skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Levitating nanoparticles may make for better geoengineering
> We often work with early stage startups, where uncertainty is a fact of life. In these cases, both parties agree that hourly is preferable.

Ah, yes I can see that, that was not clear from your initial statements, I thought you meant under 'ordinary' conditions as in when working with established companies.

> We generally give a bracket (+/- 7%) outside of which further discussion is automatically triggered.

How did you arrive at the 7%? Gut feeling or some kind of formula? (It's a funny number to pick, why not 5 or 10?)

> I like to believe our bids are simply always better.

Hehe, don't we all :)
Wait, is the whole company for sale, or just the domain name?
Quora Random
Dear Apple, Thanks for Ping But We Don't Need More Social Networks
Install an ad blocker browser plugin?
Not sure why you were downmodded, I'd like to know this as well, and it certainly relates to this thread.
Who told you that your GPA rules you out?

If you have actual experience, nobody should care about your GPA. Or even whether you have a college degree. Lots of people at Google don't. If you're still in college it might be an issue, but if you have something to point to you still have a shot at getting into the interview process.

The interview process is hard. I won't lie to you about it. Even if you belong at Google, there is a good chance of not making it through on the first try. But your odds are infinitely worse if you don't even try.

Speaking personally, I didn't apply to Google for years because the core Google languages are Python, Java and C++, while my professional experience was all in Perl. Eventually I did apply, and discovered that it never would have been a problem. And in fact I'm doing most of my work in internal languages that nobody comes here knowing.
If you have to pay to go to grad school, have you determined that it's actually worth it? What field is it?
I wonder what is keeping them from doing an IPO. Selling a company as large and as profitable as GoDaddy at a public auction seems very strange.
"Welcome to OpenBSD" is customarily spoken as "Fuck you moron" or "SMP is for retards and jackasses like you" or "Threads are for idiots and no, we don't care."

I love OpenBSD though. Use it everyday. They don't pretend. What you see is what you get.
You sell investment banking advice, software and self-help books to the Chinese, the Chinese sell you cars and dish washers. What's not self-sustaining about this?

(Of course, the USA still produces lots of stuff you can kick. Don't worry.)
Which I hope wouldn't surprise anyone.
Was the point about school snipers referring to actual gunmen picking off kids, or kidnappers grabbing a kid as they came out of the gates before their parents could pick them up?

Surely the gun-toting variety wouldn't be that common, even in the US?
The Chinese are getting massively richer without the rest of the world getting poorer. So why should we arrive at 6$/hr?
If you do C++, try Crypto++ it's very nice.
Internal languages? Why would Google make new languages when there are already many great ones already available? It sounds counterintuitive and inefficient. Please answer if you can.
Apple clamping down on App name squatters
maybe you could register it with ..
Agreed. That's a price/sales ratio slightly over 1. Salesforce.com has a price/sales of over 10.

Different biz I know but both are ultimately subscriptions.
A solid scope in a mid sized or large project is usually determined by a design specification that all parties sign off on. Just preparing such a specification is a project in its own right and that's why for smaller jobs it usually isn't done that way but much more loosely defined.

For me the most important bits are:

- does all this fall within my current competence
(in other words, do I have to learn something new or not)

- is the project comparable to something I've done before or is it virgin territory

- how clear is the customer able to communicate their vision of the things they want from me

- do they already have artwork / wireframes or is it that I'm supposed to be the 'main contractor' contracting out those aspects that I can not do myself

- are all the interfaces the system has to the outside world clearly defined and documented and/or accessible through existing apis?

- is there a realistic expectation as to the amount of work that we are talking about and the amount of time alloted for documenting, coding, testing & debugging

- are there hard deadlines associated with the project or not

- what do they expect in terms of after-sales when the project has been delivered (do their people take over?, do they help with building?)

