skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
They said their margins would be lower next quarter in their earning call because of the change in the mix of products. They had advised the exact same thing for the quarter just posted but beat their advised estimate.

Looking at the problems other companies are having getting a iPad equivalent into production at the same or lower price point, I get the feeling the iPad doesn't have the traditional margin. Even with that, if they release new iPad models on the same 1 year cycle used for iPod / iPhone then I can see a lower price point next April.
Why you should never quote prices in hours: because it provides prospects with a frame of reference for price negotiation in which (a) you always sound very expensive, and (b) price movements that seem reasonable to the prospect can end up being very painful for you.

If you're going to end up haggling over your price, far better for you to be doing it over numbers like $15,250 which are tied to the specific project than over numbers like $125/hour which are affixed to you for the rest of your relationship with the client. You should never, ever be budging on your rate anyways. Give an inch on your rate and you will never get it back; companies hire whole departments to ensure that rate concessions, once taken, are never surrendered. Negotiate over project scope, not rate.

The question of whether you should go fixed price or time-and-materials is a reasonable one (and it's a negotiating point), but if you're going to bid time-and-materials, price in billable weeks, and estimate the number of weeks up front. Save the details about billable phone call minutes (and, seriously?) for your S.O.W.
mod_jk used to be the way to do it with apache. not sure if it's still the "best" method or not. It acts as a proxy between tomcat and apache.
And if you are using linux LVM raid for your root partition, you should practice breaking a drive. It works, but best you find out how to deal with it before having to do some panic googling.
I just went to a small alumni event from my university yesterday and spoke to some of the "development" people. One of the initiatives the university has had in the last 4-5 years has been increasing the undergrad enrollment by ~30% (very controversial with the alumni). Part of that strategy it to greatly increase foreign undergrad enrollment. The people from the university said that in the last couple of years the university endowment has down better than many of its "peer institutions", in large part due to the full tuition paying international students. In contrast to the NYT story, it seems that many of the international students I've heard about are actually being paid for by their governments, although a lot are just from (relatively) rich families as well.
My one UX qualm is that the "Sign in with OpenID" button is the last thing to load on the login/create-an-account page, and there's no alt text so you don't know it's coming until it's there. I doubt I'm the only person who was frustrated at the prospect of having to create yet another u/p, even if a few seconds' wait dispelled that frustration.
Garages are attached to houses so...House? Haha ;)
Also, I'm personally noticing the reduced productivity, that's why I'm not sure I like the "house" idea.
I love it.

If you feel inspired and have more, keep em coming :)

Thanks.
Digg is dead: lessons of a failed startup
Soon I'll also be providing the entire hn database for download. I have the db, but I have bandwidth concerns. Anybody willing to work with me who has bandwidth to share?
Game theory explains why some content goes viral on Reddit, Digg
Normally I'd agree with you, but in this case you're signing up for a beta for a web browser that is (at least right now) almost entirely built around Facebook. If you don't have a Facebook account, why do you want an invite?

(quick edit: I'm genuinely curious--sorry if that came off a bit mean, that wasn't my intention.)
Why not distribute it via BitTorrent?
Apple is doing well out of their 5% marketshare, because they have an expensive 5% of the market. If they were to serve 95% of the market, they also have (at least) the cheapest 45% of the market.
Technically only with subsidy: $499 (iPhone 3GS 8GB), $599 (iPhone 4 16GB), or $699 (iPhone 4 32GB). Still not sure if that means as much as it should.
This dynamic is rampant in the New York tech scene where the wannabes far outnumber the real hackers.

It doesn't bother me, though, because the truth is, it doesn't matter how many times you've met Fred Wilson, or how many times your name shows up in SAI. If you build something that people love, then the VC's and journalists line up around the block. And if you don't? I don't think Union Square has ever written a check because they saw a guy at all the right parties.

Chris Dixon draws the distinction between "builders" and "extractors," (1) which I really like. Are you building something? Or are you trying to take something?

And I do think that coders are in a different category, because even if you're a "scene-y" dev, at least you could build something of value, whereas most of the scenesters (who completely lack code/design/even business backgrounds) never will.

Btw... great post, Brad.

(1) http://cdixon.org/2010/06/19/builders-and-extractors/
This is a problem we (GitHub) are facing in a big way right now. Google Charts doesn't offer https alternatives, so almost all our users get a big "this site is going to steal all your private information" (mixed content warning). We chose to roll out SSL first, then deal with the hard problem of mixed content warnings (building ridiculous image proxies) later.

