skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The dichotomy between average users and power users isn't as clear-cut as you think. I see power users (those who are actually using P2P now) as nothing more than early adopters of internet video and other online media.

"Average" users have already begun to take advantage of higher-bandwidth services such as hulu.com, Netflix's streaming video rentals, VoIP, etc. It's only a matter of time before the average users catch up with the power users in terms of bandwidth usage.

So once you recognize this situation as an increasing demand for bandwidth among the general populace, then it's simply not acceptable to expect that your users continue to use their internet connections exclusively for email, occasional web surfing, and nothing else.

The nature of people's bandwidth usage is changing, and the only reason that many U.S. internet providers think that they can get away with ignoring this fact is because they've got monopoly or duopoly pricing power.
Downvoted for reporting a bug?
1-2% using 99% bandwidth? Seems like an exaggeration. I've mostly heard the top 5-10% is using 50% bandwidth. Though i cant find any hard sources for that claim right now. Dont suppose you have any yourself?

Not that that's the main point here. ISP's were overselling their network as "unlimited" meaning, no caps or anything similar. Yet ISP's still continue to sell their networks as unlimited for the most part. They still continue to bump up advertised speeds to a level that the network cant support if people decide to use their internet connection for something other then email. Then when people decided to use their connection; on Youtube or Netflix or to play games, ISP's went and started blocking specific content. How they did it varied per ISP. But they blocked specific content nonetheless.

Then there's ISP's that keep track of your browsing and if you type in a bad URL, they redirect you to a search page thats filled with ads. google.co for example goes to http://wwwz.websearch.verizon.net/search?qo=www.google.co... for me with Verizon FIOS. And from what i hear, this is common with other ISP's. Earthlink ( http://blogs.earthlink.net/2006/08/handling_dead_domains_1.p... )and Time Warner ( http://ww23.rr.com/faq.php ) do this as well at the very least.

Net Neutrality goes beyond allowing people to use P2P services (not all of which are illegitimate by the way). It's privacy while browsing the web. After all, if an ISP can redirect bad dns searches to their own page, what's to stop them from directing a hit to http://insertYourStartup.com to "http://isp.com/tiers/highlyPricedPackage.php"?

And just to reply to one of your points directly. ISP's have a third choice as well. They can rebuild their network. They can upgrade it to fiber. Or DOCSIS3.0. Or whatever other technology out there that I'm not well enough informed about. The only problem with this is that it costs $ to do. At one point, FIOS cost $9000 per customer for Verizon ( http://tech.propeller.com/story/2006/09/29/verizon-fios-cost... ) however the more they lay it out, the cheaper it becomes.

Only when it's cheaper then implementing filtering technologies will ISP's move over to this. Verizon did DSL and Telephony before, so their point came earlier then most other ISP's who have cable lines laid out.
Ask YC: How to find market contractor rates?
I plan to move to California soon, and I'm working on getting some independent contracts there. What's the best way to find the current market rates for a developer, project manager, etc. in SFO and surrounding areas?

Thanks!
Where to begin? Do you know how to program?

I would guess download Flex and start coding.
> Incidentally - and I want to say this very carefully - I believe

You'd better be careful, look a happened to Watson. God I hate taboo subjects.
That seems common, but somehow I always feel exactly the opposite way: the longer the project, the more money I would like to get. After all, I am giving away lots of options for better opportunities that might come up. Sort of like if you invest your money, you can expect a higher interest if you "freeze" it for a longer timespan.

What I personally would be willing to lower my rate for would be the chance to learn something new or do something especially interesting. So far this has never happened in my consulting life, though.
We had exactly the same problem and have tried a lot of things.
But recently we have solved it. You need to set SPF and register it with hotmail.
It should solve your issue.
If the rest of my OS is going 64bit, why shouldn't my browser? Besides, I would imagine (unfortunately I'm not as well versed in this area as I would like) that there would be a performance gain from using a native 64bit browser on a 64bit OS instead of a 32bit browser on a 64bit OS.

