skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Warning: No less than four pop-up / in-page / full-screen flash ads before you get to TFA.
Unless you have storage space and are prepared to handle distribution yourself (including drop-shipping and getting it into stores), POD will probably suit your needs best. Most POD publishers these days have relationships with retailers (particularly online ones) -- Lightning Source, as was mentioned, is one that serves both self-publishers and smaller presses, and has very legitimate distribution channels (i.e. if you go to your local bookstore and convince them to carry your book, they will do so because they will be able to order it through the traditional publishing catalogs).

Editing costs will depend on how far along the book is. If it needs major structural work or substantive editing, expect to pay more; if you just need copyediting, then you will be able to find it on a fairly reasonable hourly basis. (Many "vanity" POD services like Lulu or Xlibris offer editing services, but you can also find it through other freelancing sources.) Design and layout are also frequently offered by POD services, and Amazon's CreateSpace has pre-made templates you can use.

Kindle/iBooks release as a gauge of interest would depend on your target audience. Who are you trying to reach? If you're looking mostly for tech-savvy early adopters, it's probably useful. If you have a built-in platform already, like Seth Godin, also probably useful. If you are trying to capture a more traditional segment, it may not show you a true indication of potential reach.
Will Work For Free
Tip 12 looks suspicious, at least for the use case given. I'm not wild about storing passwords on a production machine, but if you're going to do it, don't kid yourself that gaining much by hiding it inside git's db.

Still, tip 12 was new to me, so I'd be interested in seeing a better use case.
I'd accept a 10% fatality rate for important space missions if everyone was a volunteer, if it improved the rate of progress.

But would the volunteers accept it? Heh, you're "willing to take risks" with other people's lives, that's the most callous thing I've heard this morning.

Not attacking you, just saying your choice of wording is funny. I assume you are probably implying that all the volunteers know of and accept the risk.

During the few moments I've been typing this, I've gotten to thinking, does how someone answers the question "do the ends justify the means?" say much about what sort of person they are? I guess my answer would vary depending on what the ends were. Sometimes, I would answer yes even in situations where it made others disgusted with me. Sometimes I'd say no at the cost of many lives.

We're all a convoluted mix of conflicting ideals, I guess. C'est la vie.
This is right up your alley: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1797868.

You should also state whether you intend to publish solely online or also sell through brick and mortar. The latter makes Lulu a lot less attractive. Otherwise, Lulu are a great choice for an online PoD store.

Another thing to consider is that if this is your first time publishing, you will look a lot less attractive to a publisher in the future, because they can't promote you as a debut author. I have a bookmark about this somewhere, I'm sure, but it's on another computer.
There are 3,798,237 washable windows in Seattle. @1$ a window I would charge 3,798,237. if i get a exclusive lease I might charge 90cents a window. Considering there are so many, I might license the operation off to partners as well. So i might end up getting around 35-40% of the 3,798,237. Charges vary though and I charge more in the winter. When would you want me to start?

Next time, ask stupid interviewers to buzz off.
I'd go for C++, if you're really good at C++, picking up Java, C# & ObjC will be a matter of a couple days each. That and Python.
Bad name: 25 Tips for Intermediate Git Users

Good name: Tips for Intermediate Git Users
GAE looks like this at first glance. But it turns out to be focused 90% on scalability, and 10% on easy deployment. The main issue for Django developers is that on GAE, you're using a nonrelational database. Assumptions about the RDBMS run deep in Django and in most Django apps, and great effort (see django-nonrel) is required to present even the thinnest veneer of compatibility.

In my experience (>2 years of GAE consulting for paying clients) I think using GAE is probably the wrong choice for most new projects. If you're new, you need to be able to iterate ideas quickly and you will value tools that (1) give you flexibility, (2) offer a lot of useful reusable libraries, and (3) have a large and stable culture (good docs, stable APIs, people you can hire). And if you have a scalability challenge somewhere down the road, it would make perfect sense to rewrite most of your app on a platform like GAE -- after all, by that point you'll have the basics of design quite solid, so you don't need as much flexibility, and every other part of the effort gets easier when you have money to throw at it.

