skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word 'no'"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridges_Law_of_Headlines
"For responsible disclosure, I will not publish the details of the vulnerability until an ultimate fix is out."

Is this even responsible? Even when a fix is out it's well known that most handsets won't be able to implement it because they have no upgrade path from their manufacturer. (Samsung Galaxy and Android 2.1, I'm looking at you) You'd still put a huge percentage of the mobile market at risk by putting this out there even a year after it's corrected. Why not just sit on it and be happy you did some good for the security world.
You can have a fast internal development cycle without devaluing the established concept of major version numbers.

I don't appreciate this because I make money from software. To me, a new major version number is:

a) an indication that there have been major changes. It's not something that increments every 12 weeks.

b) something most people reasonably expect to pay for.

I know Mozilla isn't first with this approach. It still sucks.

Edit: Interesting that it has been driven by the same company that rendered the term 'beta' meaningless.

Edit 2: Why the downvotes?
Atomo (programming language): giant 0.4 release
As an iOS user developing for Android, this is awesome. Thanks!
If you don't like paying for paid apps, you should consider not getting them as an option.
Jason is getting dinged for describing the challenges a freelancer has in scaling beyond one person, and using the broad term "consultancy" in the title, so everyone's judging his essay against the counter-evidence of huge or highly specialized firms.

Thomas, you didn't even come close to quoting him accurately or in context. Here is the real quote:

If you bill out a so-called “$30/hour” employee at $60/hour, you’ll only break even. You really need to bill out at $100/hour to make any kind of profit.

Which is hard, because the client you’re billing knows this person doesn’t really cost $100/hour. And when that client thinks about what’s “fair,” they won’t go through the computation I just did; they’ll base it on the person’s nominal rate plus a little profit for you. This caps the amount you can actually re-bill before client feels ripped off.
I think it can be said, more generally, that nationalism is obsolete..
Isotope is fairly nice, but it is still missing fluid width on the layout elements. In other words, although it does respond fairly well to horizontal resizing of the browser, it still doesn't do a good job of dynamically adjusting the width of elements horizontally while at the same time stacking them vertically.

I made some custom modifications on the original jQuery masonry plugin to get the effect I needed for my upcoming web app. You can preview it at http://test.bookflavor.com (This is an in-development sneak preview so don't expect everything to work perfectly, but you will be able to preview my personal modification of the jQuery masonry plugin.)
Yeah, there's a fine line between helpful and creepy when it comes to using Facebook connect to enhance UX.
Adding code samples (java & layouts) would be even more awesome.
Very interesting, still.
Yeah, that's right.

These are numbers incomprehensibly big. Nobody can even begin to mentally picture these in a reasonable fashion. The only part of the statement that is really important is the meaning, not the details of the numbers. That meaning is "we are creating shittons of data really really fast, faster than ever before". If you're getting hung up on the accuracy of the numbers used to express this, then you're missing the point, and I wonder why you don't have something better to do than get worked up about it...

EDIT: Furthermore, according to the "more accurate" statement form the article, we're creating 23 Exabytes in 7 days, not 5. Read it again: "_23 Exabytes_ of information was recorded and replicated in 2002. We now record and transfer _that much_ information every _7 days_."
There are a huge, huge number of clients who are neither sclerotic BigCo nor the corner bakery.

My typical client has less than 30 employees, the ability to react to issues fairly quickly by the standards of large corporations (i.e. squash a consequential bug in minutes, do a complete site revamp in weeks), more than enough money to pay any conceivable consulting rate for something with predictable ROI.
Prize4Life gives $1M ALS award to Mass. doctor/entrepreneur
The link is to the release notes, which has the documentation embedded - click Getting Started at the right if you've never heard of Atomo (which is very likely).
> So assuming that the translated War and Peace represents a reasonable sample of English, 160 characters is fairly close to the length of a sentence.

I would say the mean is close to the length of a sentence, and the first high mark via standard deviation is a long sentence.

So a standard SMS should be able to fit 2 or so normally worded sentences or 3 concisely worded sentences.
Could Robots replace Lawyers
You should look hard at how the Big Law model is doing in 2011. Hint: not awesome.

Instead of setting up business models that encourage people to break their backs finding billable hours, why not the model where consultants have no idea how many "hours" they billed because they don't care? Give people roles where their projects are meaningful and interesting, their comp is stable, and their career paths make sense. Recruit the best people from the vast pool of candidates who want sane jobs with interesting work. Staff them at companies that will pay a premium both for flexible staffing and for top-caliber work. Call it a day.
I'm not sure as a 10 year old I'd have had that much ability to persuade my parents of the virtues of domain names or selected tech stocks as investments. In my early teens on the other hand...

The opportunity that immediately springs to mind as having the lowest technical barrier to entry is a Craigslist-type service, starting off in the same way at round about the same time as a mailing list. A sufficiently smart ten year old with indulgent parents probably could have started that that on dialup AOL too...
Handwritten Letters and Invitations - With Sincerity
The bondholders disagreed. They'd have rather had a real bankruptcy.

One of the consequences of not honoring the usual rules of debt in bankruptcy is that loans to govt favored industries/companies are now seen as more risky, which makes them more expensive.
For clarification, are all the different channels simultaneously present in stable release that regular Joe's dl and install, just hidden by by pref/build option/cl-flag switches?

For example, when you say developers don't have to decide which version to install, but only which channel to follow, is that how they switch among channels - just restart the stable version using a different switch?
> What's wrong with red-black trees for an ordered map?

