skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you make money on this, it will be because people didn't do their homework. This is not a new market, and there are a ton of free options that allow really large downloads (FileFactory, etc.).

I think the only way you'd make headway is to focus on customer service and presentation:

- Provide a way to directly download the file via link vs. having to visit a page first.

- Be very specific about the amount of time the file will be hosted, and tell the customer that you will contact them at the email address provided to remind them prior to expiry that it will expire. There will also be a defined period of time following expiry when the file would stay there until payment was made to extend the contract before the file was removed.

- Be clear about how you store the files (using some well-known enterprise provider, or describe the fault tolerance enough where people feel safe).

- Site must look very legit so that customers will really believe that you will take care of them.

- Limited downloads or time limit is not something people are looking for. I think the companies that did rate limiting slow downloads that require customers to buy faster download had a better model, even though I never bought one. However, you can't do this and handle the first requirement of direct URL to download, so maybe you could offer both; if the customer wanting you to host the download wants a direct URL, they can pay you for that on subscription basis, in which case their customers would not have to wait on the download; otherwise, the customer downloading the file has to pay subscription for a faster download.

Realistically though you can't compete with larger companies doing massive storage. They will win on pricepoint. The best chance you have would be better service and usability, but imo it is a waste of your time.
It does, or at least in the state of Virgina there's an agency that will go after employers who stiff their W-2 employees (speaking from experience).

As 1099 contractors, I suspect your only option is to sue, which might be practical depending on your small claims court system.

One other option for leverage is to look at the way you were employed and see if there's much of a chance that per Section 1706 you really should have been classified and paid as W-2 employees. In that case you can threaten to drop a dime on the company by contacting the IRS, which will not be amused.
"... but I do have to wonder about the skill level. I'm sure it's harder than I think but the job still boils down to parking on the side of the freeway, spotting violators, chasing them for about a minute and then writing them a ticket. Is that really worth $48+ an hour? ..."

Non verbals, body language, dealing with highly charged emotional people - all these skills aren't readily acknowledged but required to police effectively.
No examples :|

Edit: thanks for the link!
I really don't see Apple buying Facebook. It's just too far away from what Apple does best.

I can't say your opinion isn't rational, but.. Apple is weird. The iPod was far away from what Apple did best too. As was the iPhone. As was the iPad. I admit, they're all at least hardware, but Apple is pretty diverse and I can at least imagine them taking such a leap (see Logic, iTunes, iWork for software examples).
You can't think about things like this. You are, at the core, composed of your history of things that you tried and what you learned doing them.

As I learned here, you cannot give in to regret. You have to pick yourself up and resolve not to make the same mistakes.
http://searchyc.com/UI+design+book
Download & convert YouTube to iPod on Mac
What video, movie & audio formats will the iPod play/support? iPod supports H.264, MPEG-4 in .mp4, .m4v formats, and mp3, protected AAC, Audible, Apple loss less in .aac, .mp3, .m4a files
> The decision to keep (and only warn against) unescaped strings past the introduction of an incompatible feature (constants) is inexcusable.

It's so easy to turn those warnings into exceptions. I don't think I've seen any project in the wild that does anything meaningful with unescaped strings.
Maybe Avid, although there might be some antitrust issues.

Possibly Quark, to ramp up a full publishing assault against Adobe.

Or maybe even Adobe as a defensive move against Microsoft.
lionheart, are you secretly me?
I remember Harj touched on this at the YC meetup in New York. Was the decision to move from the UK to here easy?
PHP has copy-on-write semantics for strings and arrays -- your sort of reference optimizations seem a little strange to me. That is, unless you're not intending to making copies of structures when you change them inside of functions, in that case using references is not a strange optimization but just the correct choice.
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If I don't have to, why should I choose only one or the other? Ideally, I'd love to have access to both sets of studies for my websites.

I would assume that eye tracking is mainly for looking at content and secondly for looking for next actions, while mouse movement would be primarily for locating next actions and secondarily for interacting with content.
Here is a link with a list: http://www.quora.com/What-are-the-best-books-on-UI-UX-design...