It is a common misconception, though, that AppEngine serves the same needs as Heroku, or is a Heroku equivalent for Django. I think that's the main reason we didn't see more Herokus-for-Django* earlier.

*Disclaimer: I am a founder of http://djangozoom.com/ .
While I agree, what's maybe more interesting is that a community of Java users would "do it all over again". Could be blub programmers not being able to see up the chain, could be normal human comfort tendencies, but it could also be "legit".
Free University Training - $100,000 in scholarships
Do you know of a good poll site? You could test your hypothesis.
Well-known, open-source advocate Matt Asay leaves Canonical/Ubuntu
What's next? The Solar solstice has caused mass downtime; stay tuned. Eeek.
I spend a fair amount on ITunes every month and I only recently found out that Bieber is a singer (I thought he was some internet guy). I don't know if I've heard a song of his or not.
It's important that Google Makes Froyo Tablets Ready For A Honeycomb Upgrade
Good to know, thanks. I'm not sure if I'm happier knowing the State Department didn't request this or knowing that PayPal is still who I thought they were.
I'd say to be fluent in the first 3 or 4 languages would be quite a good repertoire.
If this be treason, make the most of it. -- Patrick Henry (who might not have actually said it, depending on which source you go to, but the sentiment stands nevertheless)
Am I missing something with all the separate Stack sites? Wouldn't it be better to keep all the questions from the different sites together and create a better tagging categorization system?

I think that having all the questions together on one site would facilitate cross pollination and accidental information learning while simply browsing.
The "you fucked up somewhere" without any explaination of his opinion makes this piece look childish.
I find it more interesting that in a Java community, 30% didn't choose Java as one of their 3 languages.
Are they related or linked to this deal?
An archived copy of the first web page uploaded can be found here: http://www.w3.org/History/19921103-hypertext/hypertext/WWW/T...
> that is going to hurt people way beyond PayPal

That's what I meant by broader and deeper impact. If service is impaired for merchants, a fraction of them will switch their payment provider.

I am not arguing this is the right thing to do from moral standpoint btw. This just got me thinking about DDoSes for the first time. Would be interesting to hear what the security experts think.
I don't know of a good LOGO interpreter for Windows, but I have had some experience teaching programming to kids. I interned with OLPC a few years ago, and they have a visual progamming application called Turtle Blocks which is very similar to LOGO. Unfortunately, it's only available in Sugar (the Fedora Linux based OS that they use on the XO-available as a live USB). Also, MIT's Scratch is another program that is available for Windows and Mac that is designed for visual programming for kids, but has many more features than LOGO or TurtleBlocks.

When I was working with OLPC, my boss Elana would make teachers and students try to understand the idea of giving and following exact directions before letting them jump onto the computer. Outside, they would have someone act as the "turtle" and they would receive directions like "walk forward 5 steps", "turn right 90 degrees", "take one step back", etc. This way, they were tasked with walking in a square and ending up in the same place they started. Before they could start though, they had to write out all the instructions they would give to walk the square, then a person would interpret them. Just like how a programmer writes a program and only after it's finished a computer interprets it.

I'd make starting off a game like this, just following directions. Have her give you the directions to walk from one room to another while avoiding obstacles. Having gone through this thought process, it makes understanding making the little cursor on the screen do something a much less abstract experience.

After getting the cursor moving around the screen and drawing boxes, I think that one of the best ways to get a kid excited about programming is just by showing cool examples of things drawn in LOGO. Then pick a simple, short script and step through it with them. From there, start changing parameters one at a time and point out that the output is different. Of course, at this point, a challenge is necessary and possible. Have them try to draw something that they like, or a stick figure of themselves. If she can do that, then try making a taller stick figure for you, or something like that.
"Salesforce.com is the original cloud company."