I think a lot of developers underestimate how big of an impact this warning is on users, especially on browsers like IE that throw up a dialog on every page that has this warning. Developers understand that it's not that big of a deal — but to a user, it looks like the site is full of viruses, malware and is going to steal all your bank account information.
Golgafrincham already did that and we descended from those 'expelled' telephone sanitizers.
BTW, I'm happy to help with bandwidth, if I can. :-)
Don't forget the big CouchSurfing (http://techcrunch.com/2006/06/29/couchsurfing-deletes-itself...) crash. They appear to have recovered from it though.
There are sites that make use of sessions without forcing you into using an account. These are also vulnerable.
+1 for everything mentioned here. +10 for the way it was mentioned. +100 for the Sinatra reference.
Or even the cars. BMW and Mercedes are just two German premium car companies. There's also Porsche, Audi, Ferrari, Rolls Royce etc.
Not only that, but in IE it's a modal dialog. You can't do anything (even switch to another tab) until you've acknowledged the scary warning.
Garages have different environment and physical set-up.
>Take a room
>Empty it
>Now just put bare minimum you need to work (a Computer, Table and Chair / Beanbag) in my case.
And let it fill up with inspiration.
Being a designer I like blank canvas to paint it with my imagination.
MSFT is not immune to economic downturn especially a crash called by a currency crisis. The FED is currently walking a currency crisis tightrope.

As for value stores, look at the performance of the Brazilian market over the last few years and gold and silver.

Worse, if we have a currency crisis here the entire equities market is toast. The people who called this depression (Schiff, Denniger, etc) are calling for a currency crisis due to the fed's actions.
Assuming you've made the choice to get a smartphone. If you haven't then the difference between a regular and smart phone is really the plan cost.
Unfortunately, they're only protesting that it be used against pilots. They say nothing about the rights of their passengers. From the article (emphasis mine):

"the practice of airport security screening of airline pilots has spun out of control and does nothing to improve national security"

They would have deserved more kudos if they had stood up for passengers' rights as well.
Speaking about color: hue, value, saturation, chroma, shade, tint, tone
I had no problem carrying a longsword into and out of the UK. I called the London police in advance to ask if it was an issue, and they asked me whether I could conceal it on my person. Since I could not (it's a longsword), it was not classed as a knife and so was no problem.
I agree, but compilation is a low barrier for correctness :)
That's probably what I'll end up doing. Id like to have it updated daily, seems like with BT there would be older copies floating around with newer copies unseeded.
I don't think this is quite right. The problem is that the TSA's incentives are all screwed up. Any time some idiot manages to sneak a weapon onto an airplane, the TSA leadership gets attacked for it, whether or not they could have reasonable predicted it. But there's no penalty for instituting a new policy that is massively inconvenient (or embarrassing) for travelers but doesn't actually make people safer. So there's a one-way ratchet effect, where they keep adding new layers of security theater but never retire old ones. And because they're insulated from political accountability, there's nothing travelers can do to push back.

Public opinion is rarely coherent or rational. Most voters think Congress spends too much, but if you poll individual big-ticket spending items, almost all of them are popular. Similarly, I imagine many of the specific "security theater" measures wouldn't poll very well, but "more secure airports" is overwhelmingly popular, and that's the level of abstraction at which the TSA's mission is set.
Seems really laggy to me, Fx3.6.12/mac

Great idea though. How do you do the edge detection? Sounds like a neat feature.
I regret not forcing myself to leave my over-paid, reliable, incredibly easy job years ago. Despite building many (what I consider cool) things solo, my job search is suffering from a lack of experience developing in a collaborative environment and the problem of being too much of a generalist. This is what happens when you do everything yourself.
I was working on something like this for a while. May be I'll dust it off and release it :)
I always knew happypenguin.org as a site that had reviews of linux games. DRM issues sound weird in my ears, but maybe they offered some Steam-like service for downloadable games.
Nevertheless, the first link if you're not logged in is to that Wikipedia article gasull linked to: http://i.imgur.com/N7dXW.png
I see a lot wrong with this.

At HN we are not initially tied to our username. I would keep making new accounts/submissions until I hit a gold mine, something that generated a ton of karma. This would make my initial HIndex very high, and give me 2nd, 3rd, and 4th posts a much larger edge.

It would also encourage high risk initial posting. Since every new account's first post is going to be a calculated gamble to gain karma, that first post should be something highly controversial, opinionated, shocking, risky, etc. When it fails or gets downvoted, we just open a new account and try again.

I do not think indifferent comments are bad, in fact I think they are good. They help us realize that its ok to have a non-opinion on something that is seemingly coming off as 'the greatest thing ever'. Of course these comments never get upvoted because they don't mix things up or stir the pot, but they help add clarity and balance to the conversation.

