skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
How Much Should I Charge My Clients?
Whether you’re a brand new web designer, or an experienced web developer, you should have pondered this question at some point. I think putting a price on my time was one of the most difficult and subjective things I’ve had to do. My biggest consideration was how much I needed to make to cover my overhead & make a profit. Usually when you’re in business, you want a few bucks to show for it.
More Pictures of BMW's GINA
The new copyright bill has been tabled in Canada
previous bills have not passed
Previous attempts have not passed through parliament.
Yep, look here: http://tinyurl.com/5wrbfq
Colocation in San Francisco?
Does anyone have advice/recommendations about colocation in San Francisco? I need a full rack, 5Mbps. I took a tour of 365 Main and was impressed, but it's very expensive ~$1400/month for such a setup.
Flixwagon Unlocks iPhone Live Video Streaming (only on unlocked phones)
The software solution is possible - you could use a program called Inet Protect (http://www.blumentals.net/inetprot/) to only allow internet access during certain hours of the day. The other solution is guilt-based, using SphericalTech's time tracking software to produce reports of where you spend your time. However, I doubt it will help in the long term.
Few things smell worse and when you are in a small dressing room with a team of guys and their equipment. Yikes!

Actually some googling after that comment led me to this: http://www.thestar.com/Business/article/429427. These guys claim that the croc-style equipment only masks the problem while their stuff kills the odour-causing bacteria. If the next front in the war between equipment makers is on anti-stink technology I am all for it!
> Who keeps voting them up?

Perhaps economically literate people who agree with the arguments? Schiff is a little on the alarmist side, but it takes a megaphone to be heard over the geyser of bull-tard propaganda that dominates popular business discussion. You get ahead in America by joining the rah-rah chorus and people just don't want to hear bad news.

> Everybody Panic articles.

Schiff is very positive and bullish on certain countries and certain sectors. "Everybody panic" is not his theme; it's "US citizens should panic." If you paid attention to him six years ago and panicked, and moved out of USD denominated assets you're something like 50% richer than your neighbors. So who's being irrational?

> "The Great Depression of the 1990s"

What's your point? Various idiots make bad predictions all the time? So what? Might as well mention "Dow 30000". Schiff isn't an idiot. His arguments are sound.
There is an important demographic shift happening, and anyone starting a business that rides a large social wave would be wise to pay attention to it.

In the 1980s and 1990s, the younger generation was put down as cynical, slackers, no good, apathetic, criminal, etc. They were seen as too individualistic, not group-oriented enough. The Gen Y generational put-downs are new: too group-oriented, lacking individual initiative, too nice, "coddled", etc. There's underlying truth in both kinds of put-down, even if (of course) they don't apply to every person in each generation. As Gen Y gets older, the optimism, group orientation, and lack of individual initiative will become even more clear. For one thing, they'll seek strong leadership from government. And of course, the changing demographic will both create and destroy business opportunities.

Strauss 7 Howe's books _Generations_ and _The Fourth Turning_ make a lot of interesting observations (and predictions) about this.
BiPolar Investing: Investors Fight for Chickens' Rights
I read the title wrong and thought it was 15 tools to help me develop web pages faster, not faster web pages :(

Oh well, yslow + firebug ftw!
I believe crocs sold out to a bigger company as fast as they could. So the original founders have made there money and have been smart because Crocs = LA Gear. Popular one day, burn them the next. Nurses might still wear them, they will have a specialty market.
Chemists get scoop on crude 'oil' from pig manure
Put ADHD kids in settings more like the dynamic env. of our nomad forebears
> Perhaps economically literate people who agree with the arguments

... for some odd values of "economically literate", and who haven't caught on that this site is not for the discussion of one's pet economic and political theories.
OMeta: http://www.cs.ucla.edu/~awarth/ometa/

and the rest of VPRI's

"STEPS Toward The Reinvention of Programming"

q.G.
This reminded me a little of "You Weren't Meant to have a Boss"
They've said that they would rather do a few cities very well than do a bunch of cities poorly. Also, one of the biggest obstacle is finding, getting permission to use, cleaning up, and publishing different datasets. This is much more of a social problem than technological, although it might improve when they have good reference implementations in their initial cities. Right now they have different datasets for each city because they take what data they can get.

