skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ugh, I've seen small-town web development shops charge $130+ an hour for work done by the grunts who get more like $30 an hour.

Some of these shops are very profitable and successful, and some of them aren't.

Either way, the person who's got the most to complain about this situation is the grunt, not the customer who imagines they could get the work for cheaper. The grunt is very aware that he could produce a lot more value for someone, and capture it, if he can get rid of the middleman. Although the work in a consulting shop is varied, and can keep you on your toes, the need to bill 40 hours of project time every week leads to a lack of self-investment and eventual burnout.
BetaCandy Subscribers at 260. Closing at 500. Join Now
NSConference 2010/2009 Videos: Mac OS and iOS Development
really cool. Developing web apps is becoming like a no-brainer. Who builds for desktop when you can create the same responsiveness in a web app.
Same here - having the DAG up and being able to change where things point easily is awesome. If I were pressed to explain git without being in person, I rather liked the Git Parable.
Oh really? Schmidt's claim overstates reality by 5000 times and you don't care? Link is to an (awesome) online calculator showing how I arrived at this.

http://instacalc.com/?d=&c=ZGF5c19zaW5jZV9oaXN0b3J5X3N0Y...
My tummy rumbled and I burped at 9:22AM EST this morning. Now that I have posted this: is that a piece of information?

My point is that a lot of this "information" is ephemeral and not really all that important in the long run.
You could always do something like Detroit, instead...

http://www.detroitagriculture.org/GRP_Website/Home.html
This model works so well that there are branches of the industry that are difficult to staff outside of consulting

If anyone hear ever starts wondering "Why can't I find a full-time dev with SEO experience...", suffice it to say that the reason is quite similar. (With the added wrinkle that pen testers cannot generally lock themselves in a room away from clients and make large amounts of money without running afoul of the law, and good SEOs can.)
Probably because Mozilla explicitly said their focus would be on web apps, particularly javascript improvements.
Nate Silver on How Much Does Bing Borrow From Google?
Would you prefer Linux/SunOS-like version numbers where the major version never increments? When you do a release every 6-8 weeks, they're all going to be minor.
Isn't server-side javascript the Next Big Thing for utility scripts? I still use python, because of the difficulties of getting new runtimes approved in $bigco, but I got the impression that's where things were going.
Help a charity while shopping A good-deed startup
I completely agree - I put it down in irritation after ~100 pages.
1) This is a giant wall of text that I don't want to read.

2) First item under work experience "Summer Intern, Senior Technician"... This sounds like you were interning as a senior technician. Not believable. It wasn't until I saw you worked there for 4 years that I guessed you were listing all jobs you had at that place.

3) There is so much boring/unrelated trash in this resume it is hard to get through. I dont care that you were a paper grader unless it has some impact on what you'll be doing for me. Tell me about what kind of projects you spearheaded as a lead developer for your university. (As an aside, virtually no employer will believe you were a lead developer for your university as a student -- you sound like a liar and I'm not even half way through the page).

4) On your activities section, REMOVE HACKING! Your boss may know the colloquial meaning of the the term, he may not. But I would bet the farm that HR thinks you are spending your free time trying to steal people's passwords.

4-b) Remove your activities and interests entirely.
I like it (I used treemap viewers on Windows and have been looking for a Mac replacement) but what about some colour-coding? It would add another dimension to the data and allow the user to easily see which areas are photos, movies, documents, applications, or misc files. It's much much easier to see colours than it is to read the folder names.

Please, please, please tell me you've got this planned!
Perhaps the figures he was given were based entirely on computer data - and he quoted them to sound like all data?
Now it is.

