skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is a very good point I haven't seen expressed elsewhere before. It's hard to know, but the OLPC program hopefully has a few circling social scientists who will be happy to test this hypothesis.
as a freelancer on the side, myself, i'd say that you should consider asking him if he would be willing to scale back his hourly rate the more hours he works on your project or the more hours you can guarantee him contractually.

i do this, as if i have a longer-term, solid project to work on, i know i'll have that committed income stream, so i can afford to charge less since i know i won't be having a dry spell.
Cool game - reminds me of Smash TV
It is not illegal to drop emails.

That being said, are you positive the problem is with hotmail itself and not its mail handlers?

For example, if you use the incorrect sort of line breaks [1] in an email that gets sent to a qmail server, the server will silently drop that email message. It will report an error textually but not return an actual error code. This could make it look like your email was getting dropped. This happens quite frequently with machine generated emails.

Who knows if MSN / Hotmail uses qmail, but my point is that there may be other matters afoot than Hotmail intentionally playing hardball with you.

[1] Qmail pukes when you send an email that contains carriage returns without line feeds.
I would say you get what you pay for.

QFT. I have seen the quality of his services, we've talked about our own personal ethics and approaches to development on the kinds of things my company works for, and he's the guy I want on staff.
Way too many words, downvoting for disagreement is (unfortunately) encouraged; pg has already given his edict:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171
Also: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=218289
The principle he is looking for is called the scarcity principle. By falsely limiting his amount of "available" popcorn, its value increased.

Since the time between his decision and the movie was relatively short, his need for popcorn never reached the point where it was equitable with the increased value of the single handful of popcorn.

Nevertheless, cool hack.
SMS is more capable, by far more reliable and complex system than Twitter. (guess how do I know?) Most Americans are unaware of it because it has never been popular here due to pricing differences but it's changing. SMS are multi-casted more often than you think and the load I've seen were several times that of Twitter. I am not calling anyone stupid or incapable, I suspect it's just a side effect of "release early, release often" mantra.

And don't exaggerate for the sake of exaggeration: how many Twitter users have "thousands" of followers?
DHH: Twitter me this
You could add TrollTech, purveyors of Qt, to that list as well.
Out of curiosity, what's the number of hours at which this discount kicks in?
This is spot on. If you know he's your guy, offer him $$ up front or guaranteed billable hours per week for a lower rate. As a former freelancer for 10 years, I'd often dropped my rate if I was guaranteed $$ or hours.
Ella Fitzgerald at low volume behind the gameplay music? Brilliant!
For me, it was usually something like, guaranteed 40hr/week for 4 weeks or just paying for 80 hours up front. So, instead of working for someone for 2 weeks, and then getting paid, I was already paid and thus knew I had a 2 week bubble should something end the project.

Sort of like, first, last, and a deposit when it comes to rent, but for a freelancer.
If he's fantastic and believes in what you're doing, what about bringing equity into the equation?

I ordinarily say, "Contractors don't get equity. End of discussion." But it sounds like money is tight, and you have deadlines to meet and/or goals to achieve that this person can help you achieve--that's what equity is for: The things that you can't get any other way. If you can't afford him, then you can't get it in the normal manner.

The other option: Trade equity to an investor for money--more than it takes to bring this person on board. It's still giving up equity, but it'll probably buy you more in the long run.

Or, keep negotiating. Rates are negotiable until one party gives a plain ol' "No". If he isn't having to juggle jobs to make ends meet, he may be willing and able to work on your project in order to do something fun. When I did contract work, I lowered my rate all the way down to 1/3 the normal rate to work on stuff I really liked. And when I could no longer give them my full attention at those rates, I left the job and helped them in the process of hiring a replacement.
And if you pay money for software, it's out on Tuesday.
MySpace to get overhaul
Perhaps I should have said it's nice to see Google giving us the tools we need to defend ourselves against those who may limit our access to bandwidth intensive websites, like youtube, and in turn defending Googles ability to sell ads on those videos.

However it's a brilliant strategy nonetheless. It's essentially crowdsourcing the policing of ISPs.
You might consider just hiring someone as a w-2 or otherwise someone who has never freelanced (or is not currently a freelancer.) Even if you could not hire this person long term at least the person would be able to gain some experience and cash.

The problem with freelancers is that they have lots of overhead. They may not have to pay a lot for equipment or a building but they have limited hours and many of those hours are spent doing non billable stuff. The overhead is in the lost time keeping the business going.

