skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There are two reasons:

1) It drives your customers to your competitors

If you had a choice between a shop that detained you in an "interview room", and checked your bags, pockets and body cavities against the receipt, every single time you went there, and one that just had a few CCTV cameras, which would you choose?

2) It makes people think "If I'm going to be punished anyway, I might as well commit the crime"

In some countries (IIRC, both Finland & Netherlands do this), purchasers of recordable media are "treated as criminals" and pre-emptively fined for copying music (specifically music, not software). If I were subject to that kind of treatment, you bet I'd copy as much music as I could lay my hands on.
The most important thing you need, besides your skill-set, is an existing market you can tap into. And by that, I mean lots of people you personally know at lots of firms who need the kind of work done that you can provide. Starting out "cold", with no leads, will be tough.

Ideally, your customer set will be behind your move into self-employment. Even more ideally, you'll have a job or two lined up when you quit your day job.

Edit: of course another route to market is via (contract) recruitment agencies. If there is (regular) activity in recruitment channels for your particular specialisation, then obviously that is something you can leverage too.
It is both something I have seen, and is very common.

See http://www.thedailyrecruiter.com/the-daily-recruiter-blog/co... for some sobering statistics.
Ask HN: Would you pay 1 cent/tweet?  How about 1/10th a cent?
Inspired by this tweet (and subsequent ones from @novaspivack):

http://twitter.com/novaspivack/status/24568666973
I'm Ok Mom, I Bought a Porsche
Haystack Plays With Fire, Gets Badly Burned
Well as somebody who buys software for a small company, I do not consider unobtrusive and transparent DRM a minor feature. If your licensing scheme is too much of a hassle, I will look elsewhere.
I've never read a book that made programming as simple as "Absolute Beginner's Guide to C".

Although this may not be down your alley, it's perfect for anyone new to programming in general.
Seven Actions of a True Role Model Entrepreneur
The cash system will be hard to get rid of in the US. Many people want to be able to hold their real money, not just have it on a bank statement. With these same people - for fun - have a few drinks with them and try to explain to them that the dollar bill they are holding is also not 'real' in the sense that it is only a piece of paper and has no intrinsic value of its own.
New York Startup Weekend Pitch - Main Street
Dylan Thomas said it best:

"Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight

Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,

Curse, bless me now with your fierce tears, I pray.

Do not go gentle into that good night.

Rage, rage against the dying of the light."
To reinforce this point, we did not have core competency to build an iPhone app and wanted to keep the project bootstrapped. Given the feedback here it seems an app would in fact make a big difference.
You know, I don't think it would (perhaps, but tough to say). You're right with the "where should I go?" question, which comes down to the "what do I want to eat?" question. Actually, looking at the site again, I can see you're addressing this with suggestions from the local area.
Order a http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/internal_storage/Mercury_Extr... and don't worry about it.
Equal Pay for Equal Work? Not Necessarily
That's really funny. It reminds me of my old Quiz Bowl days, where I would raise my hand while still working out the answer. I trusted my brain would finish the problem before the "well, what's your answer?" pause ran out.

I suspect this individual was extremely bright, and would have succeeded regardless of job specifics.
This is a great idea. The problem with leaderboards and points is a network effect that is not currently there yet. Its a chicken or the egg problem that exists, and we tried to get something out that didn't require mass participation but rather had a strong single player game model. Now that we have some scale (tiny!) this may be a good thing to try
Wow, this looks gorgeous!
Where do you get your 80% non-productive number?

Every job I've had in the last 10 years, I've delivered production code on day one. I expect that anybody good enough to get hired at Google would be capable of the same. I mean sure, we've all hired our share of useless junior devs, but then we've all done that at places that were a notch or two below Google on the minimum-standards front.

For talented developers with experience, I could see losing a few percentage points of your max speed during the first week while you get used to process, but do you really think you can stumble along at 20% of your capability for an entire year and not be noticed? At a top-tier software company???
I've considered this as well for pricing our product. We have users from all over the world, all of which have a drastically different spending ability. Additionally, we have a strong connection with our users, so I think the emotional appeal would be successful.

It's just so hard to bet potentially thousands of dollars on it!
I helped my friends pirate the first 10 audiobooks of a series I love, by handing them a flash drive with the MP3s on it, and the condition that if they liked the series they should buy the new ones as they come out.

Now 6 of my friends (who never would have been hooked on the series otherwise) own legal versions of the two most recent novels starring our favorite wizard-detective.

Those sales would not have been made if they hadn't gotten a taste of the series beforehand. Sure, this situation isn't the rule, and they pirated 5x the books they've purchased... but 2 sales each is better than 0, and with 8-10 more books coming in the series, the author/publisher have come out far ahead.
"Be that as it may, can you see that it's legitimate for a musician to want to make, record, and sell music - not an associated industry of products?"