Reply to the edit: If you stretch the timeline long enough, nothing is of any importance.
> The "inefficiencies" in the US political system aren't actually inefficiencies in the long run

I agree, and I could argue the same thing for maintaining manufacturing/vocational jobs. As I said in my first post, giving reasonable wages to the lower/middle class means they have more disposable income and consume more. I think this is a net positive economic effect. If a high net-worth person makes 10x the average wage, that doesn't mean she will buy 10 times as many televisions, ipods, or cars. She may purchase HIGHER QUALITY goods/services, but overall consumption from 10 workers making 40k per year and 1 high net worth person making 400k per year are not equivalent. This consumer demand from the lower-middle class ultimately creates markets and creates long-term efficiencies.

>However, indefinitely preventing technology from advancing civilization is the exact opposite

I don't want to cling to the past. But as our society progresses we must find ways to integrate hard working people that aren't the type to sit in a office all day. I think Germany is a good model. In high school, students are separated into a vocational track or an academic track. Because of this, Germany has a very highly skilled manufacturing workforce today.

>I don't believe that there needs to be "a viable option for 'hands-on' people to earn a livable wage

I disagree very strongly with this statement. There are more 'hands-on' people than 'intellectual' people in this country. If those 'hands-on' people can earn $25 per hour, then you can make your apps and devices and they will have enough money to buy it.
The 6 Levels Of Proactive Support
Oh. So they are going for the completely fracturing the user base approach.

Meaning since people will learn that upgrading major versions will constantly break things, they will stop upgrading and consider other browsers like Chrome.
The most powerful utility is being able to message your fans. It's like getting them on your email list, but even more powerful because sharing and commenting are viral and easy.
This is true, but the BBC were extremely grateful for the copyright infringement that has seen the rescue of Q, Doctor Who, and countless other series - they may come to see that again (and to be honest, the chances of the BBC suing are probably very slight).
A bit romanticized, but a worthy read. The University is a very different place these days.
The quote said "information", not data.

Edit: "There were 5 Exabytes of information created between the dawn of civilization through 2003, but that much information is now created every 2 days."
What do you mean using an active SIM card? I enabled the free 3G data plan with Verizon, if that's what you mean.

What are the different hardwares that my cr48 could be. I was not aware that there are multiple models. Is there some way to check this from the shell?
When you have the CTO commenting on your blog, you are definitely attracting the right kind of attention.
Richard Feynman was giving a lecture and, as usual, had gone off-script. He mentioned some historical event, but got the last digit of the date wrong (like 1951 instead of 1957 or something). He said, "Hey! 3 significant digits is pretty good for a theoretical physicist!" :-)

Edit: I can't link to the middle of a Silverlight presentation, but if you visit http://research.microsoft.com/apps/tools/tuva/ , click the middle (with the picture of Feynman), click Lecture 5, and skip to 17:00 in, you can see the incident. But you really should watch all of them, especially the one on Symmetry.

Dang Silverlight!
It also seems to be nearly the same case for the top tier of mobile developers ("nearly" because the Apples and Twitters of the world can still pick them up.)
Old Habits Die Hard: Banking's Rampant Bonus Culture
I am deeply curious why 15 people up-arrowed this. Was there something in it that I missed?
So I'll run through a few cases where he's looking at worse case scenarios.

1. He's losing 32 hours a month (almost a week a month) because people work "less" then 8 hour days or take personal time. This is true perhaps on some months. But most consulting teams will work long hours come crunch time. Salaried employees make that time back when they do overtime to get a project done. I know a lot of interactive shops who burn through talent because they are working 60 hour weeks. This extends to the lost days

2. Then there's lost time to due to down time between projects AND time put into 10% time. Don't do this, this is a worse case scenario he just killed 4 days a month with this (or 48 days a year, really?). If you want 10% time and have down time between projects then use the down time between projects for 10% time. Most folks I know hire when they can keep someone busy full time and then back fill with contract help.
Google I/O registration opens today - ANY MOMENT!
Packers victory shows an average 23% annual stock market return
Time Travel without Regrets
Not true. The core elements of the number are major and minor. Major represents a new stable release from the trunk. Minor is a subsequent release from that branch. We almost never do minor. The notable exception was 4.1, which came off the 4.0 branch.