I stopped reading after that line.
Better name: Tips for Beginners to Git
Merging Unladen Swallow into CPython
Investors Don’t Fund Startups Without a Good Plan
When I first read the title I thought it was going to be how the interconnected nodes of the stackexchange network was evolving into an AI. ;)
Sometimes when I'm feeling down I visit https://api.heroku.com/login and enjoy the sunset :~)
Basically, he's saying you don't do enough interviews to get good at them.

That's not really news, since I've heard so many people say to do more interviews just to get the practice.

And if you've somehow escaped hearing that, let me fix that:

Do more interviews! The practice will make you better at future interviews. Even if you don't really want the job, take an interview. The more you do, the better you'll be at them.
Google StreetView now available in Romania
There should be some cheatsheet i can hand out every manager and sales person that get all those buzz words totally wrong.. Especially "cloud" seems to be the word that is labeled on everything "non-cloud" just for marketing.
It seems that it at least has some overlap. But I'm not sure it is similar, ZeroMQ focueses very much on routing of messages, while this library focuses on making cooperative multithreading for networking easier.
Then again, I'm not familiar Pluton at all so I might be completely wrong.
I have my account filled with tiny apps that barely do anything from when I was making apps to learn rails. There should be a ton of people like this too.
Julian Assange is no more subject to US law than a US citizen is subject to Iranian law.
I agree, that way they could have included "traditional" local optimization as well, although probably that will come up in machine learning questions anyway.
No, they keep the money until whatever dispute there is, is settled.
I wonder if this is better than sammy.js
Thanks for the email though. Its always nice to have feedback and know that people are actually reading my articles.
You want a near monopoly like Google to fight against Facebook becoming a monopoly? How does that help?
Given AWS just announced a free-tier, I imagine Salesforce will want to keep the free app quota to remain competitive.
Also i've seen that the YAPPS-developer stopped development in 2003..
And yet, none of this has any direct correlation with productivity.
Ask HN, pointers for revitalizing a magazine?
I am very close to the owner/editor-in-chief of an African (distributed in several african and european countries) women-oriented magazine. It hasn't been doing well recently.

I do not have any experience in that field, but when we discuss the owner often implies that he's looking for new, fresh ideas. I wish I could give him some.

Probably relevant: the owner is very old and barely uses technology. He still does most of his work with paper and scissors. Any idea that's web-related will be new to him, and probably won't have been implemented yet by the magazine (even though it might be old news for the rest of the press). All they have right now is a 90s-looking website with the history of the magazine and a picture of this month's cover.

Pointers and ideas don't have to be tech-related, and can be books that I should read, or anything, really.
I don't think C++ would give you a good grounding for a language like C#; too much emphasis on manual memory allocation, and insufficient exposure to higher-level abstractions, like lambdas and monads (as IEnumerable<T> effectively is).
If only it was just managers. I remember attending a presentation by people who introduced themselves as cloud computing specialists, who made the grand declaration that "cloud computing is not a technology, it's a business model". That presentation was so full of hot air that the entire building seemed to float above London for a while.
"was initially created after Involver noticed that brands wanted increasingly more control over the design and function of their Facebook applications."

... No, they wanted -easier- control. They already have as much control as exists. They just have to spend a lot of time and effort to use it.
Graduated (again), work in a VC backed AM firm in London, paid off my parents mortgage and now fixing up the property outside of work. Started researching Venture Capital careers as its what I want to get involved in long-term. If anyone has any thoughts on this please do get in touch with me.
In the spirit of Cablegate, Perspeck leaks
Inspired by the Cablegate incident, we’re leaking a little about Perspeck, our startup currently in stealth mode. Of course, to protect our founders and sources in the field, the following has been redacted:

WEDNESDAY, 08 December 2010, 11:03
S E C R E T #01123583145 (FM10)
SUBJECT: AMBITIOUS STARTUP GETTING READY

1. (S) PAYLOAD: We are the brokers and the *REDACTED*
of *REDACTED*, adding content *REDACTED* to *REDACTED*
strong privacy *REDACTED*, using *REDACTED*. END PAYLOAD.

