nobody expects a grad to be expert, the worst thing you can do is pretend to be one! :)
I'm not an absolute authority on this, but Debian is very conservative with packages, especially on non-testing releases. I believe the problem in this instance was that the bug, while serious, wasn't fixed until the next major version of gnumed, and so they generally wouldn't update the package. Due to the severity, this is a plea for an exception.

That's my rough understanding.
No. I couldn't be happier. I have my gmail account setup to pull all of my email out of my other accounts (school and first@last) automatically. (They all get marked as unread since its POP, but that's okay; it's better than manually forwarding all the mail since I want to keep the old stuff. Not even sure if that's possible). So all my mail got migrated and is continually migrated so the other accounts stay empty.

The labeling feature, instantaneous syncing to my phone, search, etc... all the reasons gmail rocks, but now for all of my email. My mail is auto labeled when it is pulled through POP so I still know what account it was sent to, plus I'm already feeling way more on top of my inbox because I keep my email color labeled by project, etc. Sooooo nice.

The Android Gmail app sync is so fast that it gets to my phone before the browser extension tells me I have mail.
Yes. You may need to use this URL: http://www.google.com/ig
I make Flash games, about 5 months ago I asked http://www.oneappatatime.com/ to port one of my games, just before the shit hit the fan.

It actually got approved today too!

http://itunes.apple.com/au/app/square-there/id367085960?mt=8
Insurance was insulated from the global meltdown? I thought AIG was ground zero. Were they just one big outlier?
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I'm fairly certain you've read this with the incorrect tone.

While it is written as a how-to-abuse type guide, the tone clearly shows it to be a how-to-avoid-abuse-and-recognize-it guide.
Your chat-for-an-hour offer made me think of Hacker Roulette. Participating HN members with info to share or a project to discuss would sign up and then be paired off to meet up (if near each other) or talk (Skype, IM, email) about what each was up to, bounce off ideas, brainstorm, whatever. Could be interesting.
"I think this is highly improbable"

I apologize - I should have either not included the parenthesis comment or explained it further. So to explain it a little further, I don't think we give our forefathers enough credit when they devised the school system that they did post-civil war. I agree this thought is a bit conspiratorial at nature, however it does say something when our system is obviously missing certain basic subjects to assist in critical thought, especially with the knowledge that the most intelligent and successful minds created it. I'm still forming an opinion here, but I do find it suspicious.

"the world is not particularly interested in being awoken, never has been, and probably will never will be."

This may be true, however it is in everyone's best interest that they are 'awoken' to the best of their abilities. Also, with the semi-recent discovery/invention of frighteningly-effective persuasion techniques, I believe this is more important than ever.
Doesn’t that matrix get big fairly quickly? Are there any tricks to keep it as small as possible?
The list is what is currently completed. They are aiming for 100%.
"it's all located in the APP_ROOT/date/scripts directory"

Is that a typo?
How long as this been your rule? Do you not find that you unconsciously improve your worst case estimates and your buffer for unknowns becomes excessive?
Apple. LOL
I find my Chinese government is doing exactly what the article says. Especially on Rule #1 and #2. Most of the Chinese people have to work hard for 20-30 years to pay the house debt. Chinese economic has grown at the speed of 10% for many years from the government report. It has to grow like this at least another ten years. Or there will be a disaster. Workers will lose their jobs. The bank will take back the houses. Then most of them will feel like they get nothing in all their lives.
AwesomenessReminders now has 750 paying subscribers
Yes, there are many investors other than PG that read (and contribute to) HN.
Try this - http://blog.kissmetrics.com/seo-guide/
guess it all lies in the interpretation and in the intentions of the early compilers / facilitators of such books and men in position of power ...

Correct me if I'm wrong but Christianity, Islam and even Buddhism rapidly propagated in early ages through conversions and there was a conscious effort for the same in terms of the growth of religion. Maybe such text was merely an aid in helping with the growth of religion in order to establish a certain superiority for followers of one religion over another.
Call me jaded but lately I've learned that most of the wealth on the internet is generated out of "Just copy what they do and do it until you get their numbers."

I keep encountering folks with this attitude, and sadly it seems to be working for them, very very well. No surprises that this is deliberately disseminated at Zynga
well, in that case, they wouldn't have sold the extra copies, gotten extra coverage and extra revenue in ads and so on .. media is hardly idealistic these days .. it's all about who breaks the story first and who uses it to increase their visiblity + popularity + revenue
19.2 Apps may contain or quote religious text provided the quotes or translations are accurate and not misleading.