We don't emphasize version numbers in our marketing because consumers are almost never aware of what version of the browser they're running other than "latest". Do you know what version of GMail you're using? Neither do I. With this in mind we chose a predictable versioning scheme even if it's somewhat unconventional in the world of desktop software.
Unexpected Table Manners Around the World (and reasons behind them)
Three years ago people would read that and feel glad that those areas have improved. Today I read it and feel sad that we are inevitably heading back into similar days.
Yes, SF has very high bike theft rates. Around here a chain or cable isn't considered a lock at all.

That's not why though. One has to get off the bike, get a key out, get the lock out, lean the bike against whatever one is locking it to, put the lock on, and work the key.

With the Brompton, one simply gets off and folds it.
MMV, indeed.

I found ZAMM irritatingly condescending.
Meat-eating furniture
There is a lot of cart web forms that just have a check box asking if your shipping address is the same as your billing address, isn't that easier to implement? Not sure the added vaule of seeing it "copy" from billing to shipping...
I think it is irresponsible to condone priorities like this. Being dead will kill your momentum a lot faster than being alive and in the hospital. I've got to say, that I don't really care about this guy. I have no idea who he is. I've never even met him.

I wish him the best, and I do hope he gets better, but any caring that I could do is going to be dwarfed by those around him. His wife, his family, his friends. Maybe this is callus of me, but please, focus on the people who would actually lose you.
My interpretation is that there is a partial but insufficient fix in 2.3.
For a lack of a better (formal) definition I copy here the one used by the Economist (found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle-class):
"defined it as beginning at the point where people have roughly a third of their income left for discretionary spending after paying for basic food and shelter."

This conveys the idea I have for a middle-class lifestyle. Hope it helps.

For the explanation of which people I mean I have to ask tomjen3 for help: He used "those people" in his argumentation and I've reused it.
Ask HN: What do appraisers look for in a company without revenue?
I've found myself in a situation where I need to leave my company for various reasons. My shares have vested, but my partners are entitled to a buyout. If we cannot decide on a number, an appraiser must be used. What do appraisers look for when valuing a company without revenue?
It works for Ubuntu and Chrome.
Lies, damn lies, and clichés.
It's all about context:

If someone asks me for spec work I tell them no, if I ask someone to do spec work for them to raise my profile I'm hoping they don't tell me no.
It's funny I actually set up super-cache last night. I was just too cheap for my own good. 256MB RAM on rackspace just wasn't cutting it.
> that is true, but it's also irrelevant, since typical consulting firms actually charge much more.

Again, it's irrelevant if you redefine "typical consulting company" as one of a clearly atypical group of big-name firms with tens to hundreds of thousands of employees.

> Secondly he asserts that consulting doesn't scale.

He makes two assertions. First, that with all the details accounted for, your profit will likely be half of what a naive assumption would find. And second, that as a founder you'd end up doing a lot of stuff outside your core competency or interest. At no point does he say, "Given these facts, it's clear that consulting cannot scale." If he had, sure, you could take two seconds, point out a single point to the contrary, and feel good about "demolishing" an easily refuted argument. He didn't, so we're back where we started.
I remember that the monitor for the first computer I had -- a Mac IIci -- was in portrait format, and could show a full page of a word document. I thought all monitors looked like that, until I went to a friend's place and saw a landscape monitor. I asked him, "how do you survive without being able to see a full page?!" His response: how do you survive without being able to play games?
> grandstanding for lack of a better word.

This is really interesting to me. I've recently started reading more political philosophy, and a few weeks ago, dug into "On the Genealogy of Morals" by Nietzsche, and when I got to that whole anti-Judiasim bit (the one about hawks and lambs), all I could think was "this sounds like /b/" or "I bet he was just trolling for pageviews, given that he's writing this in 1887 Germany"...
Space and the Y Axis
Totally!.. I just don't get it, even my bank statement envelope, utility bills has three logos at the back

Youtube, Twitter and facebook.