- can we agree on a rough block diagram of how the system will be put together and do I feel confident about each of those blocks in terms of complexity and an estimate as to how much time it will take to realize that block

For me the 'deal breakers' if the customer wants fixed price are mostly their vision, communications issues and the knowledge about external hook-ups. If any one of those gives me a bad vibe then I'll probably either refuse the job or I'll tell the customer that it is not possible to execute this job fixed price unless they come up with solutions for those issues.

> What if the client asks you to tweak a feature that's within the scope, but ends up taking up significant amount time?

That is a very tricky situation. I think that both parties are somewhat to blame if such a situation arises, if it is 'within scope' then a tweak should not end up costing significant amounts of time that indicates a less than general attitude towards coding things, on the other hand there should be some penalty for changing the design after it has been nailed down and agreed on, even if it is within the scope since it will require re-work of at least some portion of the design.

I'd probably negotiate a reasonable adjustment of the price in that case (also to dissuade from further tweaks, or to get paid for them), and a note to the effect that the deadlines will be pushed back as a direct consequence of this.

I'd also want that documented in email with the consequences clearly stipulated.
You fuck goats. Way to take this way the fuck off topic.
The important thing from my standpoint as an investor is that the CEO "show me the money." Whether that's in terms of profits distributed as dividends, or as a growth in the value of my equity, it doesn't matter, but it has to happen some way. If it doesn't, I'm pretty disappointed. How much value has Ballmer created for his shareholders over the past ten years? Does it compare well to other companies with stable market shares in their primary line of business? These are the questions that interest me, not merely whether he's been able to maintain a market share status quo. That's the baseline of competency, not a sign of success.
Nice picture and explanation, but probably wrong. I'm with the commenter Steffen here:

The shot is probably taken from the ground and during a (relatively) slow maneuver where the aircraft pulls hard up, causing the flow of air to become almost perpendicular to the alignment of the wings, which will cause said large pocket of low pressure which rapidly is equalized causing condensation of the water vapor in the air.

You can see a similar (very) low speed condensation effect here

http://www.airliners.net/photo/Air-France/Boeing-777-228-ER/...

here with a fighter jet but also low speed and high angle of attack

http://www.airliners.net/photo/USA---Air/McDonnell-Douglas-F...

and this is rather extreme example of the same thing

http://www.airliners.net/photo/Russia---Air/Sukhoi-Su-30.../...

and here is a similar rainbow effect, but behind an A340 which surely isn't supersonic.

http://www.airliners.net/photo/Virgin-Atlantic-Airways/Airbu...

Another factor which makes super sonic flight unlikely is that the photographer had to wait for the moment when the sun is behind the aircraft which would be very difficult to do if it was flying that fast.

edit: oh and apparently it is called
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prandtl–Glauert_singularity
Adobe to resume work on iPhone Flash tool
Understand the Text before Selecting the Essay Theme
The essay theme plays an important role in the process of writing. The theme needs to be understood before the writing of the essay as this is the central idea of the text itself. Once you are able to identify the theme in the text, writing the essay will be an easy task.
I've never worked for Google, but I understand from reading that BigTable is a storage service that includes replication.

Here's an interesting post about AppEngine which I expect applies to gmail. gdocs etc...

http://googleappengine.blogspot.com/2009/09/migration-to-bet...
Most of the "great" languages were at one time internal to a company or research group.
You could try out Planetaki (http://www.planetaki.com) it doesn't do anything fancy, just just puts all your favorite websites on a single page (full disclosure: I used to work for the same company that made it). It's a relief from the task oriented feed readers.

Pro tip: once you sign up you can import your websites from google reader at planetaki.com/username/import (not linked yet because it's in beta).
Unfortunately that would probably just make things worse. :-/
Ask HN: Any startups in the N.E. of England?
Long term unix sysadmin here. There seems to be a dearth of start ups in the North East of England. Any other HN readers from this area with companies on the go, or even just with plans to start something up?
Did you read the same article I did? He was talking about a lot more than manufacturing--the skilled trades and even engineering fit his argument pretty well.
Well first of all it is unlikely to be a public auction. It will probably be a private one organized by a various investment banks.