Also my biggest pet peve with HN is often times really good thought out comments go overlooked. Maybe because they are on too high of a level or do not present themselves well. This of course is a current problem with the karma system that the HIndex does not resolve.
With a wretched name!
Is the solution to Firesheep to have every logged in page in https? Or is this not necessary?
It's Sunday and I'm not behind on any work. It's raining out and I have nothing better to do. It is in my interest to understand patent law. But, I just can't make myself read the law.
writing is worthless compared to actually calling.
I don't know. I haven't really done NLP before. My guess is that it would be slower, but not by a significant amount. It might be more accurate, so I could give it a shot.
I think he's arguing that since both twitter and facebook (and other unnamed sites) do not use adsense, but are still vulnerable to firesheep, there must be another reason why developers don't update the security for their website.
Great! I'll email you when I get home. It's a 300 MB compressed XML file. 1 GB uncompressed. Contains comments, links, postedby, dates, parentid, and so on.
Thats why I use IE6. No tabs, no problem.
I'm sure a lot of people asked the same question when competitors to Netscape hit the scene, and look at how much they've changed in that time.

I've only read a little about RockMelt, but it's not clear to me why they didn't develop this as an extension ... aside from perhaps being able to claim the search revenue.
Did you take it on the plane with you? If so, I can imagine doing some damage with it...
Saving the web on paper
The problem here isn't misogyny. The problem is the impact that the unreality of the Internet has on people's psychology, and what happens when Internet psychology crashes into cold, hard reality.

There are two events being "discussed" here: the alleged incident of sexual battery at ApacheCon, and the Internet's reaction to the report of the incident. Both are, to my eyes, shot through with Internet-thinking.

I can give you a pie-eyed exegesis of how the rapid-fire 140-character "we're all Interfriends" no-harm no-foul if - it's - easy - to - and - nobody - catches - fire - it - must - be - ok mentality might have led to some idiot allegedly assaulting a peer at a conference, but you can probably see those arguments coming a mile away.

But this article isn't mostly about the actual incident; it's motivated more by how the Internet responded to the incident. And the Internet handled this incident the same way the Internet handles everything else: the same way it handles an iPhone bug. So you've got people talking about "innocent until proven guilty full stop" (note: you are not in the real world trustworthy until proven untrustworthy), and other people saying "she wasn't actually injured so what's the big deal" (note: of the places I would not want to be locked up for sexual battery, Georgia tops the list).

But they're not really talking about gender politics. They're nerds, trying to fit a complicated event into their mental models, which models demand consistency and transparency and rigidity. It's just difficult for the nerdal cortex to process the idea that rather than laying out an irrefutable case in front of a court of law, the victim of sexual aggression can use other tools available to them to retaliate, deter future offenders, and reestablish a zone of control over themselves.

You saw exactly the same mentality over the Reiser trial. "How can you be convicted of murder on circumstantial evidence?!" (answer: very easily). "Juries just don't understand Aspergers!" "His best friend is a serial killer!" The nerdal cortex tries to absorb these stimuli and turn it into a graph structure that can be traversed for answers, but no matter what the model is, at the end of the day, Reiser led the police to the body and confessed to the crime. Reality is inescapable, even when the graph isn't fully connected.

I wouldn't read this most recent story as an example of how geeks discriminate against women (though: they do), but I would look at it as another cautionary tale about how reliable the conventional wisdom of geekery is.
DIY Arduino Water Meter
What size is it?
Ubuntu - Brave New World? Or Jumping off a Cliff?
300 MB compressed.
Successfully executed.
Most notably would be the oodles of forums out there that are ad supported and require logging in.
It is a triumph of vendor marketing (Hi, John Hugg!) that reasonably informed engineers think ACID == SQL/relational and that NoSQL == EC. Both are false. As a couple of examples, have a look at Google Percolator http://research.google.com/pubs/pub36726.html and Scalaris http://code.google.com/p/scalaris/ .
While sites wait for services such as adsense to support SSL, adding a second Secure cookie and requiring on sensitive pages and to perform destructive actions can help reduce risk to users. Depending on the site, it may be OK to skip showing ads on a few authenticated pages. Wordpress implemented this in 2008: http://ryan.boren.me/2008/07/14/ssl-and-cookies-in-wordpress...

This won't protect against active attackers, but is definitely a step forward and will make a full transition easier in the future, when possible.
To see the talk's abstract: http://edtech.rice.edu/cms/?option=com_iwebcast&action=d...

I was a Rice student at this event, and I wanted to add a little to the description, because it deserves to be made to look more appealing. Yes, it's over 100 minutes, but I thought it was incredible; it was a gift to anyone open-minded enough to accept it, probably because the scope of the talk ultimately went far beyond video games. It's not that Jonathan didn't have insightful and explorational thoughts on game design, but near the end of the talk he showed how he was actually approaching deep questions on the relationship between art and entertainment- irrespective of the medium. I (as more of an ex-gamer than anything- years ago my parents made me sell my Super Nintendo when I starting acting like a junkie) still enjoyed the 90% of the talk that lead into the pretty damn awesome philosophical ending, but I for all I know an experienced gamer will call Jonathan Blow out as a pretentious n00b. Anyway, if any of you have read Infinite Jest, remember the conversations between Marathe and Steeply when you're listening to this talk. Are many gamers slaves who believe they are free? [everything that follows is from Infinite Jest]

Marathe had settled back on his bottom in the chair. 'Your U.S.A. word for fanatic, "fanatic," do they teach you it comes from the Latin for "temple"? It is meaning, literally, "worshipper at the temple."