A freelancer with a long term gig could lower rates a bit but many of those overhead items still remain. Even with a long term contract a freelancer still has to do marketing, keep sending out invoices, "maintain" the clients and many other things that a non freelancer doesn't have to worry about.
Alternative to drilling = no need to drill in wildlife preserves. [good]

Alternative to drilling = main money-maker of middle east going to be eliminated (good for us, bad for people living there). [bad]

Alternative to drilling = global warming problems going to worsen because oil-user companies (car companies etc...) will have less incentive to become more efficient. I just hope that this "carbon negative" statement they made is not a pr-ploy [ugly]
Apple isn't going to support 64bit Carbon.
We had the exact same issue with these morons. Email them and explain what's up. They will add you to their "white list". Funny thing is how their SMTP server accepts messages without errors and then just silently drops them.

It's Microsoft we're dealing with here.
nice one... i love it... is it completely coded in flash?
it really depends on the situation and the individual contractor.

in general, though, if you can offer at least 20 hours/wk for a period of more than just one week, try making a deal. the more hours you can offer, the better deal can be negotiated.

also, especially in situations like this, be nice/good to them. if you're easy to work for, that'll be a good influence in your favor.
So far I'm liking this option the best, thanks for all the feedback. I'll be talking with the co-owner this week and we'll come to an agreement or compromise.
If an order of magnitude speedup is "astonishing" then the field must have become overconfident and complacent. Great to see someone rocking the boat. But does anyone care to explain any more (in English, for us plebes) more about how this is astonishing? I'm not challenging the assessment; I'm just curious about what it means.

And some interesting words from one of the other papers: what are "classifier regret" and "ranking regret"? Is that a metric of how often you go down the wrong path or something?
I actually think quite a few people have "thousands" of followers. I don't have anything to back this up, but I think you'd be surprised as to how many people follow the more popular people on twitter.
I am conflicted on this issue. On the one hand, I believe in a situation where perseverance and risk taking is rewarded. On the other, it is true that many people with bright ideas do not go the startup route because they have family responsibilities or something similar that holds them back.

It's too simplistic to say that a social safety net will encourage entrepreneurship. It will probably enable more people to start up companies, esp in the tech sector, but it will equally lead to more deadwood entering the system.
Regarding Carbon and Accessibility, VoiceOver, etc.:

Every standard view on Mac OS X receives accessibility and VoiceOver support, whether it comes from Carbon or Cocoa. So Carbon isn't the reason this breaks in Firefox.
Okay, here's some of the reasons that occur to me:

It's not just blogs. It's also new web apps, aggregators, wikis, mashups, and documentation.

Users also get to reuse their avatar/username across multiple sites which might encourage commenting.

It has good nested threading support which most blog software doesn't include for some psychotic reason.

It has good anti-spam which prevents you from needing akismet or defensio integration.

They support video comments now that most blogs won't support.

...

Currently, I'm debating adding it to bug.gd rather than adding new features to our own commenting system. Why reinvent the wheel if we have a tool that does it for us?

The only cons I see right away:

Loss of serch engine benefits of having the comment content hosted on someone else's site.

Risk to your site if it goes down.

I also wonder how it handles incredible traffic.
Angel Investors Ignore Credit Crunch
What about find as you type? I really wish Safari had this.
3 Ways to Try Out Linux, For a Windows User
Can't play with my Flash Security settings. Why can't you at least let me play a demo, before I adjust the security slider?
The article talks about having too many of these, period, which I certainly agree with: it's a bad sign.

But if they must exist, you should have a facility for doing them in an automatic way. If you don't, you are better off keeping data members public.

Of course, I really like how Python properties handle this, because the syntax is the same as if the accessor methods never existed.
Fun game, but it's missing the huge boss battles that made Smash TV so awesome (Seriously, if you want to up your conversion rates on purchases, make that last room in Episode 4 an onslaught to remember instead of four easily disposable dorks).
I can't believe people are so caught up in the net-neutrality propaganda.

Most people could care less about net neutrality b/c they use their internet connection for some web surfing, file transfers, and generally fit within the usage pattern that made their ISP (acting as a bandwidth reseller/speculator) determine that the price should be around $60/month.

If you're one of the small percentage of users who wishes to use p2p software and soak up 100% of available bandwidth at all times, then you are not compatible with the bandwidth estimates that your ISP used to determine the price of your service.

The ISP has two choices, it can either make its basic plan very restrictive (for example, forcing everyone to use http through a proxy server and blocking everything else), or it can use more subtle -- LESS INVASIVE -- measures such as blocking p2p traffic or imposing a cap on the 1-2% of users who use 99% of the bandwidth.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with this. It's like moving into an apartment where the landlord offers "free" water service and filling up a tanker truck each day with the "free" water. You would be violating the spirit of the agreement, and it would be reasonable for the landlord to be upset, or to change the policy.

Google wants net neutrality b/c it envisions a world in which http traffic could be modified (by non-neutral ISPs) to harm its ad network. This is Google's big, scary, what-if that motivates its current stance. Google also owns miles of dark fiber which could be used to do any of the non-neutral objectives Google may have, including offering all kinds of proprietary services over "the googlenet".
It seems that downvotes would definitely decrease - I would bet that a large portion of them would not have been made in public. If nothing else it might increase the number of replies to a post - It would be slightly embarrassing to see your name as one of the downvoters if you didn't also reply to the post.