The good news is that the journalism grant that funded them stipulated that they have to release their code at the end of the project, so when that comes, each city can make their own Everyblock if they have the will.
Compared to XP yes. No question. I just dislike the fact that having an iPod or iPhone gives me a great piece of hardware that can't run any software, not because nobody makes it, but because Apple won't allow it.

With the EEE I am not limited to what Asus states are acceptable programs to run. Thats pretty much it. The down side of the EEE is that it does not fit in my pocket.
If you're considering MOSS from a startup perspective, I'd stay far away from it. The licensing for it is expensive, and hiring people to work on it is also expensive.

Unless you have a full .Net infrastructure and team in place, you could probably find better alternatives elsewhere.
Print your documents from the cloud
To make a complete Apples to Apples comparison we need to see if the beefed up plan pricing applies to ALL AT&T phones using the 3G capabilities or only iPhone.

What would be nicer is if we could get an iPhone for the sprint network :P
ColoServe is around the corner and generally cheaper. But $1400 for a full rack (assuming at least 20A) is not a bad deal in this city. You'll find cheaper colo as you leave the city and peninsula.
As the comments here show, people tend to come down on unit testing in a binary way (love it or hate it). Like a lot of things in software, especially in software process and double-especially when consultants and authors are involved, it became a religious question. Advocates insist up and down that they love it, it saves time, it's all good. But it's not all good. Unit testing has benefits and it also has costs: you have to write the tests and you have to maintain them. The cost of an entire second codebase is hardly insignificant. So the rational question to be asking is whether the benefits exceed the cost, or rather, when they do.

My experience is that it depends on things like language, environment, and team. I've written many thousands of unit tests in C# and Java and trained quite a few people to write them, too. But when I began working in Common Lisp, I was surprised to find that didn't need them as much. I write and test my code by evaluating expressions in the REPL and I mostly write functional code without side-effects. This turns out to yield many of the benefits of unit testing without many of the costs. The overall tradeoff becomes different, making unit testing less valuable, except in targeted places. Other things that in my experience increase the overall benefit of unit testing include OO designs, larger teams, and corporate environments.

How much I enjoy writing unit tests depends on my gut feeling of whether the benefits are exceeding the costs. If I'm struggling with a tricky algorithm that I want to work out a bunch of examples for, I enjoy writing unit tests very much because they're helping me solve my problem. But if I'm going through the motions of updating a bunch of unit tests that aren't relevant to what I really want to do (and this happens a lot on larger XP projects despite what the advocates say), I don't enjoy it.
Twingly Blog Search Engine Now Public (With Widgets)
Heathrow, Beijing: A tale of 2 airports
The Simple Pleasure of Taking Notes
I'm not sure of the causal direction, but my mood and productivity both seem to shoot up whenever I take playful notes throughout the day. Here's how I do it:

1. I always have a pen(/pencil) and 3x5" notecard on me.

2. One side of the card is for to-dos (i.e., don't go to bed until you finish these N things), and the other for observations, questions, funny quotes from professors, books I should read, things to write about, etc.

3. When I'm bored or at least once at night, I go through the day's notes and (a) act on the easy ones, and (b) put the idea stuff in a text file for later.

I find that having a simple way to take notes keeps me on the ball and intellectually engaged. It may be a bit weird to whip out a note-card in public, but I've found that tons of stuff I didn't think was worth jotting down ends up being a gold mine later on.
Ask YC: Want to learn about GPS/Location Based Programming. Where to start? 
Hi all - I'm fascinated by the notion of GPS/Location Based programming and generally programming mobile apps that are location aware. I've read some primers and have a tech background, so wondering if the community had links or background to share to learn more?

I guess the fundamental questions are:

1) How much can a programmer do without striking deals with the big telecoms (i.e. can you now get around it with the new location aware phones).
2) What kind of APIs already exist?
3) At the end of the day, the challenge is to get the location (longitude/latititude) of a phone user. The rest is up to the idea/execution of the app. I need to know what to read/learn to enable me to hack an app to get that location.