It's legitimate to want any sort of business model to work. But if it doesn't work, complaining that you wanted it to doesn't help.
The ebook deal of the day offers have a dedicated RSS feed:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/oreilly/ebookdealoftheday

P.S. Sometimes it appears they don't cut off right at midnight. Weekends would be one example of this, but also on weekdays.

I've yet to see one of their "heavy hitter" titles offered, though. But I haven't been following the feed regularly.
Didn't they just fuck him in the ear by publishing the stupid comments?
Cool story, but not practical for me. Not going back to a 386 anytime soon - although maybe replaying some classic Sierra RPG's might do the trick?
I always look for affiliate links when bloggers suddenly start shilling merchandise outside of their competency.

I don't mind when there's an obvious "best prices" DIV at the bottom or wherever, where its purpose and commercial motivation is obvious, but embedded affiliate links just feel....scummy.

It's like getting invited to dinner and the host starts an Amway pitch. It colours the entire presentation.
People also tend to use interviewing to gauge what is current market price for talent they have. Specially when economic conditions start looking to change for better.
I'm someone who used to download music (even for albums I own, it's more convenient than ripping myself). I've now transitioned completely to Spotify. There is an argument to be made about how much money the artists actually get, but as a consumer the benefits over piracy are well worth the price.
For heaven's sake. This is every bad bit of pricing psychology I can think of wrapped into a tiny package of poverty wages for the developer.
Capacity is often a bottleneck in large buildings. The elevator might be full as it passes going the wrong way, so getting in isn't even an option. Also, more people might show up on your floor by the time the elevator passes going the right way, necessitating another stop.
Is it available for linux?
Sony is starting to implement this sort of feature with the PS3. You can download the entire, full version of the game to your console, and then you have 24 hours from the first game start to play the game, including saving your position, as much as you want. Once the 24 hour period is up, you can keep your game saves, and either delete or purchase the game, at which point you can continue from your game saves.

It's just too bad so far that you can only do this with an extremely limited selection of games that have already been on the market long enough that I would have bought them if I was actually interested in them.

But the concept is great.
No, it's not open to government monitoring, unless of course they have the ability to break "unbreakable" encryption. And, if they do manage to magically brute force a single key, they only get a single message decrypted. Each message uses a different key, so compromising a single message doesn't compromise the whole conversation.

For a school project I (sorta) implemented this on Android 1.5 two years ago. I stopped before finishing the key rotation stuff, so ended up with just a encrypted text messaging client. Another company just recently announced an OTR text message program for android, you should look it up! Textsecure by Whisper Systems.

Clickable link: http://www.whispersys.com/
Decent article, but out of date by a few months. None of the drives listed use the newer SandForce controller, which skyrockets sequential writes into the 275 MB/s range, and random writes into 50K IOPS. These drives are where it's at (for home/commodity use, etc).
It is not hidden. They can see that if they pay, they get the extra features. If they don't pay, then play the restricted version without the online stuff.
Ethics of Code | ZDNet
Top 100 list of education advice blogs
Arbitration fight reveals background details on Facebook - ConnectU dispute
Usability Study Shows Kids Don’t Search
That's the only way to actually combat piracy.

No. That's the only way to make money in an economic reality that copying is free. It's redefining what you sell so that it cannot be pirated because it's a different product/service to start with.

You're not combating piracy when you offer a non-copyable service - you're just redefining your terms to work with reality.
Working at big banks and credit card processors I can tell this sort of insider abuse happens everywhere. And firing a bunch of people instantly for breaching policy actually does work as a good dis-incentive. Whether this raises the question due to the amount of data the Google knows about everyone of us could the impact of any potential insider abuse be magnified is a something for debate.
Making all users pay for each tweet might be a bad move, but perhaps something like, pay $X/month if you go over Y tweets would work better. I suspect that many of the heavy users of the service wouldn't object to that, since they already must be getting some sort of value from it to be using it heavily.
Erlang/OTP R14B is now out
How so? He's selling twice as many at full price as the discount price according to his real time stats.

To my mind, that seems like this isn't a failure at all.
Except the "restricted version" is the product that is actually being sold to most users.
What annoys people is that you haven't seen a single episode but you have an opinion. Gather information, then decide. Not the other way around.
Web 3.0: Powering Startups to Become Smartups
According to the linked wikipedia page on the TRIM command, Linux has supported it "since Feb 2010", so I would imagine that anything running the 2.6.32 kernel would correctly utilize that feature if your drive supports it. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
No. It is not even available for Windows XP.
This comment is interesting:

"This model seems to assume that people don't change, or that they perform in an interview and hiring process in the exact same way that they will perform on an actual team with a variety of personalities and any kind of manager."
I spun this our of some work I was doing for an NLP related thesis. Large scale text processing where there's already a shared file system is a perfect fit for mincemeat.py.