Enabling downvotes on submissions could also be interesting - maybe to downvote a submission you have to comment about it or about why you downvoted it. Revealing voting could add an additional feature to the site - if we see that someone who likes the same stuff voted something up, then we'll probably read it.
I use Firefox solely for the Delicious plugin. There's nothing for Safari like it unfortunately :(
I think there is a generalization here worth mentioning-- you need to understand what your contractor actually wants and figure out the best incentive for him. For example I value being able to work multiple jobs at the same time and/or on my own stuff. This implies when I give people a deal on a rate I give them a LOWER rate for the FIRST X hours and then the rate goes up after X. The client is happy because he knows he's getting a deal for the first X hours but more hours are always available if needed albeit at a higher rate. I try to make the average rate over 40 hours a slight deal for the client. This strategy seems to make clients happy as they wind up with a real deal on the first X hours. And I get diversity/freedom. Everyone wins.
Oh yeah, that's a truly excellent feature (which I think they stole from OmniWeb -- I seem to remember OmniWeb having a feature like that)
Good point... this game needs more Mutoid Man
I think the article sums up some important steps, definitely problems I've seen on other projects before.

One thing I would add is to regularly repeat the "wipe, checkout and rebuild" process, especially as part of releasing the product. It's scary if someone builds software out of their messy work-area and releases it for "production", instead of using a clean tree in the middle of nowhere. It's just too easy to forget to check something in that matters.
Very impressive! Unfortunately, I can't give any higher praise than "a well-executed dungeon-crawler with style." I'm having a blast now, but I get the impression I won't look back after beating it.

In many ways, this sci-fi, shooting, dungeon-crawling RPG reminds me of "Virus Hunter," a walk-through example used in the Game Design program of "Cybercamp," which I enrolled in when I was 10. Is there some common inspiration I'm not familiar with? I highly doubt Virus Hunter had much originality...

As a comic side-note, I initially thought the Light weapons meant they fired light as their projectile.

P.S.: I must compliment the decision to jump straight from one mission to the next. I initially told myself I'd stop after beating mission 1, but, with the game offering no natural breaking point (e.g.: "Congratulations! Save and continue?" or some other kind of pop-up exposition or prompt -- an analogous phenomenon: it's easier to put down a book between chapters than one paragraph into the next chapter) , I found myself telling myself "I'll stop after beating this mission." As mission 3 rolled around, I found it hard to force myself to quit. It's the game designer's job to get the players addicted, and you certainly succeeded there!
Doesn't directly answer your question, but read the comment by thedelimiter on the page below and it may provide some insight :D

http://www.reddit.com/info/6nh28/comments/c04d5l0
I think the real question is: Why the hell would you need a 64-bit browser?
To answer your last question, yes. I had no idea my game was being saved until I read your comment.
Bill Gates Makes 2.8 Million Every Morning for The Past 20 years
I love the game. My only problem with it is that when Flash gets busy (lots of items on the screen), the controls get sticky. I've fallen off the side several times because I let go of a button while Flash was bogged down and it didn't register... so I kept going in that direction.

I'm on a dual 2ghz G5 with a gig of ram, running in Safari, in case you're curious.

As a side note, I'm an AS3 coder and though I love my current job that has nothing to do with games, it's stuff like this that makes me entertain thoughts of game development. I'm gonna go read the technical notes from your link now....
Getters and Setters are ok in Java, but not in python. Java compilers are smart enough to optimize, and inline if a getter and setter has no side effects.

But while it is good to avoid them, sometimes it is impossible.

Consider this pseucode, a simple scenario, when starting a video, if the default volume is too loud, I want to reduce it somewhere in the middle.:

....

videoPlayer.play("myvideo.mpg")

int vol = videoPlayer.getVolume()

if ( vol > 50 ) {

videoPlayer.setVolume(50)

}

Getters and setters make perfect sense.

Avoiding them is good, but I really don't trust people that scream "Getters and setters are evil". No, they are not. They have their place, but as everything they should not be overused.
But in terms of bad software design, if somebody overused them and exposed things should be exposed, they are pretty begnin, not even close to Dr. Evil evil, more like mini-me evil.
I suppose this is why Steve Jobs has it in for them.
Inovative Sports
This will change the way people meet their goals
I don't understand the objection here to getters and setters. Sometimes part of the public interface of an object is as simple as a property that can be read or written.

Is the idea just that a large number of getters and setters are a good indicator of poorly chosen encapsulation boundaries? I haven't seen code go wrong that way.
It would be good to have something Apple-supported, but this certainly wouldn't be the first Cocoa port (see GNUstep for Linux).