I know this is HUGELY simplified, but hope you get the gist.
Nevertheless, the only one of the three that is even approaching success is the bakery. The one traditional "startup" (rentingyourhome) does sound like every other internet entrepreneur -- in a bad way. His idea sounds like it has serious structural deficiencies, and now he's hiring indian lawyers to make up for the slack. Brilliant. Perhaps these structural deficiencies are the reason he's having the "standard challenges" to which you refer.

Having a website does not change the basic rules of business. These small companies may not be "start-ups", but the lessons still apply: focus, don't overreach, make money fast.
One key to Crocs' success has been their materials. I think they were also keenly aware of how easy their product could be copied and/or have a company clone their product especially in this post-China production world; they're just mold slippers after all. By vertically integrating their entire logistics chain they're ensuring one form of competitive advantage. Those cheap knockoffs at Target or WalMart looks the same but just quite isn't right because they don't have access to the materials manufacturer.

The same strategy wouldn't work for other companies. Apple for example source so many parts it's not feasible for them to own the entire logistics chain.
I can give you a teeny tiny head start. Here is the logic for determining the distance (in miles) between two points.

sqrt((power(69.1 * (latitude1 - latitude2),2) + power(69.1 * (longitude1 - longitude2) * cos(latitude1 / 57.3), 2)))

This is coming from SQL server... it took a little fidgeting to get the actual distances right because of the weird curvature of the earth issue; but it should get you close for reasonable distances.

The Yahoo! geocoding API is pretty nice for getting lats and longs for addresses in the US:

http://developer.yahoo.com/maps/rest/V1/geocode.html
Ask YC: What do you want to know about mobile usage? (An Open Source Survey)
Just received a request from a large (purposely unnamed) client for a POV on mobile strategy.

For the project I'm going to conduct a wide-cast survey, largely for anecdotal support. My question to YC/HN is: what do you want to know about mobile phone users? What questions would you like answered, what subjects would you like quotes regarding, etc...

I'll be writing up and hosting the survey online in a few days, and submitting it online a bit later. It'll run for a week or so.

The answers will be posted online, and I'll even host the data in a raw format (names removed) for anyone to use. If successful, I'll host a few more YC/HN polls on various (and suggested subjects).
Don't forget getting a hosting provider with low latency.

Actual hostnames have been changed to protect the guilty and to avoid spamming on behalf of the innocent. If you really want to know, the IP address is there.

BAD:

$ ping suckyhosting.com

PING suckyhosting.com (66.39.3.7): 56 data bytes

64 bytes from 66.39.3.7: icmp_seq=0 ttl=56 time=85.547 ms

64 bytes from 66.39.3.7: icmp_seq=1 ttl=56 time=85.164 ms

64 bytes from 66.39.3.7: icmp_seq=2 ttl=56 time=84.244 ms

64 bytes from 66.39.3.7: icmp_seq=3 ttl=56 time=89.111 ms

^C

--- suckyhosting.com ping statistics ---

4 packets transmitted, 4 packets received, 0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 84.244/86.017/89.111/1.848 ms

GOOD:

$ ping myprovider.net

PING myprovider.net (216.218.186.2): 56 data bytes

64 bytes from 216.218.186.2: icmp_seq=0 ttl=57 time=12.773 ms

64 bytes from 216.218.186.2: icmp_seq=1 ttl=57 time=11.947 ms

64 bytes from 216.218.186.2: icmp_seq=2 ttl=57 time=12.747 ms

64 bytes from 216.218.186.2: icmp_seq=3 ttl=57 time=15.037 ms

Geography matters too, but even for locale-specific sites, it may be better to have a US-based provider with super-great network connections (with good access to a MAE, for example), hopefully also redundant connections, than to have a poorly-connected provider closer to the geographic region you are serving.
"Meraki is donating the devices plus free Internet access to any San Francisco resident who wants them. Neighbors within a block's radius of the device can tap into the Internet for free, too."