True, some plugins for browser (I'm looking at you, Flash) aren't 64bit - yet - but that could be vendors dragging their feet because there's not enough of a demand. Or something else; I'm not privy to what goes on in the upper levels of Adobe. Or any other major company for that matter, but thats not the point of this post.
OK I checked it out. And by checked it out I mean spent three hours and beat the first four missions. What an awesome game. Smooth gameplay, intuitive UI, etc. Thanks for that.

One idea I have -- cut the demo off after the first two missions. I'm kind of burnt out on the game right now and needing a break; not in the mood to buy the game and play it some more. After two missions I was deep into it and most likely to convert into a sale.
Superb new Flash game for News.YC members:
http://www.egg-attack.com

Backgrounder:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/05/19/ballmer_eggs/

http://www.theserverside.com/news/thread.tss?thread_id=49451
Perhaps they're better at customer service than you are. Additionally, even if I ignore the people with a vested interest in Disqus, most of the praise I've heard about Disqus is from people that use it.
@tx claiming that SMS has persistence is wrong, once the SMS is delivered to the customer, and the buffer fills up on the SMSC oldest messages are cleared, a record is written to a file which is then transfered to some other server (That deals with the persistence) so SMS as it stands now is not persistent, since one App handles the messaging and another handles the persistence.
It gets really messy with plugins, Java, etc.

Browser developers have had to jump through all sorts of hoops to get 32-bit plugins (aargh, Flash!) working in 64-bit browsers, (e.g. on x86_64 Linux distros) but it's presumably even harder to do the opposite, use 64-bit plugins from a 32-bit browser. My x86_64 Linux distro has 64-bit Java, for example, which won't work with 32-bit browsers.

Aside from that, it won't be long until 64-bit operating systems take over even on the desktop, even in Microsoft-land, and the less 32-bit cruft that is dragged around, the better.
How do I save my game? If I can't, then I'll have to leave my browser open. Don't want to risk going to the main menu without knowing what will happen.
Guaranteed in what sense? I think I'd be pretty unhappy to get random invites over sms, actually.
If you go to the main menu you can start at whatever mission you are on, but not mid mission
This is good stuff. I really hope raytracing starts taking off. Current GPUs are blazing fast at heavily pipelined rasterising, but that particular model of rendering is incredibly awkward. Most effects have to be "truncated" because every level of indirection incurs a huge cost: you can only render to texture, use the result to render to another texture, etc. so many times - the latency kills you and you're often wasting cycles repeating the same calculation over and over. Complexity increases disproportionately with every added effect.

There's been some success with getting ray tracing working on current GPUs, but it's pretty inefficient due to the architectual assumptions. A large number of simple CPU cores with their own decoding units (as opposed to GPU cores, which run in lock-step in groups) are much more convenient for ray-tracing. Intel may well be on the right track here.

I doubt nVidia has been sleeping though, and AMD are known to be working on a GPU/CPU fusion project...

It wouldn't surprise me if the next PlayStation had hardware support for ray-tracing instead of a classical CPU. Of course, we'll have to wait a while for that. Microsoft won't do it because they have too much invested in Direct3D, and Nintendo, uh... yeah. I don't think so.
Before I walked into the objective room on the first mission, I had a little fear in my stomach like I always get before a big boss battle. Then I walked in and it was nothing and I was disappointed. Like waiting in line to ride the roller coaster and getting stuck on the merry-go-round.
Top 50 Australian Websites
Lists work because people want to know what other people are doing, reading or buying.

Online lists are loved even more than printed lists.