2. Now, ain't that just awesome!? ;)

URL is REDACTED oops, I mean, http://perspeck.com
Is it a "race", really, when one of the "contestants" isn't aware, or care, that the other "contestant" is even there?
What a waste of resources. They could have simply released the Involver SDK for PHP to supplant Facebook's terrible SDK, without having to do all the extra backflips and convince people to learn/use their language.
Whistleblower (re: Wikileaks)
updated the title from "State Department Told Us It Was Illegal" to "State Department Said It Was Illegal" following update on TechCrunch post.
Maybe. Manual memory allocation is no longer a best practice for "normal" C++ projects, and I'm not sure how much easier C#'s syntax for higher-level abstractions is relative to template metaprogramming. Both are convoluted, obviously.
He's entitled to his opinion, but I'm still waiting for someone to point me to information in the wikileaks dump that is a genuine public service. I'm not arguing that the wikileaks dump is trivial. There is information in there that is genuinely harmful from the perspective of the State Department and US government. What I'm arguing is that there's nothing actionable there. I haven't read a single thing that made me say, "wow, what I thought I knew about US foreign policy is all wrong". If that were there, it would be a different ballgame.
I agree. Actually, I'd go farther. Why is it wrong for the government to discourage people from doing business with someone they don't like?
It's a battle every day :)
This is great news for everyone in the general cloud infrastructure space too -- expanding the number of viable potential acquirers for startups.
If the language you are interested in isn't in the top 10, you can still find out how popular it is on GitHub. Just click on your language in the list under "All Languages" on the right side of the page. You will discover, for instance, that "FORTRAN is the #32 most popular language on GitHub".
I guess SQL wasn't an option.
Deciding to Buy an IT Dissertation
Because of its technical aspects, an IT dissertation is a tough project to complete. As a result of this, many students will opt to buy an IT dissertation. Buying an IT dissertation from a good writing company will be convenient for students.
$1T.
Want a private app store?
Visualizing Mortality History
Exactly. It's very easy to obsess over your percentage of the company, but what you really care about is (price per share) x (number of shares you own). There are a lot of additional factors that you'll need to understand to work out what your piece of pie is worth (liquidation preferences, participating preferred etc) but percentage of the company is never one of them.
I don't know if you're abnormal, but for me personally, the problem is more that there are so many things online that are interesting. It's so easy to get caught up, click another link, open another tab, or two, or ten, then spend another hour reading, or two, or the whole morning. Then at some point you realize, oops, hours have passed, I haven't done a damn thing, and yet for some reason I'm drained and exhausted.

Maybe this effect is stronger in those who remember when information was scarce, especially information on subjects that used to be obscure, like, say, programming languages. :) You instinctively try to eat up as much as possible. Except that strategy is actually harmful nowadays, because there simply is too much information on just about anything, for one person to process. That concept is easy to grasp, but it's not so easy to actually change our habits.
You mean Canonical? Well, the article was about public US companies. Canonical is neither, it's private, and it's registered in the UK.
BTW - you can email me at: lucite@
gmail

Thanks
Social Media Platforms for Musicians
Any thoughts on how such a system might work?
I would rather like to see it named as "HTML5 version". Oh, and please use CSS transforms/transitions instead of Javascript animations. Otherwise, nice work.
Would love to see a survey like this on HN
Glad to know that someone else is being human, not allowing machine to take over or Facebook to replace real friends:) Like your attitude, fully endorse it.
Because the role of the government in an allegedly free market is not to boost or squelch specific businesses. That's what happens in planned economies such as the old Soviet Union.

The government already discourages some kinds of business through the creation and enforcement of laws. Going beyond that is not the action of "the government", but can only be the action of individuals within the government abusing power to pursue their own beliefs and agenda.
No, the problem is with these companies, too. If there's an issue with a client that is not clearly illegal, then the responsible thing to do is to put the burden of proof on the government. So far, from what I've heard, only a French bank has had the spine to require the government to make specific charges or provide a court order before they would close the account.