It's ad-supported internet access. They insert a thin javascript ad toolbar at the top or bottom of every web page you view.
Wow, cool. This is the kind of stuff I'm looking for. Tips and tricks to help me start coding and experiment. Thanks!
Ask HN: Best framework to build RIAs?
Hi All,
I just wanted to ask you all for your advice...
I already have a great idea, I have done the market research, the funds are in the bank, I am moving to SV mid July and I just cannot wait to launch my product!!!
Unfortunately I am not a hacker :( ... although I do know my stuff - I have a technical background but went from student (Computer Science) to being a business analyst for IT & Web companies...

So I have a couple of questions I wanted to ask your advice on:
1. What do you think is the best framework to build RIAs?
2. Do you know if it is very hard to find kick-ass flex developers?

Many Thanks!
R
That's especially shocking given that you spelled masturbate wrong ;-)
For once I heartily agree with DHH. It does not need to be all-or-nothing. Full stop.
That's an interesting point. Are there legal impediments in place that prevent such outsourcing? I don't know the law on this. The American Bar Association is a very power organization, with the added detail that their members also happen to write the laws in this country.
Palm Users Get Their Own Optimized Facebook App
Interesting, but for me, I'd still happily use the iPhone for the same reason I have a MacBook and not something with linux installed.

I can see android being hugely successful for people who want to learn, tinker, and develop - just as linux is. But if you want to just get stuff done, I'd say MacBook/iPhone wins against Linux/Android.

Also I don't think Android has that much chance against the lure of the iPhone. There's a clear upgrade path/leverage system from iPods (which pretty much everyone has) to iPhone.
Power of a Dev Shop
Thank you for pointing that out... if you hadn't, I would have.

Now compare that chart with Heely's HLYS. Or Jones Soda JSDA.

These are fad stocks based off trendy items...however:

The only difference with CROX is that they have a patent on a very good material. They can license it out, but it won't have near the revenue as their ugly plastic shoes.

For more analysis, read the beginning of this article:

www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=fashion
If this post is off topic then so are almost all of pg's essays.
At least this is a primary source instead of the typical "Arrington misrepresents the facts to get ad revenue". Refreshing.
My first C++ instructor compared operator<< and operator>> to eating and vomiting. I am having trouble reconstructing how the analogy worked though.
There is supposed to be a standing rule against linkjacking (link directly to the primary source instead of a blog post about it if possible).
Google/Yahoo Search Partnership Announcement At 1:30 This Afternoon
Try postgis, it's really cool with postgres. You can add a column which makes evaluating distance between points really easy. If you want to find out what points are near a given lat,long.
A good title tag needs to focus on one or two key phrases. If the whole site is on one page, you can't make a good title tag to cover everything. Better to have a different page for each topic and optimize title, body text, and thinks for the topic the page covers. If all inbound links are equal, the optimized page will always beat the all-in-one page.
train your brain
Living with your parents if you're lazy or a freeloader is lame. There are countless good reasons beyond those to live with your parents if they're cool with it. What's disgusting about that? I lived with my parents until I was finished my degree when I was 24. I've had friends who hit tough times move back home to get back on their feet (who were accepted with open arms). I've had other friends stay home longer than I did because their goals did not bring them the financial benefits of others and it took longer to become self-sufficient. Their parents were more than happy to support them when they did not have the means to achieve their goals on their own. I don't personally find any of this disgusting.
What comes to mind directly is the rough ratio of users' use of their stock browser vs third-party internet apps they downloaded.

Also, if they ever used a mobile app and if so, if they purchased it or got it via a free download.
The GPS chip/unit embeded in cell phones is incredibly minimal (at least when I reviewed the topic a couple years ago). The phone itself does not calculate lat/lon. The phone captures the bare timebase GPS signal, uplinks the raw sat numbers to a server which calculates the actual coords and transmits that back to the phone.

But privacy issues are probably the biggest reason lat/lon is not more available for app usage.
I keep a small moleskine for medium to large notes. I keep small sheets of paper in my back pocket at all time to jot down something to do later today or tomorrow and cross out when done.