These agencies they hire are just selling stuff to the corporations.
Steve and Jake, I think you should do a video together-- I've seen Jake's version and it's pretty good. Maybe next month at PghRB?
There have been a few books like this, that are supposed to be massive and life changing, but when I read they just fell flat. Everything by Ayn Rand I read was like this too.

I could get past the pacing, the circular storytelling, and largely the premise of it just didn't work in my mind. It was not something I could get into and getting past more than a chapter at a time was painful.

Oddly, I like philosophy and I ride motorcycles too.

My only theory is that since these books have been published, the core ideas have worked their way through our culture so throughly that reading it now just seems like 'duh'. This is the way I felt reading Ayn Rand and not a single interesting thing there popped out at me as new or novel.
Cool! e-mail sent!
I used Facebook like this for a while, then I remembered that all my likes are public and that they use them to advertise.
I would urge you to watch this video on how these kind of claims can be made : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-QA2rkpBSY
BBC FM&T and R&D did/does awesome stuff with little resources. It appears to outsiders-who-care that the problem exists higher up, especially with decisions such as adopting Siemens to provide infrastructure support (Talk about locking in what existed 10 years ago with an SLA!), and the perverted influence of people like Highfield and now, surprisingly, Huggers.
Great set of articles by the way. I appreciate you telling us how it really is in the VC world. Those small nuggets of information, thats really important but pretty hard to come by, coming from an authoritative source like yourself really helps framing our approach to starting a startup. Eg: whats the norm for a liquidation preference, the reality of dealing with a board, etc.

Also, I came to your talk at Columbia Univ in NYC. It was very informative (and pretty funny too).

Thanks.
Most of those just copy the data the same way anyhow, still in Javascript. I like the checkbox better, but it's not that different.
How about Facebook Connect integration that pulls your address from your Facebook profile? ;-)
I've noticed this behaviour in Chrome and Firefox as well.
You have to share the upside with your consultants, put a target to bill 1200-1500 hours per year depending on your average engagement length and how much they will have to be on pre-sales work. Then split every hour after that with them 50/50% up to 2000 billed hours and after 2000 hours billed give them 75%, keep 25%.

I know tech folks love to reinvent and learn things on their own and sometimes it yields new and better results but in other cases we'd be better off to look at how BigLaw has been billing out hourly associates for hundreds of years very profitably.
During the dotcom book, "number of eyeballs" was the metric. Now it "number of Fans" and "number of followers". History repeats...again
Yes, Chrome, to avoid changing major versions.
I would have to disagree there. The TechCrunch audience is a relatively self-selecting group of technology and startup enthusiasts. This is valuable. There are companies that want to reach these people.

Huffington Post, I imagine, is mostly liberals of all genders, income, and level of education. I think there are far fewer companies that want to reach all of HuffPo's diverse readership.

Consider why popular, prestigious sites like washingtonpost.com have ads for Mesothelioma lawsuits and home mortgage refinancing.
Gentlemen, start your spiders!
As a general rule it seems fair to assume that consulting shops aren't going to get 60 hour weeks out of their employees. The ones I know of that do that pay OT for that time, or aggressively balance the time out with bona fide vacation days.

Similarly: 80% utilization is a totally sane rule of thumb for a consulting shop.

The thing that makes these points somewhat misleading in an HN context is that most HN people wouldn't start consulting companies where bill rates are so low that these things matter all that much. It's the same problem, writ large, as Cohen's analysis that "just giving clients a 10% discount can crater your profits". If 10% discounts are cratering your profits, find a better market to work in.
I gradually realized that I treat the Back button as a game. I have no idea where it will take me, so whenever I don't like what's on the screen and want to be "somewhere else", I just push the back button until I see something better, or I'm on the home screen. It's kinda fun, but very bad design :-)
This is a great resource for commonly observed interface conventions. It seems many applications have been ported from iOS to Android and the UI has not been changed that much. While there are a lot of good interface techniques are shared by Android and iOS there are also many differences how Android and iOS applications are used.
Color coding is in the roadmap, right now I have a 1.1 update that improves scan speed, memory usage, and a handful of bugs, but I've got to wait 15 days for apple to approve it.