'Oh Jesus now here we go again,' Steeply said.

'As, if you will give the permission, does this love you speak of, M. Tine's grand love. It means only the attachment. Tine is attached, fanatically. Our attachments are our temple, what we worship, no? What we give ourselves to, what we invest with faith.'

Steeply made motions of weary familiarity. 'Herrrrrre we go.'

Marathe ignored this. 'Are we not all of us fanatics? I say only what you of the U.S.A. only pretend you do not know. Attachments are of great seri ousness. Choose your attachments carefully. Choose your temple of fanaticism with great care. What you wish to sing of as tragic love is an attachment not carefully chosen. Die for one person? This is a craziness. Persons change, leave, die, become ill. They leave, lie, go mad, have sick ness, betray you, die. Your nation outlives you. A cause outlives you.'...

...[Steeply's speaking] 'What if sometimes there is no choice about what to love? What if the temple comes to Mohammed? What if you just love? without deciding? You just do: you see her and in that instant are lost to sober account-keeping and cannot choose but to love?'

Marathe's sniff held disdain. 'Then in such a case your temple is self and sentiment. Then in such an instance you are a fanatic of desire, a slave to your individual subjective narrow self's sentiments; a citizen of nothing. You become a citizen of nothing. You are by yourself and alone, kneeling to yourself.'

A silence ensued this.

Marathe shifted in his chair. 'In a case such as this you become the slave who believes he is free. The most pathetic of bondage. Not tragic. No songs. You believe you would die twice for another but in truth would die only for your alone self, its sentiment.'
Yup, I agree with you. This is a pretty big problem with a lot of other google services as well.

The google maps api for example will not work behind https. Google has publicly said that this is because they want their maps free and open, not behind some page where the user needs to be logged in. This create a huge problem for any site that uses google maps. They do offer a solution though, for $10,000 a year they will let you use the map api behind https.
Distributed Dictatorship
Very nice. Are you using a variation of the Arc90 readability algorithm or something else? Aha I just saw you talk about them in your "about" page. I was going to do something similar with the python readability port[1] and Flask but hadn't got around to it. I am glad someone did, and did it far more impressively than I could have.

[1]https://github.com/gfxmonk/python-readability
Yeah, that's a good idea once motion has been detected by a computer.

I just saw a Nova program about elevators where this guy was stuck in an elevator for 41 hours and there were paid humans on duty the entire time who had video they never looked at.

Here's the story:

http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/05/21/trapped-in-an-elevator-captured-on-video/

I think the case was settled for $200,000.

A motion detector would have more reliably sounded the alarm or some electronic sensor indicating the elevator was stuck. I have to wonder sometimes if people in old industries like this know what's going on.
There was some discussion about this last week here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1864932
Exactly. Browser makers (including Mozilla/Firefox to a large degree) are responsible for the fact that HTTPS hasn't become the standard protocol as it should have been years ago. It's not only the unproductive mixed content warning but also the insistence of all browsers to only accept expensively bought certificates and throw a very scary and hard to overcome error dialog if a site uses any other kind of cert. While that isn't a problem for big(gish) commercial sites like GitHub, it presents an insurmountable hurdle for private sites and small-time projects for no good reason. For most sites I don't need "secure" origin verification as badly as encryption. The lack of a verifiable server address shouldn't mean that I should be bullied to not use an encrypted connection with it. But even if the verdict is that you absolutely can't have one without the other, browser makers should AT LEAST include trusted root certs of authorities who offer free SSL certificates, too.
Switched On: The iPadification of Mac OS
no regrets.

trying to live in a way to keep it that way.
Springer's CS Reading Room (Free access to CS journals)
The on site video shows twitter and other sites. You're right though. I think I was more complaining about about site doing this facebook connect only thing.
Honestly, how many sites are aware that they are vulnerable?

It seems like you assume that because the security-oriented 0.5% of the web knows about it, the rest of the web should, too.

For most people, just making sure that their site runs at all is quite enough for them to handle, and keeping current on the latest vulnerabilities is way down on the list.

Additionally, fixing a site takes time. How long has Firesheep been out? A week? Two? You should realize that for many sites, even those staffed by very competent tech people, a month is the minimum amount of time for immediate action.
We discovered the exact same issue and rolled back few weeks ago.

The worst is that the default selected choice in the modal box is to not load anything.