I've personally read "User Interface Design for Programmers" and "Don't Make Me Think", and would recommend both.
That is correct. The football and/or basketball programs at many schools support the entire athletic department. The schools can then offer many other sports that don't even cover their costs.
That resolvequery() function in cog_database.php looks interesting. Wonder what happens if you call resolvequery('INSERT INTO ... VALUES (@email, @example)', array('email' => 'test@example.com', 'example' => 123));
I like it so far. The site does seem a bit empty (expected for 4 hours), but there is nothing inherently bad about the design. A few comments about using it:

1) I think it would really benefit from displaying the expiration date / number of downloads left. Right now, there don't seem to be any pages for the files, but being able to see what I'm downloading before doing so would also be great.

2) You might benefit from giving some shorter links. This seems like something that would be used on twitter or the like, and links that take up over half the allowed characters could be detrimental to adoption. One could use a URL shortener, but I'd personally like to avoid more indirection than necessary.

As for monetization, my first thought would be to sell extra downloads / longer time. You could also try selling larger file sizes.
I worked for a company that fired two developers for disclosing salaries. (An executive put a spreadsheet of them on a public drive.) It wasn't just the difference in salaries that got people upset. It was the lies management had told when people had asked for raises: "Nobody makes that" or "You're already one of the highest paid developers."

A year later, when the company didn't make enough sales to pay bonuses according to their plan, they gave bonuses to a few select people. Oddly, rather than keeping this secret, they announced it in a company meeting. My favorite moment was one developer asking, "When will you be letting those people know?"
Poor Barbara Fogarty made $-80,814.55

http://www.sacbee.com/statepay/salary-details/?firstname=Bar...
It's not to do with shortage of labor. Their salaries are high because being a cop is a life-threatening and potentially psychologically damaging profession. Some go their entire careers unscathed, some get killed, almost all have close calls every now and then. Most of them have families that care about them and know the sacrifice they might have to make one day. They deserve good salaries for their service.

Believe you me, I have many gripes about the quality (or lack thereof) of law enforcement in this country. But how much they are paid isn't one of them.
To be fair, police have to deal with a wider range of psychological issues than jobs in rescue. Not only are police exposed to most things that rescue jobs are exposed to, they also have to deal with domestic violence, hostage situations, exploitation of minors and other disadvantaged groups, threats from organized crime, and sometimes actually pulling the trigger themselves. Hell, just the fact that police officers have to enforce laws they might not personally agree with is a pretty big emotional strain. My naive intuition is that rescue jobs are far less in a grey area emotionally.

I'm not saying this to quibble about whose job is more important or serious. It's just that I would volunteer as a firefighter or an EMT in a second, but I would have to think very carefully about how working in law enforcement would affect me.
ProTip: Just because someone puts a form in front of you doesn't mean you have to sign it :)

That form (release of inventions) scared me the first time I saw it (agency job) and I asked if I could just not sign it — they said that was fine. It's amazing how far you can get in life by just asking questions.
I assume you saw this? http://github.com/chrisdickinson/wilson/blob/master/docs/int...
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Thanks for the suggestion :-) I had a ton of experience with C and Java back when I was in high school and somewhat through university, but after I finished university I fell out of it. Your book looks like a great introduction for a complete newcomer to programming, but I've picked up "How To Think Like a Computer Scientist" and it seems to be more on my level.

You are an amazing person, however, for releasing all of your hard work for anyone to learn from!
From an email I recently sent out:

I'd suggest starting out with "The Non-Designer's Design Book," which explains the basics of putting elements on a page or screen together in a tasteful way; "The Humane Interface," which explains testing and measuring for efficiency and why dialog boxes are often bad and so on and so forth; and "Designing for Interaction," which is often cited as a good overview of the practice of interaction design, and I just flipped through it and it seems to be, although I haven't read it.

After those three, you could probably throw a dart at this list:
http://www.facebook.com/topic.php?uid=114778998560307&to...
Pay is not determined by the difficulty or unpleasantness of the job, or at least, not directly. It is determined by the balance of supply and demand. How many people are ready and willing to be police officers at some level of pay, and how many police officers are needed?

Policing isn't trivial, but you know what? Neither are most other jobs. There are many, many people with the capability of being police officers; supply is high. Demand is not actually all that high compared to supply. There's even more supply than may initially meet the eye because many people not physically strong enough to be police officers right this instant could bring themselves up to spec if needed. The difficulty or unpleasantness of the job factors into the supply but I think you'd find a lot of people who would take that job; it's hard, but there's a lot of hard jobs about that people do for much less than that amount of money. (After all, first responding is hard from one point of view, but it is uniquely rewarding too; how many lives have you saved in the course of your work? It's not all good but it's not all bad either.)

