skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So unnecessarily restrictive!

Does anybody have any online resources they can point me to that details the legalities of lending physical or electronic books?

Thanks.
To me, this seems about as pointless as Foursquare; and yet just as interesting to marketing folks.
those vertical toolbars look horrible

facebook connect is forced? no thanks - browsers should be enabling more privacy, not handing it away
"As in, exactly what is the process?" -> depends on the format. If they attached a few png's, I just open then in new browser windows. If they send me a PDF with many versions, I open it and scroll through it. If they send me a ZIP file, I ask them for something more userfriendly ;)

"multiple designers and multiple projects and multiple revisions" -> now we're getting somewhere. This is your target audience, not just "designers".
I sometimes would like to be able to bill hourly, but find it impossible:

1) When I'm thinking about the project in the shower (where all the real thinking is being done) shouldn't the meter run? Apparently from the original post, the only billable time is the typing time, which is a little bit funny.

2) How do you know if you're fast or slow? Are you even consistent? Sometimes a stupid feature takes me half a day; sometimes something really complicated snaps together in an instant.

3) Even more so, the client has no clue of what time it takes to do something (and how could he, given that I haven't got many clues either, beforehand). If I tell him that it took me 3 hours to do X and 5 minutes to do Y he will be shocked! He will think I'm crazy, or bullshitting him, or that I'm trying to convey some other message that he'll spend the next week trying to decode.

4) What about warm-up time? When I get back to a project I left a week ago, it takes about an hour to get up to speed; how should this hour be billed?

Besides, every theory of pricing tells us that price should NEVER be based on costs. Price should be based on value because that's what it is: price == value. The problem of course is that the client won't tell you what the value is.

What I end up doing is:

- if I can get an idea of the client's budget, and I find this budget acceptable, then that's my price

- if not, my personal rule of thumb is (maybe counter-intuitively) to bid low on things that are new for me (and interesting), because I really want to learn the skills and get the reference on my portfolio; and to bid relatively high on things I know well, because I don't really care to get the project or not, and if I do get it I expect it to contribute financially to all the other stuff.

(So if you want to hire me cheap, make me do something I've never done).

Also, it's been my experience that clients care about the price before the project begins, but never after.
Thats not to bad, it would be a quick torrent. I was just reading about the 640.6gb torrent of all the 2010 world cup games, in HD, 12gb per game, and the geocites torrent which was also quite big.
If we applied this logic to every behavior that someone else found reprehensible and dangerous to society the population would crash.
Ask HN: I have a webpage now but how do I convert? 
Hello, I have a page http://www.safeb4sorry.com and I am trying to figure out if the page is set up to convert or how could I make conversions better.

The main goal of the website is to create leads for my company.

Any help would be much appreciated.
Was this list derived from the Facebook page?
I know it sounds trite, but if you can't afford to walk away from a project, you probably shouldn't be contracting to begin with.

I say this from hard experience, the jobs I've taken against my better instincts are the ones that have bitten me badly.

Another thing that's important is to know WHO you are pitching to. I charge predominantly T&M, and my ideal clients are existing dev teams that are looking for an extra pair of hands for a particular project. Matching your billing model with the kind of clients you want to work for greatly increases your chances for success.
(totally off-topic)

and plus a few more points for having the same as this guy:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-PQbdmQRwc
StartSSL (http://www.startssl.com/?app=1) provides free certificates that are browser-recognised.
This is an interesting blog post, but I have to nitpick at a couple points.

First, the author says "Touching someone without their consent is assault." I hope that's just a not-so-well-thought-out sentence. What was described in the [original blog post http://blog.nerdchic.net/archives/418] that started this firestorm went well beyond "touching".

I hope we don't end up in a place where just touching someone (like a hand on someone's shoulder) is actually bad. That said, I really dislike even casual touch from anyone but people I'm very close too, so I can sympathize with people not liking that, but that's not the same as assault. I think there's other ways to handle things that make us uncomfortable without criminalizing them.