And I think it does make some sense, especially in these days when private equity is so well developed. The stock market likes growing companies, and I am not sure whether they would like GoDaddy which seems to be reaching the limit to its growth. Also, the stockmarket does not like situations where the owner is cashing out, and much prefers companies that sell stock mostly to re-invest in their business. If Godaddy did an IPO, the owner would not be able to cash out immediately and would have to wait a while and sell his stock slowly and hope he does not cause a collapse in the price.

Private equity specializes in these situations (owners wanting to cash out, and companies that may have plateaued or are in decline), so it seems like a good choice.
> The CC company bears absolutely no burden for fraud beyond the administrative hassle, and it is wholly on the merchant's backs.

I've done some research, and I was misinformed on that point.
FYI: Name based virtual hosting uses the Host Header to route.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_hosting#Name-based

Remember, TCP/IP doesn't specify Hostname, messages are only routed by IP.

HTTP 1.1 specifies the Host Header specifically to enable features like name based virtual hosting.
Gridding is indeed very similar to concepts you'll learn in geometry or algebra, such as FOIL for evaluating the product of expressions.

Here, I whipped up a geometric explanation for gridding. This would be taught after you've demonstrated with counting blocks that multiplication is fast addition of rows in a rectangle, i.e., that multiplication is the calculation of area.

http://images1.bingocardcreator.com/blog-images/hn/multiplic...

You can teach this to third graders very easily. (Well, if you are a third grade teacher who understands how to calculate the area of a 5x6 rectangle. That is, sadly, not universal.)
In fourth grade I had 5 hours.
By grad school do you mean a master or PhD?
Mostly in technical fields, you get stipends once you are in a PhD program; however, for masters is a whole different story. Have also looked into applying to scholarships or fellowships?
Gucci jeans denim|cheap gucci jeans|wholeale gucci jeans|guccipop.com
http://www.fanchatter.com/ are YC alums who've built their company to some degree on twitter. They went through a few years ago, probably pre-RFC 3.
Technically speaking, charging any amount of money is a professional signal.
do we know if @FreeTheFeross is on HN?
Sorry, there is a catch: I'm not actually an old man, i just want to live the life of an old man in a shack. What i really want is to maximize the hours per day dedicated to sleep and whatever else i want to do, which currently is only reading and writing. I had a relatively bad undergrad GPA and basically want to live the life of a professor without having to worry about grad school, then phd, tenure, teaching if i don't want to, meeting with people i don't like, etc.
No idea and probably not. The Bloglines podserver/itemdb was built internally. You can get some idea of the setup by reading the slides from pquerna's GeekSession's talk: http://journal.paul.querna.org/wp-content/uploads/2007/10/bl...
Commit a felony and go to jail. That will meet most of your requirements. You will probably be paroled early, so commit additional felonies as required.
+1 HN is one of my favorite sources for interesting stories, content, conversation, etc...
You should also read how Feynman helps with choosing school books in California.

http://www.textbookleague.org/103feyn.htm
Another reason to MAC ciphertext, not plaintext
And Mark Zuckerberg is the CEO of Facebook.
Paypal has the most customers of any financial institution in the world, they have some of the largest challenges of any financial institution in the world. Not the least of which being that everybody who is capable of using paypal is simultaneously connected to the biggest and most efficient megaphone ever invented (the internet) and the unique consequences for bad press that situation entails.

You can decry paypal's customer service, no doubt, but recognize that the root cause of these problems are all of the very real scammers who have abused the system and never make the news. Consider an analogous situation, check fraud. There are many stores and restaurants that do not accept checks, is this because banks are evil and hate honoring checks? No, it's because of repeated abuse from fraudsters devaluing checks as a method of payment. The same is happening here with online payments. You can get around the problem by paying more money for a merchant account but that only protects you from the immediate effects of the problem for a little while.
Serious question, not joking - wouldn't you die, literally die, without any protein, fat, or micronutrients?
I (almost) never did any homework at school. It's easy to wiggle out of it, if you set your mind to it. For example, you can often just fake it in class. But my parents where not involved at all.