You argue that they are valuable, and this is true, but the value of an employee is not what determines their pay... it is what caps it; long term, anyhow. You can't be paid more than what you are worth, you can't even be paid exactly what you are worth, you in fact inevitably must be paid less than what you are "worth" for the whole arrangement to work. Governments aren't immune to this. They must run at a net profit or they'll bring their society down. Measurement of profit is somewhat different than a private company, but profit they must; they must be extracting more value from their employees than they are paying their employees or the society is running the government at a net loss, which can only be tolerated to a finite degree as determined by what other surpluses the society is running elsewhere. What governments can do that private industry can't is put off the pain until much later before the fact they are paying people more than the value they are actually bringing bites them.

Later's pretty much here, by the way.
Sort of. They gave me half the money back to make me go away. Given the amount of hassle getting that half of the money back entailed, however, I'd say I won the battle and lost the war. At the time I was filled with righteous anger at PayPal: How dare they treat me this way? Years later, and PayPal is still doing the same kinds of things.
Wow! Thanks :-) This is exactly what I was looking for.

So much nostalgia for the years spent trying to code a killer text-based game in QBASIC... tear
Wow. I hadn't thought about that as much.

True, developing for over two hundred different handsets is going to be tough - but I see it as the same as the old Mac v. PC debate. The different software and hardware configurations of PC users is staggering.

Truth to be told, it's something that will come up in any debate - depth and customization versus ease and simplicity. No way to move without making some trade-offs. I just find him dismissing the first option somewhat disingenuous.
sure, that's possible - just see the LOOP macro...
Father and son team launch iPhone to edge of space
$$var is awesome, it makes it really easy to put function pointers in a db record. Was using this back in 2002.
List of mergers and acquisitions by Apple: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisition...

Looks like they go after companies mainly for talent and IP. Facebook's biggest asset is their network effect and 500M eyeballs, not the software or talent, though I'm sure they have a lot of talent. Now that they are designing their own chips, after the PA Semi and Intrinsity buys, maybe silicon would fit the bill as a big aquisition for them - AMD (4.7B) or Nvidia (6.5B).
What about Nintendo? Same color scheme, gets them in the gaming console business.
this is pricing to the market versus within the company. I guess i should have specified that employees should only price against others in a company. also salaries above $200k are silly. there are much better ways to fiscally reward a someone above $250k that are not so tax inefficient.

@cosgroveb, way to pick the edge case. in general CEOs should make enough that their incentives align with investors. everyone is in a different boat.
I don't know the figures of running a telecom but buying a carrier would make a lot of sense. There is a lot of Apple-cash that's being pumped into AT&T.

I've thought that would make sense for Google to do but it would presumably alienate the other carriers and destabilise Android. Apple however doesn't have any such conflicts.

I don't see them wanting to buy Facebook and moreover I can't possibly see Facebook selling to Apple. Their ideologies and goals are far too different.
It influenced it the Maclisp LOOP. The idea. That's all. The CL LOOP macro OTOH is a straight version of the Maclisp version. The MIT version of LOOP came from the same sources, even.

The Interlisp iteration facility looks slightly different. There are Interlisp manuals as PDF at bitsavers...
it -will- get out who this person is, anonymous or not.

Assertions presented with zero evidence are not persuasive.

They even have a little distinct way of writing some things that I'm sure I could recognize if I worked with them from emails they had sent.

Why would that matter? A small handful of people in the world might be able to identify him, but so what? I mean, if he's misrepresenting the situation, it might be a problem, but you'd have to present evidence that he's, you know, misrepresenting the situation.
Which face detection module do you use? Do you need to pinpoint pupil with detection tool before later process or estimate pupil position with the rough detection area of eye?
The Pleasure of the Text
I know PHP uses COW, so theoretically, reading from a variable should have no impact on memory usage whatsoever. This has not proven to be the case, I've called get_peak_memory_usage() and played with passing the params explicitly by reference or not. I assume it has something to do with the fact that strings/arrays are not passed by reference, and explicitly declaring the reference is cheaper sometimes and more expensive sometimes depending on refcount(maybe?)
CCL has no GIL.
I was curious about this recently, so I looked at a ton of convertible note agreements. Almost all (if not all) included provisions like "cannot be repaid without consent" and/or "elective conversion", which I think both protect the investor against this kind of problem.
The Business Of Burying Internet Search Results
There may be things that Applebook (Fapple?) could do that each company separately cannot. This article is still just linkbait speculation, though.