Second, I'm not sure if the author is implying in the final paragraph that sexual assault is one of the main reasons the male-female ratio at most tech conferences is so off. He just says it's "due to the behavior of us, the straight white male majority in the open source community".

That problem behavior often falls far short of sexual assault, but the behavior is still problematic ("how to X like a porn star" presentations, anyone?).

I suspect that there are also many other reasons that women don't go to conferences. I would love for someone to do some research on what is keeping women away so that we could make these conferences more attractive to everyone.
From your profile it looks like you are building a Student Management system. My comments probably don't apply so much there, because presumably your system doesn't really have much contact with students (and probably not too much with actual educators - it's mostly for administrators, right?). In that case I think you'll find its probably borderline-sane - no worse than any other enterprise sales thing.

Just stay away from doing anything that attempts to change education itself.
If you're finding yourself worried about being able to bill for phone calls, or for shower thinking, or ramp-up, your rates are too low. Stop trying to put price tags on tiny scraps of your time, and instead put an appropriate price on the value you're providing to clients.
From credit cards to VC, funding tips from Urban Airship's Kveton
This: "multiple designers and multiple projects and multiple revisions"

Plus this: "Faster decision making."

Leads to this value proposition: "Your clients take ages to choose between design versions? They're overwhelmed by the options? Make your client's lifes easier, help them decide better and faster."

It may be way off, or on the right track, not sure. (I think it's still a little off.) It's hard since the pain you're solving for your clients (the designers) isn't actually their pain, it's their clients pain. So your value is: solve the pain of your clients with my product?

Mmmm..
I really like that approach, and I plan to do several smallish mobile projects (Android+iOs mostly) in the near future. Would be great if we could find some common ground. I code.
no way to prevent it, just the way it works. there you are relying on local machine security and the user not keeping themselves logged in, etc.

do use SSL, though
If the rendering speed in any way reflects that in the video then the social features would just be the icing on the cake for me.
"when well-executed these trainings really do work"

There's absolutely no evidence that "sensitivity training" or "anger management" or any number of these programs designed to protect companies from liability have any sort of effect on anyone.

I actually expect that fear of being publicly named on someone's blog will be more effective. Not saying I approve; just that it has more chance of succeeding than any of those programs, well-done or not.
Food that is Difficult to Acquire Tastes Better
Sorry, but I have to call bullshit on this one. I've been working in the IT sector for more than 15 years and I haven't seen a recruiter yet (whether agency or in-house) that cared that much about any of their candidates ... unless they had a position open at the time and could cash in.

It's not much different from the employer's point of view either. Unless your vacancy is for something which is very low skilled, you're much better off making contacts through your existing programmers or reaching out to local user groups.
For reference, this 2009 post talks about how you need to subscribe to $10,000 Google Maps API Premier to use Google Maps on a private service: http://47hats.com/2009/07/google-maps-the-10k-gotcha/

http://www.google.com/enterprise/earthmaps/maps.html
Thanks for the link, I didn't know them. I just tried it. I generated a certificate for a site of mine, uploaded it, changed the config and the cert was pulled by Firefox. However sadly, the authority of StartSSL was NOT recognized by Firefox. This is what it said in the egregious warning dialog:

*-------.com uses an invalid security certificate.

The certificate is not trusted because no issuer chain was provided.

(Error code: sec_error_unknown_issuer)*

StartSSL does not work for me. Unless I did something wrong, which happens from time to time. I verified that the StartSSL cert I installed was downloaded by FF, it just doesn't recognize StartCom as a trusted cert authority (apparently). Can anyone confirm this?

Edit2: You guys were right, thanks! I did paste the intermediate certificate into the wrong file, my bad! It works!
> It doesn't matter how long your regulatory rules run. If people can abuse, get around, bribes, they will.

You're assuming that "the rules" would produce good outcomes if only we could get people to obey. That's not likely.