Here it comes the Top 50 Australian Marketing Blogs compiled by Julian Cole. He pretty much categorized the websites based on PR, Technorati and Alexa, He also has included a subjective score — the Pioneer score which measures the “blog’s ability to have pioneering thoughts about marketing”.
Yes I do. I am not a game programmer though.
In the UK, SMS is pretty well used, very cheap, and does not only go point to point. You can specify a list of destinations in each message.
Phone carriers like O2 routinely send SMS out to their entire customer base announcing new offers/deals (Unless you text stop).
Football announcements - if you opt in, as soon as a goal is scored, they send SMS messages out to thousands of interested fans instantaneously.

I used to run a ringtone website and dealt with these sorts of things.

Perhaps SMS is slow and unreliable in the US, but not in europe. Each message has with it a message longetivity which says how long it should stick around in the system trying to deliver itself. Also you have successful send notifications for that rare instance a message could not be delivered.
bjclark right on spot
If someone could expand the answer to include Boston Area, I'll be infinitely thankful. I'm in a similar situation, going to Boston next week.
A lot better than I thought it would be. Thank you for exceeding my expectations.
I'm not sure this excludes the use of getters and setters under any and all circumstances.

A purist argument is that objects are supposed to do stuff, and that methods should be big, chunky verbs that don't expose unnecessary implementation details - including dozens of properties and twiddly knobs that "could be useful some day".

But if you're building container classes for a model, then your value of "do stuff" is "store data and make it available to others", so the use of getters and setters seems entirely reasonable.
Food and medicine programs are making the standard of living higher in the short term and lower in the long term. That was exactly my point: if you want to feel good, then short term is important. If you want to solve real problems, like unsustainable birthrates, then long term is important. We don't actually disagree.

If we had enough money to bootstrap the whole (or part) of Africa into a decent way of life, it would be one thing. But we don't. And half-measures are worse than nothing. If you don't have enough strength to lift an injured person over a fence, picking him up and dropping him back down won't do any good. But, it'll look like you're trying if you squint hard enough.
The Associated Press to Set Guidelines for Using Its Articles in Blogs
eBay has seen the light???
hardly a response - more like a 'yeah, i agree'. i downvoted in my mind...
As someone who is does some contracting my suggestions would be...

A). Ask/call around your network/contacts and get information direct. This may also land you a job too.

B). Ring around the leading job agencies in the area you intend to work and ask what they can offer you based on your experience and skill set. This will give you a rough idea of what you can expect in terms of work and pay.

C). I would couple this with a look at the internet job sites and drill down to your area/market. This should give you a much more objective and clearer idea of the economy and rates too (you can gauge contract rates based on rates for full time positions). Plus the job adverts also give a good indication of the sort of skills the markets want at that time too (e.g. if you know .NET/J2EE/RoR/etc and the most money is in .NET work, then if money is your main driving factor you know you will do well to brush up on the .NET skills).

Sites like http://www.vault.com and http://www.itjobswatch.co.uk/jobs/london/microsoft.do as well as the usual job-boards are good places to start.

Hope this helps.
As mentioned in the article, this is analogous to Facebook, and although the idea is it will help Selling Manager take off as a platform (those who have used it know how bad it is) and at the same time remove the appeal of other third-party selling tools/services, the question I want to know is how does eBay intend to rewards these developers?

Will it offer commissions, access to user data, allow advertisements in the tools (like facebook), as it is notoriously monopolistic, greedy, and uncompromising and from my experience of eBay it is not in its nature to do such things.
Agreeing with one of the options above - one of my friends who works with a lot of startups will take a lower hourly rate in exchange for equity, depending on the startup. I think the deal is he gets 1% of equity for X amount of hours worked, with an hourly rate a chunk lower than he normally works at. He seems happy with the deal and the client's happy with his work.

As a freelancer, I've been asked to work just for equity on various projects. Normally this is by people who have a poor business idea and often no real clue about how to implement their side (i.e. the business and marketing) side of the idea. So if you ask a freelancer about working for equity, even if it's a split deal with some money, please understand that you're going to need to sell them the idea just as you would any other investor. iamdave it sounds like you're not in this exact situation as you all ready know the guy.
> Cool game - reminds me of Smash TV

Which in turn should remind you of RoboTron.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robotron:_2084
That may be true in the eyes of enlightened consumers, but there are a lot of people who cannot easily discern these different types of wine, and to them wine is a commodity.