My (personal, not reflecting on my employer, etc) feeling is that Facebook wouldn't take the offer. Zuckerberg doesn't even want to IPO yet because of the limited amount of control he'd give up. Even if Jobs offered every last penny of that $51B, plus stock and a magic pony, I don't think Zuckerberg would take it.
Right. I really like his point about the schooling being a factory, with people going through based on date of manufacture. I absolutely think it would be awesome if you could go through your grades at your own pace, in different subjects. A software based approach to learning would be excellent for this.

But of course this is completely antithetical to his latter point, which is that group based learning/problem-solving is important. You can't have groups if everyone is going at their own pace.

The happy medium might be to structure elementary education more like college, with the ability to take 100 level classes in the 4th year or whatnot. But of course, this is far more expensive than the batch method because you have to have many more classes. To support so many classes you have to have many more children, which means vastly larger schools, so you might only be able to do it in densely populated cities.
"In June 2003, Robinson was knighted in for his achievements in creativity, education and the arts." ~Wikipedia

He has plenty of ideas. This speech is trying to get people to see that the current ideas aren't working and work together to create a new system of education.
i try not to work for car salesmen and in such a case it would be hard for such a person to fit into the company.

@philwelch, it falls into the category of anti-patterns. the idea is that because it's open and part of the process, its not hidden and so the politics of it are not hidden. additionally only those that want to work in such a pay scale would accept the job. so you are basically agreeing to get rated by your peers before you accept the job.

if you were to take an existing company and transition into this pay model you would probably see excessive attrition.

it also means that your peers are responsible for your raise, rather than someone who does not understand your work. if you feel undercut, you will leave, and if your work is valuable then the team will miss you, as you will effect their productivity.

again this is an anti-pattern is meant to disrupt normal strategies.
> FWIW in most areas police are statistically less
> likely to die a violent death than the populace at large.

[Citation Needed]
By my calculations they could buy the following companies for cash at a 20% markup to become totally vertically integrated on a scale not seen since the days of Standard Oil:

ARM - Market cap 8.3B

CableVision - Market cap 8.13B

EA - Market cap 5.21B

Netflix - Market cap 8.01B

Sprint - Market cap 13.64B

Of course it will never happen but it's fun to think about.
Git has a limited version of that built-in, 'git gui blame' (this is also integrated with the 'gitk' tool). However, that doesn't let you jump quickly to different places in history. If you need some thing that shows you the file 'blame' and quickly lets you easily jump around in history, I recommend 'qgit'.
Ultimately, the Xbox 360, the PS3, and the Wii may be irrelevant given the emergence of connected televisions, thin devices, and cloud-based gaming.

This doesn't make sense. Why would they become irrelevant? I presume we're also talking about future generations of said consoles. Even if, by some magical miracle, computational needs of those consoles push onto the cloud (like Gaikai and OnLive), they'll still be a platform, and developers and publishers will still make games for them - and player will buy games for them because games are on those platforms.
We know if we need to acquire something – a piece of the puzzle to make something big and bold – we can write a check for it and not borrow a lot of money and put our whole company at risk... The cash in the bank gives us tremendous security and flexibility...

You never know what opportunities are going to be around the next corner. We are a large enough business now that, in order to really move the needle, we have to be thinking pretty bold -- pretty large.

--Steve Jobs
There's a decent chance they'd buy ARM Holdings ($8.4B).

They could bring the processor design in-house. ARM chips already power all the IOS devices and could also power their server farms. They could also be planning for iOS/ARM systems to eventually replace their entire desktop and laptop lines.
Speaking as a former Apple employee, let me answer TFA:

No.
I see this talk as an argument against "traditional" schooling. The alternative to traditional schooling is anything not traditional. In the US, that would be homeschooling or private school like Montessori. The political takeaway is that government schooling (which necessarily places emphasis on uniformity and conformity) is harmful and that private alternatives should be encouraged.
They're obviously way too robust and have too much momentum to be in trouble any time soon.

That being said, visit any college campus and most people are using Apples. The younger generations are growing up with the perception that Microsoft is for old people in suits and Apple is creative and classy.
Violent French Protests Show Why A New Debt Crisis Is Inevitable