Since the rules are produced by a political process, that assumption seems suspect.

Even if it's true, you're assuming that rules makers can get it right, which is highly unlikely.

Regulation is systemic risk.
Is all this extra effort really worth the alternative of just using HTTPS for everything?

Have you really examined the extra cost of 100% https compared with the scheme you've outlined? Sounds like this idea would require a decent amount of effort to identify where to use https, to ensure that each privileged request is using https, etc.

I can see that for some cases it is advantageous to stick to regular http for unimportant requests and use https for the important stuff, but I have a strong feeling that this is only applicable for the minority of use cases and websites.
I read the overclocking ssl posting (http://www.imperialviolet.org/2010/06/25/overclocking-ssl.ht...) & I've been seeing plenty of follow up about how SSL is cheap and easy to scale, but I have yet to see one tutorial that describes actually implementing overclocking SSL or implementing it cheaply.

So- to the HN community, is this whole "ssl is cheap" a false meme, or does someone have actual instructions on how to deploy & implement a scalable SSL?
My remark was in the context of backroom airport searches by the TSA. I'm aware of the wider context but saw no need to include it or specifically exclude it.
"I'm not sure if the author is implying in the final paragraph that sexual assault is one of the main reasons the male-female ratio at most tech conferences is so off."

I have a female friend that regularly attends tech conferences, and she said that what surprised her about the blog post is not only that it happened at a tech conference, but that it had happened before. She said that she generally feels pretty safe at tech conferences and that people have always been very respectful of her. That said, she's a sample size of one.

But I'm not sure a sample size of two is enough to conclude it's a pervasive problem at conferences that really needs to be dealt with on a population level.
Diversity is a good idea. I have a TimeCapsule which automatically backs up my Macbook once an hour, but I still put important files in my Dropbox folder so I have a 3rd offsite backup of them too.
Absolutely, but the protection SSL helps with is it actually forces the attacker to compromise hot-new-metrics whereas without SSL you can just skip the first part of step 2 and just do "send malicious js" through a MITM without ever having to go compromise any of the services involved.
We spent about a week trying this on GitHub. It works pretty well as long as you have no ajax requests. We were basically left with this option:

1) Lose the ajax (and spend a significant time redoing bits of the site)
2) Scary iframe hacks.
3) SSL Everywhere.

I feel like we made the best choice (I certainly don't mind removing any chance we'll have adsense any time soon :). It cleaned up a lot of logic based around determining which pages were important enough to require SSL (admin functions, private repos, etc).

It's brought on some other issues though. Safari and Chrome don't seem to properly cache HTTPS assets to disk, for one. This is an old problem: http://37signals.com/svn/posts/1431-mixed-content-warning-ho... . I'm not too worried about increased bandwidth bills on our end, I'm worried about having a slower site experience. We're also seeing users complain about having to log in every day. Are browsers not keeping secure cookies around either?
Obama, we want Justice
One reason why I think hourly works better than fixed price: might help getting priorities right. For example, suppose the budget is 20000$, and you have 2000$ left to spend on the almost finished software. With hourly, the money could be spent on useful enhancements, or on the most useful features still missing. With fixed price, you probably agreed up front on some stupid things like "all source code has to be documented", so you probably spend the remaining hours on writing crappy documentation everybody will hate to read anyway. Since you agreed on features x,y and z up front, you might end up doing a hush job on features x, y and z, rather than doing a good job on x and negotiating that y, z will better be scoped.
If you read the rest of my comment, you realize that I do not think that all regulations will produce good outcome if it is followed.
Being lazy... it's been a year and I am still inbetween novice and intermediate when it comes to javascript and php. I have the books and some tutorials but I have not really looked at them. I could be a lot farther along with all my projects if I focused.
And the classic LeafyHost Saga http://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=25&t=238085
( might want to look for a summary, it's a long thread )

At least HappyPenguin sent their disk for real recovery...
Indeed. My /home directory is on a 1TB 3-way RAID 1. Because I am that paranoid about disk failure.