I also catch myself implementing some GTD tips.
Compared to the iPhone the android just falls short because of design flaws that arn't folded well into the handset. To really be a true competitor (iPhone killer), the android platform would need to be implemented on a device that can rival the iPhones features/look (i.e. nokia s60 touch or the n98 concept).
Yahoo - Google search deal coming this afternoon?
Bloody Hell: Facebook Set to Become #1 Web Site in the UK
Lingtastic Offers On-Demand SMS Language Translation
What about Google Gears/Android and the iPhone API? If you build an application that uses those two APIs, won't that cover most of the future mobile market? If so, is there any need to dig under the covers - just make the simple API calls??
Unanswered (random) questions
The 10 Top Paid Senior-Level IT Jobs
Forget Twitter: It's Crack For The Tragically Connected
Here are my delicious location links:

http://del.icio.us/jmatt.peterson/location

There are a lot of APIs if you are going from address, city, zip. All sorts of variations - free, commercial, metadata, super accurate, international, US only, shipping, etc.

There are fewer and they are less reliable if you have a latitude / longitude and want address, major intersection, city, etc.

Initially I'd code for phones that provide basic location information like lat/long/precision. Personally I've written code for the iphone and android. I'd avoid any of the older phones that don't provide some sort of API. Your initial users presumably will be techies with newer phones. If you have some initial success you can add support for older phones that don't have a friendly API.
Apologies for my ignorance, but is there a link to the extended distinction between startup and new business? I don't quite see how the two are all that distinct, or why the distinction is useful?
A bunch of APIs, data, and examples here:

http://del.icio.us/pskomoroch/gis
I'd love to see Android give iPhone a run for it's money, but I'm not seeing it happening in the early term. We still haven't seen Android in the wild. Android doesn't have a strong obsessive, visionary like Jobs.

And you can't underestimate the thundering power of the AppStore. Like iTunes, Apple is going to make it dead simple to add apps to your phone.
The Five Stages Of Early Adopter Behavior
Thanks this is fantastic. Going from address is fairly straightforward as you say.

However, I am looking to use the GPS or tower triangulation built into newer phones. I'm assuming this is available through the ipHone and android APAs?

Is any of your code open-source by any chance? Just looking for some tips as to how to get started - even the basics.
BRK.A is a conglomeration. Over the past decade they have been in the insurance business (GEICO). But they have also been in other businesses, and I would say that you could consider them like a private equity firm. They would buy companies of good value and build them out. They did it with furniture retail.

There is a difference between speculating and investing. Speculating is zero sum and about 80% of the people that trade will lose money.

Buffet actually says that diversification is a good idea if you don't know what you're doing. If you can value companies properly then you can have returns greater than the market (beta-weighted).

Investing is not zero sum. I'm not going to defend that, it just is. That being said, buy and hold is a dumb idea too. And equities historically beat inflation if you consider dividend payouts.
W.B. refuses to invest in internet companies. He feels that they are overvalued.

And there is a difference between stock price and the value of a company. Of course, I also believe that the efficient market hypothesis is bullshit.
I'm curious how true you guys think this is? As someone who does adopt early I found this post to be overly negative of early adopters. There's a subset of serial early adopters that this is true about, but it seems to me it's not generally true. Who knows I might be an elitist self-important jerk and just be in self denial!
What's going to be left to do at Yahoo? Develop Yahoo! Mail? Or is that going to be Gmail as well.
I though the argued that they were hard to understand, not intrinsically worth less than the price at which he could buy them.
Google I/O recorded sessions now posted
RepairPal: Yes, your mechanic is ripping you off | Webware : Cool Web apps for everyone
This kind of thing is a standard trope of investment news. Some market somewhere moves unexpectedly, so some journalist finds an analyst who predicted it and writes a story on "how they knew". It's a giant game of confirmation bias at work.

That doesn't, by the way, mean that we aren't in for a rough few years (although depression-era hunger lines seem a step or nine too far to me). It just means that this guy doesn't statistically know any better than we do. He was just lucky.
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