However, while studying math in university I did lots of homework and it actually helps with understanding. Also in mathematics you know when you are cheating yourself.
Is there enough nutrition in (brown, i assume) rice to do this?
There is a middle ground here; bill in person/weeks instead of by the hour (which, by the way, is probably an amateur signal), and structure your projects in terms of milestones that have economic value to your client.

This "consulting hack" I picked up from Thomas a few months back helped land a lucrative and mutually rewarding engagement, by the way. Relatedly, it helped me give the client a menu of options: here's what you get for one week (A), for two weeks (A + B), for three weeks (A + B + C).

It gave the client easy options to adjust scope to adjust the final bill (rather than negotiating on my rate), which suits me fine, and given that I've got built-in milestones where I'll be able to demonstrate significant value to the client, possibilities for extending the contract/relationship abound. ("Things are going pretty well -- want another week out of me? I've knocked A and B out of the park, can I interest you in getting C as well, or do you want to do that some time later after I've raised my rates?")
to be fair, nobody explicitly told me that gpa rules me out. but after i revealed my gpa, the youtube employee who reached out to me suggested that my resume would be discarded if my gpa was below 3.5, and even then, they unofficially shoot for 3.7. i only graduated in 2009, and as a self-taught programmer who graduated with a Psychology major, i have almost no training in computer science (i couldn't tell you what a bubble sort is; i find abelson and sussman totally uninteresting save for the box and pointer diagrams). but i did at least make it through real analysis and abstract algebra for fun and i do have a unique combinatoric proof of a summation identity to my name.
I think it is neither of these. Well, i am somewhat of an asshole, i guess, but I want to study math and physics.
Wow. And there was no way out?
the monkeys reference may (or may not) be in response to linus talking about openbsd developers:

"I think the OpenBSD crowd is a bunch of masturbating monkeys"

http://news.cnet.com/Torvalds-attacks-IT-industry-security-c...
I would think their profit margins are huge, though you're right, they do spend a ton of money on ads.

IIRC, registrars pay on the order of 25 cents a domain, which they then resell for $8 or more, and GoDaddy is the registrar for something like 1/4 of all .coms. Web hosting and email are very high-margin too.
Anyone know if there are any extra dangers from eating shrimp that have been chowing down on these microbes?
Oh, by "escape the system" i meant escape the system we create here, as in keep my freedom, not be incarcerated, not be prevented from having sex or children for the rest of my life, etc.
Teleportation Is Real (seriously)
Everything looks great except for the $110/month minimum bill (even if you have zero sales), wish the $35 monthly fee was all there were when starting out. Or go even lower with an email-only, non-timely support option.
Is there a vim version?
I'm amazed this has gotten no discussion... are people indifferent to the article? If so, why?
Depends on his country's tax brackets/laws?
Apple May Be Planning A Holiday Release For Next iPad
That is possum living there is a book for you http://www.possumliving.net/
There are video about it on youTube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mvn79E40VSc
About the video: It's funny to compare `standard algorithms' (or their expression) from different education systems.

And the lattice method et al are really the same as long division.
We're hiring Rails developers in London or Miami. Take your pick, but preferably Miami ;)

http://www.startuply.com/Jobs/Ruby_on_Rails_Developer_2728_1...
Exactly how I learned mine. My times tables were abysmal until I did A level maths, there's only so many times you can use your calculator for 6x7 before you just remember it as 42.
your question is really how long it will take you to gain traction. And it varies upon what you're making, and who your market is.. Whenever I ask myself such things for my idea, one reference I look at is Patrick's sales states for bcc: http://www.bingocardcreator.com/stats/sales-by-month

Search HN, there's other examples people have posted out there.

The question you want to be asking: Why do you want to go to grad school? Why not save money while working for a year for it? Are you able to "gain traction" with professors yet? i.e. get them to vouch for you, and possibly help you get into a TA program to help cover costs?