Interestingly, all three disks failed, because Newegg does not know how to ship them properly. Never buying disks from them again. The good news is that only two failed at the same time, so there was no data loss. And the replacement disks from the manufacturer, Samsung, have been chugging along for months just fine.

RAID on your desktop is nice. RAID on your server is mandatory. The total cost was $300 for one fucking terabyte. Just do it :)
People in "my" country get sentences for posting security camera footage of robberies in their shops. I find that to be utterly ridiculous.
How is 'mixed content' any more dangerous than unencrypted HTTP? Why is the user not warned every time they go over an un-encryped connection?
But why? Please explain.
That's interesting. You are right. It's not exactly the designers' pain, but it is the clients pain.

But the way I see it is, ultimately it becomes the designer's pain.

For instance, say you have a large client that is not tech savvy in the least (or barely tech savvy) - but he wants to see many options.

How do you get it to them? Setup your own ftp server? Email? Basecamp?

Then how do they reply?

That's another one of the pains I am trying to solve.

So it's not JUST allowing them to easily chose from multiple versions, it's also taking away that headache from designers of trying to figure out how to get the revisions to clients.
Without offering any evidence to support this, I agree that it feels like this should be a rare event, if only because sexually assaulting someone attending a conference with friends is a great way to get your teeth knocked out, and that's a story I haven't heard before.
Except that Flock was incredibly bloated, and took up lots of screen real estate, when I tried it at least.
Business idea, any thoughts?
I have wonder about the possibility of using robots to fix cars... Considering the typical car today is quite computerized, I don't understand why I still have to deal with auto mechanics... your thoughts?...window washers too, why are those guys still hanging up there? A robot with lizard grip palms could do a much better job.
Unless they're using Safari which doesn't have a mixed content idea. My point is that it doesn't fix anything at all. Like filling 8/10 holes in a bucket of water. It's still going to leak out.
> The difference between free and $10/year is bigger than most of us think it is.

> I agree with you that we need some good free CAs

https://www.startssl.com/ Supported by just about every browser. Entirely free. A fellow Hacker News user linked to it in a similar thread. I was impressed :)
It's good to have a solid reason to keep IE6 around. I'd hate for it to go away!
> The first is why the teachers that are bad are actually bad.

Under what circumstance are you willing to buy a poorly made car? After all, maybe the workers could become better given additional retraining, etc.

> The other is how they are measuring teacher performance.

Feel free to provide a better measurement scheme. Until then, why should we prefer nothing?

In practice, we find that the "need better measurement" folk are actually unwilling to accept any measurement scheme. Yes, even one of their own devising.
Keep Tabs On Your Favorite Startups With StartupFollower
Anywhere young people, booze, and partying mix, this sort of thing happens, so I don't see why the author sees it as a sign the OSS community, in particular, is "the epitome of a hostile misogynistic work environment".

Further, to publicly name the guy over this seems harsh. I don't really see what he did as a big deal. I've probably done similar things many times, as well as having similar done to me. If you're drinking with members of the opposite sex, have some rapport, kidding around, etc., then slapping a butt, putting a hand on a thigh, etc., is usually cool. Why the need to tell the entire world, probably ruining the dude's career?
Hmm, the numbers I can find show somewhat more even spending, so I'm not sure that's the reason. Ballpark estimates I'm seeing thrown around are something like $20m spent by the Feingold campaign, $17m spent by the Johnson campaign directly, and another $5m spent by anti-Feingold third parties.

Maybe the 10-1 figure is for outside money? It does seem that almost all the third-party, from-outside-Wisconsin groups doing ad buys in the election were doing anti-Feingold ad buys.
It does work and Google definitely does not want the public to use it. A Googler's post on the topic from 2007:

http://groups.google.com/group/google-chart-api/msg/85186f74...
I disagree. It's true that a lot of programming language research is impractical in the real world, but occasionally it produces gems. I'd rather have the gems than nothing at all.