I basically wanted something that was much, much easier to develop for, setup, and run than Hadoop. I've heard many academic researchers complain that although they had a algorithm that would fit neatly into MapReduce, they didn't want to bother setting up Hadoop and importing all of their data for a process that would only get run a few times (and that was already coded in Python).
The Fridge (YCS10): Private Mini-Facebooks that Put Social Networking in Context
They also extended Websockets to support binary data. Given the lack of a raw binary type in Javascript, I am really interested in how this was implemented.
Cash is also useful for anonymous transactions. The anonymous cashless protocols are very complicated compared to cash, and I don't even know if anyone implements them at all.
Looks really awesome, congrats. So it scrapes hackernews and then exposes the data as a JSON api?
I thought PG frowned on this kind of stuff?
Belly Armor: tinfoil hats for the expectant mother
I love the privacy policy on DDG - so elegant and clear. If google wants my business, I need to be able to u derstand their privacy policy. I am too suspicious.
Yes, and caches the data for a couple of minutes.
By the way, is there any automation out there for automatically limiting the cost of a given set of aws instances/traffic?

(Slightly OT, sorry, but my AskHN question seems to be sinking without a trace
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1694181)
Announcing Kommons Beta
Yeah, it does matter. The way this was set up, it was impossible to tell whether the admittedly cool premise of pretending it was 30 years ago had any effect at all. That would have been an interesting thesis, and now we still have no idea whether it's true.

I mean, how much of feeling old is just feeling that the world is moving on without you?
I quite like the idea of 1/3/10/30 cent denominations. The even more efficient combinations would be mainly a social experiment: would people adapt with better mental arithmetic, would they revolt or would they rely on automation (cash tills, computers) even more?

The Euro/cent has far too many denominations with 1/2/5 at each power of 10 up to €500 (split between 8 coins and 7 notes). Combining 2s & 5s into 3s would reduce that to 10 denominations total, and I think it would be reasonable to drop single-digit cents from cash transactions entirely. IIRC Finland has "banned" 1 & 2 cent coins already. (they're in circulation obviously, but no prices require anything below the 5 cent coin)
Thank you - very good advice.
While interesting, the article perpetuates the myth that any cool new browser feature is somehow due to HTML5. Pinning apps to the taskbar is nice, but not related to HTML5 in any meaningful way.
Illumos aims to clone dying OpenSolaris
Wait a minute? This looks like the best bits of Master of Orion 2, upgraded to modern graphics standards. I've been waiting for something like this for a long time. Now if only this workday could end so I can run the demo... :-)
Can you link me? If he does, I'll bring it down.
The story (picked up from Daniel Davies at http://d-squareddigest.blogspot.com) goes that the way one argued with Milton Friedman was to listen until he got to the part of his argument where he said "let's assume x" and then say "no, let's not!" That is, the part of the argument doing all the work tended to be hiding in some premise that economists consider innocuous but is in no way representative of the world.

So here, premise (2): "probability of a transaction resulting in value v is uniform." No! Not true! In reality, people price a disproportionate number of transactions to make easy change with the coins we have, be easily divisible, be .01 less than a larger number of dollars, and so on. The discovery that cash transactions had a uniform distribution of change would actually be quite weird.

But worse is the smuggling in of an unconsidered definition of the good in the form of the efficiency metric -- fewest coins per transaction. Even granting the uniform distribution, making change out of your pocket is still solving the subset-sum problem in your head, which is of course NP-complete. The existing setup of coins, including the first three powers of 5, makes this problem very easy while almost all the proposed "better" solutions actually make this aspect of the problem harder rather than easier. Who cares if I have to handle a few extra tenths of a coin per transaction if it means I don't have to spend two minutes puzzling out how to make change?

I suppose the lesson, as usual, is that business logic is lived experience, not theory.
I rather suspect that if we consider "the ability for most of the population to correctly and reliably perform mental math using the tokens provided" that while our current system still doesn't win it has a much better showing. And yes, I'm willing to ignore the fact that people are already familiar with the current system, but I can't come up with a much better one off the top of my head.

By that metric, 37-cent pieces are just about the worst coinage possible, 11-cent pieces are a joke, and even 15-cent pieces which don't evenly add up to a dollar are a suboptimal.