Consider a commodity like steel. To most people, steel is steel. You can use steel from any supplier in any project that requires it. But to some people, particularly engineers and material scientists in very specific applications, the different makes of steel become more important.

So one person's commodity may be another person's brand. I think the point of the article is to encourage producers to work to shift the trend towards brand, to their advantage.
Well, that's kinda sorta my point.
Glorious game.

My only question is why do the robots carry cash?
How I love US law as an argument in ethic discourses..

(Though I generally agree with rokhayakebe.)
Well, by your logic just about anything can be a commodity, which would make the term nearly useless.

Wine producers have been shiting toward brand since their inception. Again, I don't think the author understands the wine industry at all.
I only skimmed the article, but this makes sense since angels usually are investing their own cash. Lending institutions who are part of the Credit Crunch typically borrow the cash that they lend from third parties. Since angels don't invest on credit, they're not affected.
Using Metadata/Attributes in PHP
> I think "downvoting" is against evolution

As a side note, evolution requires killing the weak.

When people say they want HN to go back to the Start-up News days, or Reddit to go back to the Lisp days, they are saying that they don't want the site to evolve, they want it to stay the same. But they do evolve, the strongest ideas are those that reproduce in the most minds - those which are the lowest common denominator.
I agree. In my past experience I have found it actually better to build all the domain elements (model) first based on command line usage, as it more clearly and accurately defines the problem (focus is not lost on GUI issues), and then work on GUI development.

This allows very loosely coupled yet highly cohesive systems to be easily built. The main problem I face with others who adopt a GUI-driven development method (which has many merits of course) is they start to confuse elements/logic/tiers and tie things together too much at too early a stage and hence is is no separation of concerns and elements making systems harder to change/scale/iterate-upon etc.
I'd be unhappy to get random invites via whatever method. Whatever happened to word of mouth? Of people telling other people about a cool app/site off their own back, because they like it and it's useful to them?
"Many B2C companies go viral by convincing current users to upload their address books and email their friends."

This is just 'legitimized' spam IMHO.

If your product is that good, you don't have to "convince current users" to help you spam... If you make your product really well, people will market it for you, because they like it and want to tell their friends.
Anything that encourages Linux use (especially by Windows users) is good.

Until people are exposed to other systems, they will never really appreciate how poor Windows is at many things.
It's very sad for the publishing industry. If they cannot find a system that allows authors to make a reasonable amount of money, they're not going to last long considering that it's much more convenient and less stressful to just publish your book online, if you're gonna do it for free (and is just as good for your reputation if you do it right).
I was being sarcastic you know...
USA County Map
Editable USA Map with counties and state objects in Adobe Illustrator format.
Something I settled on personally is:

You should have a standard build environment in a virtual machine.

This comes pretty naturally if you're doing nightly builds and aggregates 90% of any build.txt into: copy this VM from the DVD to your hard drive and fire it up.

Of course, you should maintain a full build.txt anyway. Having a standard build VM which nobody could rebuild from scratch brings its own set of problems.
Why can't you store the save games on the server? You can easily store a unique access key in the default 100k for casual users (and I assume that registered users log in).
A more modest real-time visualization I made some time ago: http://www.lkozma.net/wpv
The local revolution in mobile is coming. Verve Wireless is ready to spread the news
It's had that for a while, try command-F
A Look At April's Mass SQL Server Injection Attack
I think all you need is a game loop (that is the difference to web programming).

while(isGameRunning){

processInputs();

processMonsters();

updateScreen();

}

It really is quite straightforward. Start with something simple like Tetris.
I think the solution is really simple. Add down voting and make all kinds of points invisible - or atleast individual karma.
Dude, I am an Indian and this isnt much of a web app. Its a SMS gateway with a few tweaks.
O2(UK) Debunk iPhone2 tethering rumor.
The author is mistaken. You should have no getters and setters of primitive data types. There should be no

private String custName;

public String get custName(){...}

public set custName(String cn){...}

The way to handle this situation is to make a custID object that contains custName, and allows you to add custAvatar, custNumber, etc., as needs change and grow. Then it's ok to have getters and setters for the custID object.