The real danger is not the languages, but their proponents. Academia can't make you use Haskell, but other people can.
Two things are interesting about this comment.

1) that the process you highlighted in the first sentence doesn't annoy you royally. That's exactly what my issue was. There is no standardized way to get feedback from all clients.

2) You are absolutely right. Maybe I should be drilling down deeper. The question now is, how do I reach those clients with 'multiple projects and multiple revisions' ?

I know how to reach designers - i.e. the design communities, the design blogs, etc.

But how do I then segment my marketing even further.

Thanks for helping me flesh this out some more...it's REALLY helping me :)
The post conflates several issues and I think it is weaker for it. I doubt misogyny is behind the extreme gender ratios in the tech world, and I doubt public self-flagellation of males would encourage more females to participate in tech.
The problem is that you asserted it is "just as easy".

It certainly might be possible for the attacker to compromise a specific server that you have chosen to trust - but that's a much higher barrier to an attacker than performing MITM on an open Wifi connection which doesn't require them to compromise any server.
Yes. I make this perfectly clear to my clients. If they give me 4 hours worth of work I still charge them for 1 entire day. And to be quite frankly, what I do with those other 4 hours is none of their business.
Einstein and Bohr on Ultimate Reality
Ah yes, no true Scotsman....

But, how do they acknowledge that "misguided"? The ones that I've run into will only go so far as "the excesses were caused by the US" and even then they weren't happy admitting to "excesses".
It's a fun read but the whole time I was thinking "If I had the time and skill to pull any of this off I wouldn't be eating at places like Pizzahut and Burger King to begin with"
Man, I wish those punks would do something like that in my neighborhood. 5 or 6 guys should get together with some nice, big sticks and go patrol the streets. Let some kid throw an egg at them and then go beat the crap out of him (meaning hit him once or twice in a non-vulnerable part of the body until he cries but not cause any actual physical harm). It will only take one kid, one year. Problem solved forever.

Self defense.
Thanks! I took Readability and ported it over to C#. It's not an exact port as I don't have the DOM and some features of JavaScript in C#. It's using the same algorithm for most of it.

I did other things too, such as making RSS fees contain the full article, pull text from PDFs, rewrite links back through the reader...
In writing a plugin that rewrites URLs as https (http://github.com/nikcub/fidelio) I found that this worked in a lot of places. Facebook does not explicitly support ssl everywhere, but you can rewrite the requests to https servers and it works.
If not collaborating, something that's worked for me is teaming up with someone while both working on separate projects, and just checking in with each other. Much harder to think "too tired right now, think I'll just play 360" when your opposite number is going to share progress the next morning and you don't want to be embarrassed with nothing to show.
Drones Get Ready to Fly, Unseen, Into Everyday Life
The IE8 warning is the most confusing sentence I've ever seen. Even I as a veteran of 13 years of web programming have to read that thing 3 times to know which button to press to make it load the damned stuff.
Don't specialised browsers like Flock and now Rockmelt get superseded by browser extensions that provide 99% of the functionality?

You may not be able to put make a tweet this link button right where you want it but you can get pretty darn close.
In my opinion the very definition of academia today is proof of its lack of necessity. And that is the exact reason why they need to change - and change, not be destroyed - there is much need for such institutions still. Even the most ardent self-learners can benefit from mentorship relationships, so that's where universities need to focus.
Reading these stories it makes it sound as if American Airports are becoming a virtual Police State (I haven't been to the US since 2002).

I live in a first world country (New Zealand) and we only have metal detectors and x-ray machines (and you only have to go through them if your plane has more then 50 seats). They're quite lax about it as well I've gotten knives through (accidentally) both in my pocket and on a tray through the x-ray machine. Also our inbound customs care more about fruit than drugs or explosives: http://www.customs.govt.nz/nr/rdonlyres/9bec875b-dc37-4309-9...