Deciding what religious texts are accurately translated sounds like a very thorny problem. Is the KJV accurate? The Conservative Bible Project?
It's been a while. no I find that as a programmer we tend to be overly optimistic on things and do not take into consideration the other things that need to be done. For example, the cost of meetings, underestimating the scope of the problem, and the little snags that eat up time. An example of a little snag is trying to get some library or program that you need to continue installed and configured correctly. This takes more time that you expect it to.
Deep dive into assembly code from Java
To be a core-contributor to both rails and jquery seems very impressive -- switching between the two projects must be difficult?
Exactly. Its all about continually refining user conversion, engagement, and retention based on every possible usage metric
It takes 3 months.
Passion! Willing to learn!

You already have plenty of skills if you've been doing this since 1987 you shouldn't have any problem whatsoever to find your internship. If you're in or near Seattle how about Microsoft? I can see they're not exactly overrepresented in your skills at the moment but it wouldn't be too hard for you to pick that up given what you already know.

Also, If you're looking for an internship it would help if you flesh out your profile to the point where someone would be able to contact you ;)
there are even more on Quora
Actually, when you're anonymous, you're free to be a hypocrite without being caught...
There's a distinct difference between saying that you know someone is incompetent, and saying that you don't know that someone is competent. It's the same as the difference between agnosticism and atheism.

Understood, but it's still weaselly because you're offhandedly casting aspersions on a group of people's ability ("I have no reason to believe those people are competent") and then pretending like it doesn't hurt their reputation because of the exact words you spoke ("I never said they were incompetent, just that I have no reason to believe they are competent").

Agnosticism vs atheism, while logically the same distinction does not have this libelous aspect to it.
I find a great sampling of many essayists is the Edge Foundation's yearly "world question".

Not only do you get a great set of short essays, but also some insight into many great minds on loosely the same question.

http://www.edge.org/questioncenter.html
I almost feel bad for posting this link, but it does provide some evidence that even at Fog Creek - the Holy Grail of great engineering environments - employees become burned out due to the fact that, hey, a lot of software problems need to be solved in a business are just as boring as the ones that the rest of us cube farmers have to solve.

http://hicks-wright.net/blog/career-break/
Ebay Gores Craigslist: Judge rules in favor of Ebay
I generally follow Fred Brook's estimation law: it will take at least 9 times as long as the time needed to hack something together for me to use once.

I forget which chapter of Mythical Man Month that's from and unfortunately don't have access to it right this second to check.
my guess is legal liability.
Developers are forced to the Apple's Push Network? Huh.
Ha, same here buddy. What department were you in?
I know of at least one - my dad.
This touches on a question I have been chewing on. I've recently started doing contract work. I'm not doing code-monkey contracting; my projects have all required some requirements analysis and design outlines before a reasonable estimate is even possible. Do you normally bill for that kind of work? On the one had it feels wrong to have a client ask for an estimate and then bill him for 10-20 hours of work, on the other hand that's 10-20 hours I could have been billing another job (in theory, anyway).
I tried it for a few minutes and I love it. The oh-so-refreshing interface makes it such a joy to use.

One thing: I was confused as to whether or not my searches were round trip or not. I finally realized that they were not based on (1) the low prices returned and (2) the FAQ. But I guess I should have known by the "Once you've selected one you'll be able to find a return trip..." text.
The Difference You Can Make
I'm not sure historical context helps you cast those quotes in a "peaceful" light. Islam's early spread essentially was at the edge of a sword and conquest.

I'm sincerely interested to hear the context I'm missing.
The Amazon EC2 is sooo slow. I spun up an instance for Amazon and Rackspace both to see how long it would take to render a frame in Blender. It is shocking how slow the difference was. I didn't do an apples-to-apples comparison, but the Rackspace blender 64bit 2.49b rendered in 47 seconds. The Amazon linux blender 2.48 rendered in 17 minutes!

http://www.jasonrowland.com/2010/09/amazon-vs-rackspace-for-...
Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Boots in 8.6 Seconds Flat
Why not a Python interpreter written in Ruby running under Silverlight?
I wonder if Foxconn charged Apple commensurately more.
How Obama's Stimulus is Changing America
I am Indian and grew up in rural india. Have not seen it in 2010 but I still doubt that the people who lack electricity and sanitation are cruising the internets.
It seems like the "like" buttons have been easily hacked -- what could Facebook do to counter these scams (JS, CSS changes)?
Silicon Valley Vs Madison Ave