I often find that my "data" objects (custID in the above) have all public variables (that is, custName is public, custID is public, etc.). I find it preposterous to have private variables and public getters and setters that do no "processing" of the input.

The reason for encapsulating this way is that if, two years later, you find your needs change and you need other information attached to the "customer," you don't break your old contracts. It's easy to add data to the data object for the objects that now need them, and for the others to ignore it.
ok, good point :) So, basically limitVolume is used to push the implementation of the that scenario up the food chain, to the player itself. How about when I want to set the volume exactly 50, depending on certain triggers.

What if I have no control on the videoPlayer, (third party), and now I am limited only on the scenarios they thought were ok to implement?

I guess, that's the point of the author, to enforce encapsulation, but by limiting the actions to only "verbs", the author is restricing the user of that object to what he thinks he should be doing.

Basically, the author is limiting my ability to do things the author didn't thought I needed.

It is like pushing implementation up, and, limiting what users can do. It will probably be a system with less bugs, but also a cripled one.
Easy: When you see a job that you sort of don't want, quote a higher rate and see if they bite. Repeat until you've topped out.
I had the same problem, have you got correct reverse DNS record? it may help.
If I paypal you the $10 can I get beta access to your games for the next year? It feels like a much better deal if you commit to making future episodic content or if there are community tools to make new levels. Maybe puzzle rooms that you have to reclear until you solve? I think building a level editor is the next logical step and this is a great game mechanic to develop further.
I too wanted to do this.

I keep finding my way back there just in case it opens up.
Really annoying. Why can't people build things to help others not hinder them?
The Green City of the Future
Ask YC: Why does Paul Graham use the Yahoo favicon?
Whenever i go to www.paulgraham.com, I notice that the site uses a favicon that is extremely similar to the Yahoo logo, (i.e. Y!). It even uses the same color and font. Can this be linked to PG once working in Yahoo or does it just stand for YCombinator? I am really curious, any hints?
EDIT: This was a very poor post, but I think there's enough in there to discuss (aside from the awful first amendment stuff and the rhetorical rambling that went on -- please, learn to structure your arguments!)

I'd like to bring up one interesting point: Karma shouldn't matter -- yet the entire site is built on karma: who has more can downmod comments, top posters are regularly identified, all sorts of fun articles come out about how karma relates to posting style, etc.

You can't have a karma system and then say "but it doesn't mean something" Surely it's not the end-all or the greatest thing ever created, but the entire reason karma works is that it has some value to the users.

So however the discussion proceeds, can we please get beyond this "but karma shouldn't matter when you post" That's like saying it's okay to lose a couple of points in tennis if you're having a good time. It's a true statement, but it does not describe how one plays tennis. (instead it describes how having fun is more important than the rules, which is true of all sorts of things) If we're going to discuss one particular rule/moderation system, then such comments are unhelpful, imo.
Amen. Any company that doesn't understand this pretty much makes itself ineligible for "going viral".
Here’s Our New Policy On A.P. stories: They’re Banned
The graphics in this are above and beyond anything I've ever seen in a 2D flash game. Breathtaking!
I spent several days in April/May fixing problems caused by this SQL hack at the place where I am contracting :(
I've made a reasonable amount of money from my book, and it's not all that popular. It wouldn't qualify as full-time work for me, but since I've written it I've had a steady stream of additional income. No complaints.
It _is_ the Yahoo! logo. paulgraham.com still runs on Viaweb, which is now Yahoo Store, which is probably where the favicon comes from.