My opinion: given the time constraints you've defined, no, and you'd be better off working a job and contracting on the side.
Before this article even dropped off the front page, impressive.
Although i said old man in a shack, being isolated is not a requirement. But for the sake of argument, let's not prohibit it.
It's written in C. Of course it's going to be bad.

You are being unfair. I did a little Samba hacking in recent memory, and found it quite easy to understand and follow. (Granted, I didn't delve into the low-level implementation of Microsoft protocols.) I'm sure other well-written C programs exist.
I totally agree. But still, these people are serious in a way. It's generally the hobby or very-very entry level range. The thing is, they'll spend plenty of money on supplies and marketplace fees, but have this aversion to purchasing something relatively virtual, especially as they think they can do themselves or get it for free. The same goes for their websites.

It's bad decision making, no doubt. They're sacrificing their professional image, and being penny-wise and pound foolish.
Oh, people can come up with statistics to prove anything, Kent. 14% of people know that. -Homer
Did Google Steal Instant Search From Facebook?
Using Nike+ shoe sensors for automatic foursquare checkins
And the number of acquisitions that Google has started and not completed because of an employee interview (excluding something like outright fraud)?
I'm sure they do that on a bit by bit basis, when they're isolating one transaction at a time, but are you sure that when they 'freeze' an entire account, they reverse all of the transactions?
Well, at least he has a job....
The whole company. From the WSJ:

"Qatalyst Partners, the boutique firm run by veteran technology banker Frank Quattrone, has been hired to shop the Go Daddy Group Inc. ..."
Really interesting. Here in Slovenia (Europe), iphone is not even officially available for purchase (people that want it, mostly go to Italy to buy it). On the other hand, Android is everywhere. Htc desire, Samsung Galaxy S, SE experia x10, Motorola Milestone ... you name it. And people buy them a lot.
The company - hired to shop the Go Daddy Group Inc

On a completely different note, just noticed that WSJ injects a link when you do a copy/paste from their site:

Read more: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870359720457548...
More parameters are needed, in my opinion. What you want is possible, but not with only $10k. That, or give up some requirements (internet, unless you want to walk to a public library) and be prepared to squat on someone else's property.

I live close to your desired existence. I own my humble hermit's cabin outright, have no debt at all, and a few grand in savings. I grow some of my own food, hunt some more, but I still need supplies. I could conceivably coast through a few years without any external income, but it would be a very Thoreau-like existence (which isn't a bad thing, just too primitive for me). I own my car and home, but still forced to pay insurance and yearly registration/taxes (cheap, as the car and home are old and of very low value, but they're non-negotiable and will surely rise over the years and are unavoidable). I still pay for power and internet, which could be trimmed (but what's the fun in that?).

If someone mailed me a check for $100k today, I'd never need to work again, and I'm under 40. I'm that set up and frugal. As it stands, I pimp myself out as a remote admin and local PC support dude, with minor hopes that I can realize a small web site that will bring in a few kilobucks a year.

For $10k you can buy an acre on Hawaii ("the big island" -- subdivisions near the lava flows), fly out there, and start gardening year-round while you live in a tent. Water falls from the sky daily and you can raise some meat to supplement the fruit and veggies you can grow. You'd have enough cash to pay for a few years of taxes, too.

Property taxes will get you every time, though, unless you squat. There's some dude who lives in a cave in southern Utah on public land. He eats bugs and scavenges food from nearby towns. Interesting experiment, but he'd be hosed (likely) if the majority of people weren't wasteful and he lacked stuff to scavenge.

Anyway, it's possible, but you'd either need more money up front, to have everything owned outright when you begin, or have enough passive income/savings to cover taxes and minimal supplies. Like I said before, more information on your current situation and your goals/plans are required for a more realistic analysis.
I e-mailed him and he said that I could order 10 logos for the same company for $50.

At $5 a pop, just keep ordering until you get one you like. :-)