This isn't just about government, there is a process, and while corporations are within their legal rights to deny service for whatever reason, that doesn't mean they're acting responsibly.

Especially with a situation as profound as this.
Or user experience, for that matter.
It wasn't that.

The office in the area I was looking at was SMALL. That wasn't so much an issue but the vibe of the place was almost like a library.
It makes Jon Skeet harder to submit answers to all the questions :)
If seriously, as a passive user I would agree with your point, but as an active one I'de like to be a leader and such segmentation would encourage to achieve that. Also specific sites attract proffessionals of the subject.
Because the logical result of that is less of a slippery slope and more of a slippery cliff.
Hopefully anyone checking this out will get the same top headline I got, "For Obama, Tax Deal Is a Back-Door Stimulus Plan" wow... just wow.

Also, is 'chrome' here referring to Chrome OS or the browser?
We Are NY Tech
To be fair, Salesforce.com was basically the first hugely successful SaaS company. Calling it the "original cloud company" is a bit stilted, but still, they do have some claim to being "original".
What exactly has been done here that couldn't have been done with every other browser?
Technology and free markets intersected
"my definition of a terrorist is somebody who uses stealth to deliberately target civilians in an effort to affect political change."

Shouldn't the definition of terrorism include the fact that they are violently targeting civilians? Economic or computer terrorism that doesn't actually hurt or kill anyone doesn't meet the definition in my view - and the publishing work or WL definitely doesn't either.
Because some of the people that government represents actually do like them. While Assange seems a little bit crazy to me, I can't say that I've seen something that Wikileaks has leaked that I think should have been kept secret. (Of course, I haven't read everything they've released.)

I'd rather that the government be guided by laws than who "they don't like."
Where Blackboard is heading next
Ask HN: Non-tech, micro-investing for charity/profit?
After seeing an advert I've just been looking at http://www.lendwithcare.org/info/how_it_works

The basic concept is that "entrepreneurs in the developing world" apply for a loan, which you or I could fund, and then pay it back usually over a period of roughly 12 months. It's charitable, and therefore there is no cut taken by the middle man (the charity), and the loan is paid back without any increase.

Based on my rough glance, it's not exactly an area with much in common with HN - most people seem to want the loan for a market stall, or a shop, etc.

But I ponder - they say that around 98% of loans get paid back in full, and the loans requested seem to average at under $1,000. Might it be a sane investment plan to, rather than loaning it charitably, set up a similar scheme whereby they repay giving the investors a slight profit?

If 98% can repay 100% of the loan in 12 months, what if that changed to 95% repaying 120% in 18 months? Could potentially receive an average of ~15% profit on each loan, with the benefit that you could invest anything from $500 to $100,000s, and it could be set up in a similar way to allow low-budget investors to get in?

To run it as a charity seems like a lovely idea, and I'm not someone to look at every charity and think "what if that was turned into a profit-making excersie..." But if a small amount of profit might bring in a far greater number of investors, and therefore a greater number of people getting their lives changed for the better...

Does anyone have any thoughts on this? And/or are there already people investing like this?
Should Young Entrepreneurs Ditch College?
Everything a Hacker Needs to Know about Getting Busted by the Feds (1997)
I keep hearing people say this, but it's an absurd criticism. Wikileaks has released 817 of the over 200,000 cables. They're working with five news services from around the world to comb through them. This isn't over.
Lots of wellwishers in the Heroku IRC channel this morning...
How is an app store for web apps a "plague"? The Chrome store is another choice, not the defacto (like the Apple store). In my eye as a small time developer it gives me another avenue to get noticed, I don't see how it harms me.
7 pages of comprehensively or willfully missing the point might be a record.
Oil spill IT disasters: Chevron modeling crashes, BP vendor blocks inquiry