Coloring is something I want to approach very carefully. I had colors in the beginning and the app turned in to a visual mess. I want to make sure the colors can convey meaningful information without subtracting from the readability.
MIT Brings Hologram Video One Step Closer With Kinect Hack
I know exactly what you mean.

I recommend learning JavaScript itself very well before you choose a framework. I wrote pure, vanilla JavaScript for everything for almost a year. I wrote a small library of helper functions.

After a year or so of trying to avoid "investing" myself in a JavaScript library, I chose jQuery, and I have not looked back since.

I really cannot recommend jQuery enough. Not to be a fanboy or anything, but it seems to have largely won the JS library war, for the most part. You really can't go wrong with it.
> "You don’t want it to come after the header on small content pages like a kid comes after candy. It is simply wrong."

Instantly stopped reading, what kind of freak writes about that.
Apparently 15 people found it useful and/or interesting. If you don't, flag it or move on.
Entrepreneurial Advice: The Value of Having and Using an Advisory Board 
Entrepreneurs, you know who you are. You were born with an independent spirit. You are successful in part because you forge ahead when others stop to check the direction of the wind. Those of you who build businesses that thrive have also learned that even a maverick needs a few key advisors.
One interesting thing to note... Chrome operated with a 4-releases per year schedule from beta launch until late 2010, before switching to the interleaved 12-week cycle mbrubeck mentions. While the quarterly release process represented a definite improvement over the one release every 12-18 months we had been familiar with before, it still had some drawbacks.

The period of time required to put together a release was still sufficiently large that both engineering and management felt pressure to shoehorn stuff into releases. The cost of missing a release was waiting another quarter. For many engineers this means missing your quarterly objectives completely. The temptation to ship unpolished features was high, and the morale hit for missing a release was still tangible.

Moving to the interleaved cycle with 6-week updates is intended to break down these problems by making the consequences of missing a release less severe to both engineers and management. We are still in the early days of this approach and the team is getting used to the adjustment.

I'm pleased to see Firefox is going to be trying to improve the frequency of their releases. Staying fresh is critical to vitality in this modern browser landscape. When I worked on Firefox prior to 1.0 we would do releases roughly quarterly but the team size was much smaller. A high level of discipline in engineering and management is required to maintain regular releases with a large team size.
Chrome's 6-week release cycle (with no support or security updates for old versions) is probably a much harder sell to enterprise IT departments than a low version number would be.
I had to read this as part of my Rhetoric class my freshman year of college. I hated just about every minute of it, very hard to absorb, more than a big long winded in places. It also didn't help that my TA for the class was convinced that the book was written about him (not really, but every other class was a discussion about how what was happening in the book was related to his life.) However, attempting to deal with, understand, classify, define "quality" is one of the few explicit activities I did for a college class that I spend any time reflecting on today.
Alternates to Adobe Content Server
i have been experimenting with DRM for books. i have looked around but so far can only see Adobe Content Server 4 as the only credible option.

are there any other - possibly open source - DRM solutions?

option 1: just a DRM solution that can be implemented in a Server.

option 2: a full fledged server with inbuilt DRM support e.g. Adobe Content Server 4.
DICE Show Off Frostbite 2 Engine
As DICE have said, they plan to redefine the first person shooter. Their recent demo of the Frostbite 2 Engine shows potential to do just this. The demo features state of the art Real-time Radiosity, which may not mean much to some of us but hey, it looks amazing right?!
TI announces next generation ARM A15 mobile phone chip OMAP5
That would make me shop elsewhere.
Register for Google I/O 2011
I think you're missing the main point, which may or may not be the fault of the article, that you can auto fill (secondary info) city and state by using (primary info) zip code.