Even by economist standards, ignoring this aspect of the system is rather a disappointment.
Symphony of Science
Very awesome, needs a search, but yes, I'm sure it'll get use.
How about a way to retrieve comments or post ID for a given story URL? I often save articles and read them days or weeks later, and it would be nice if there were a simple way to find the associated HN discussion without risking upvote/story submission using the bookmarklet.
Windows 7 vs Ubuntu 10.04
The Droid was definitely not the high watermark for openness.
The ADP1 and the Nexus One were and are.

The Droid (aka Milestone in the GSM world) was the first really successful Android phone though.
Definitely cool, but Hadoop is fairly easy to set up and use, especially if you use Elastic MapReduce.
Safe Links provides real-time protection against harmful links
Google Health Gets A Wellness Makeover
A thorough look at the legal issues related to online news aggregators
Of course, Spotify has famously low pay-outs to artists...
That's the good thing about choice. By buying an Nexus One (or an ADP1) you can do all that without _any_ hassle.

That choice is not available with any iOS-device as of now.
How the NYTimes uses Vanish to keep their servers from crashing
The irony here is that anonymous digital cash protocols, while complicated, are also basically built around digital tokens or "coins", so efficient change-making is still relevant! (although the coins would be handled by software, so 11 or 37 unit coins would be acceptable; generally systems have used coins in the powers of two sizes, to reduce number of coins per transaction, at the expense of total number of denominations).
It's a little annoying that they're passing off a human interest story as research. It doesn't tell us why the people felt younger (Because of increased exertion? Because they expected to? Because they were good at acting? Because they were part of an experiment?) or how long the effect lasted, or whether there were any undesirable side-effects.

True, the article sends a pleasant message, and there's probably not much harm in it, aside from a possible increase in elderly tripping over bell-bottoms and shag carpet. :)
Yep, I can see them getting excited data mining people's social networks. However before they do that they need to get the social network...
But if Spotify has successfully negotiated rights with the labels in the UK, the Netherlands, Sweden, Norway, France and Spain, is there any reason to suspect that they won't be able to reach an agreement with those same labels in the US?
That is a good point... though I really don't like either choice. :D
Actually, in the Soviet Union you used to have 3-kopek and 15-kopek coins, as well as 3-ruble notes.
"Users that want to speak with their wallets will use iPhone where such problems do not exist."

Or they could buy another Android phone were such problems do not exist.

But the sad thing is: I do not think that they care enough...
Currency dependent on power sources?
Poor naming: "Google me" is already a verb phrase. If the overlap was intentional, I don't think it was wise.
Thanks for the response. I will mull that over next time I have a say in the matter of how to store data. I think at some point I will also just need invest some time to play with a few of the NoSQL choices to get a better feel for them.
"I can offer online-only services that actually add to the game experience."

It doesn't matter what they are, what they do, or whether or not the network aspect of these services/features is integral to them - pirates and consumers who insist that any features not on the disc at install-time are an inconvenience will still cry DRM.

Are these "online services" integral to the game? If they are, then what happens when they go down? It's really not much different than what happened when the Assassin's Creed 2 validation servers fell over. Are they not integral to the game? Then pirates will do without them or find ways to replace them, and some people will still bitch that they shouldn't be so inconvenient.

There's no getting around the fact that creating copies of a digital work is free, and so there's no solution that's going to make everyone happy. It's unfortunate, because every developer now feels the need to create online services as a part of their game, even if their idea doesn't really call for it.
Agreed. My job is a means to an end, not a personal definition. I'm a husband and father first. I love the job I have now because it's just a job. I do interesting programming. I work 40, zero overtime. My time is flexible, I can come or go as I please as long as I put in the time. I can take a vacation day with zero notice.

I purposefully got a job that really is "just" a job so I could not only put food on the table but be there to enjoy it as well.
Fine structure constant may not be the same throughout the universe
Bingo. I worry about the state of gaming when the primary question on a developer's mind during design is "how can I make online servics a part of this game so I can actually make some money off of it?"
How often is it hitting the server and how many pages deep does it go?
Abolish the penny, use a uniform rounding rule to make the nickel the smallest denomination. I hate pennies.
Or even peon at a big university. Better hours, less pay.
I'm pro authors getting paid, but you can't expect users to like antifeatures. Such as an online mode that merely detracts from the game. If it adds more than it takes away, then users will be happy about it, even if the main reason you put it in was your own wallet.
Quint accepts THE SOCIAL NETWORK's friend request
Running VMs for testing during development (ie: an IE6 VM, IE7 VM, etc) are the major driver for us.

Outside of that, my work machine has Chrome, Mail.app, Terminal and Textmate open generally so 2GB is fine without the VMs.

My home machine is the previous generation, top of the line iMac (3GHz, 2GB) and is often noticeably sluggish. It looks like iTunes is responsible for a bit under 200MB. I really don't know what the issue is though to be honest, but it feels like a 4GB upgrade would get it over the hump.