The thing is, Mac OS X is compelling to developers for reasons beyond Cocoa. So just how much would Apple have to provide on Windows, before Windows is worth my time anymore?

For example, I love being able to depend on Python and basic Unix tools without asking users to download them. And I like that POSIX APIs are supported. These aren't Cocoa, and sure aren't available out of the box on Windows.
Deep Profiling jQuery Apps
They're UI designers. That is their work.
hehe, yes, that was well done.
With tens and hundreds of emails in the INBOX, going forward, how much would email contribute to the virality of the application? Can SMS work out to be an interesting alternative? SMS is guaranteed to be delivered, there is no SPAM filtering yet and the probability of reading SMS is much higher than an email.
Don't get me wrong, I don't think SMS on a truly large scale is trivial. I do, however, think SMS messaging is fundamentally different to what Twitter is doing. The former is unicast: I send you a message. It needs to be stored somewhere (your SMS inbox). Twitter is multicast: I send a message, everyone who subscribe to me needs to get that message.

Now, misunderstand me correctly; I don't think this is anything new. My former boss built tools (over 20 years ago) that ran such systems as the NYSE, Swiss Air-traffic control, etc that did fault-tolerant multicast. And the uptime there was somewhat better than Twitter.

What led me to post the original comment was this: They are not solving the same problem, but if they were their architecture would be just as flawed as Twitter's.
But at the same time he is one of the most generous people out there.
I think the original post is suggesting that your pseudocode should look something like:

videoPlayer.play("myvideo.mpg")

videoPlayer.limitVolume(50)

I have to admit, in this kind of example, his argument is interesting.
I find it fascinating that a tool or startup (no matter how innovative) that is utilized by only 6000 or so Web sites gets so much attention when:

Haloscan, JS-Kit, Sezwho and a score of others dominate this niche.

JS-Kit alone is used by over 50,000 sites and reaches in excess of 20 million people

The entity in question has a nebulous monetization model

This same platform so far has no revenue sharing for publishers

And most importantly Disqus has no viable way to allow publishers benefit from their own content's SEO aspect when their content will reside on Disqus servers.

Disqus is a refined commenting system that in my opinion is designed to be sold to a brand rather than taken to its natural conclusion by Daniel and his team. This is the only logical reason for there not being a monetization or business model in place (or at least in view) and for apparently pirating massive SEO benefit from published comments (Google might like this, or any business that can derive such an SEO bonanza).

It is in Fred Wilson's benefit to see that the world thinks a comment system will replace Google, and this is why you see such assertions (he is in on the investment). I on the other hand represent JS-Kit and have an interest too. So, I suggest you do your investigating and see what the story is for yourselves.

I was one of the first to review Disqus when it arrived om the scene - a great platform and a bright developer. At the time I did not know of any flaws however. These flaws appear to reside in the intentions of the startup toward content, its owners and transparency in my view. Perhaps you should ask the question: "Show me the money" a little more forcefully?
Ebay Opens Up Seller Tools As A Platform
| So, do you have an example of an implementation that doesn't have this problem or are you just assuming one exists?

Neither! I'm assuming one _can_ exist. I think I have an idea on how to make it work; I just don't have a forum to test it on, yet.
I can see what the author is trying to get at. If you are talking about building a library with an API, or maybe even a command line tool, then what he says has quite a bit of wisdom to it.

Unfortunately for the author, industry's long experience with GUI apps indicates that MVC is the way to go - when I consider the frameworks that I use for writing UIs, the two that most clearly give me an MVC architecture (Cocoa and Rails), are easily the most productive frameworks that I use.

This comes into conflict with the original article when you consider the M of MVC. A Model makes no sense at all without getters and setters. It's job is mostly to handle serialisation of data - either to a database using ORM (ActiveRecord), or to a file using something like Cocoa's NSCoding protocol. It may even be used for serialising data to be sent over the network.

Regardless, if the UI can't get it's hands on the data, the data is useless. So how can we get the data to the UI. If you look in the comments section of the article, the autor suggests (in responding to a question for how to populate a pull-down menu list) that you create a method in the model class that takes a pull-down menu as a parameter, and then populates the menu. No! Models should never even know what a pull-down menu is! How can I re-use my model code elsewhere if it is tied to a GUI.

Again, going back to ActiveRecord. I can create a model class inheriting from ActiveRecord, and re-use exactly the same class in a RubyCocoa app, or a Rails app. How am I supposed to do that if my model class starts spitting out html, or starts calling NSArrayControllers?

No. If the author is right, then MVC must be wrong, and quite frankly I don't think that he has presented a strong enough case to justify one of the more successful architectural choices that we as an industry have found over the last 50 odd years.
Those other comment systems must be dominating in a very subtle way -- I've never once seen them. On the other hand, I encounter Disqus comments every day.
The Inside Word on Word-of-Mouth Marketing