I was wondering that too, except without the "n ordered" part. The claim that trees are competitive with hash tables in the average case rests on the claim that comparison is much faster than hashing, because you only have to hash once in the average case, whereas you have to compare something like 1.5 lg N times in the average case, which might be between 4 and 22 in common cases. I just ran this microbenchmark to compare hashing integers with comparing them, and hashing seems to be actually slightly faster than comparing on my CPU; this implies that hash tables should be dramatically faster than red-black trees.

https://gist.github.com/814746

In theory, this forces an unpleasant dilemma on code that aspires to be real-time but wants to do a lookup in a finite map: use hash tables with their awful worst-case performance (typically O(N), although you can improve this by hanging trees off your hash buckets, but that would be stupid), or use trees with their awful average-case performance?

In practice, I've never written real-time code, so I don't know if this dilemma is real.
$37 is a joke. I just purchased it b̶e̶f̶o̶r̶e̶ ̶h̶e̶ ̶r̶e̶a̶l̶i̶z̶e̶s̶ ̶h̶e̶ ̶c̶o̶u̶l̶d̶ ̶c̶h̶a̶r̶g̶e̶ ̶a̶n̶ ̶o̶r̶d̶e̶r̶ ̶o̶f̶ ̶m̶a̶g̶n̶i̶t̶u̶d̶e̶ ̶m̶o̶r̶e̶ ̶f̶o̶r̶ ̶t̶h̶i̶s̶ to support further development of this gem.
Other, less dramatic kinds of growth can appear exponential in its early stages. I'm always amazed at Internet growth data that are only fit to an exponential -- "at this rate, our startup is going to take over the universe in five years!"

Has everyone forgotten about logistic growth? There is probably a ceiling to most growth, wouldn't it make more sense to ask where it lies? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logistic_function
This isn't going to earn me any karma points, but the author's "reasoning" seems to be that the word fork has negative connotations in some circles, and therefore it must be Oracle's fault. If ever there was a tempest in a teapot, this Hudson-Jenkins thing is it. Oracle migrated its servers, cutting off access for a week, and the Hudson community exploded in rage. Accusations and insinuations followed. Well, now they're forked. Time to move on.
I would like very much to go overseas with another competent, unwed developer or two, start a consulting company, and slowly build a good corporate culture by hiring the locals. Have you done a writeup on your experience?
"We now create and replicate as much data in one week, as we did in one year, just a decade ago."

True, not as catchy as the dawn of time, but still mighty impressive. And in fairness to their outgoing CEO, Google didn't cache much data at the dawn of time (or even in the '80s), so it can't have been that important.
Is it your contention that there are qualified SAP consultants to be had at $50/hr?
Wow, very cool and I just bought it. One comment....I associate Gremlins as brown not green! Congrats. If you want to chat about OS X file system stuff, hit me up. I have a few disk utility apps I have written over the last few years.
I agree. I was happy to see such a reasonable price for this great plugin. Thanks for sharing!
Apple may eliminate boxed software from their stores.
I won't be excited until they reach 9 or 10. That's when it really gets good.
Never say never. If potential firehose of traffic available on FB will far surpass what most companies can generate for their stand-alone sites. Once they realize they only have enough budget to put towards one area online, then they might choose their Facebook page, as it's yielding more results.
I like that comparison, he is kind of the troll of philosophical history. The interesting thing about Nietzsche, though (esepecially in Geneaology) is that he takes on so many different voices to address different existing philosophies such that you can't really say (although many have) that he's anti-semitic (In fact, IIRC he seemed to dig the old testament Jews' style) or anti-christianity.

The difference between his adolescent jabs at Christianity, Judaism, the English, etc. and an ironic motivational poster is that he had a sort of overarching point to make. Among other things, he wanted to demonstrate that existing philosophy was essentially a really deep catalog of the personal biases of a bunch of well-spoken white dudes.
There is no way that 15 people found it useful and/or interesting. It's someone giving a brief resume and then, in a nutshell, saying "Gonna be doing stuff with data".

So my question stands. Do people just see 37 signals and data and imagine that it's interesting, so they up-arrow? Are there bots at work? Etc. I am deeply curious.
Perhaps the poor could also furnish infants for the rich man's table?

I see that the spirit of Swift is alive and well...
Ok people I have to face the music. I just cannot sit on the computer forever! I need suggestions for a off line hobby. I am 19 and I don't have anything apart from my computer life under my belt. I did some theatre and drama, at my last year of high school I wrote, directed, produced and acted the annual day play which was heavily applauded. But after that, nothing. I cannot continue theatre as there is no easy way to go about it, no clubs or culture in my city.

So what would be some hobby offline, something which takes me far away from my computer and the Internet. I think I can pick something up from this thread.
I agree on the 10% time. But even if the employees are working 60-hour weeks at crunch time, that's not the average. And the important figure is not how much time they're working, but how much is billed. A lot of contracts have not-to-exceed caps that limit monthly billing; you might be able to make up some of that, but every consultant is familiar with the taste of unbilled hours they've had to eat.
I thought this one was the coolest:

> Have Pixar make 3001, A Space Odyssey, with HAL replaced by a Mac.

It's called WALL-E (2008). The antagonist, Auto, has a glowing red "eye" like HAL and speaks with a Mac speech-synth voice.

Also, the title character's battery full signal is a Mac chime and, as noted in the article, the iPod designer was responsible for EVE's unique look.
No, the update channel determines which code is downloaded to your computer. The "stable" and "beta" channels receive builds from release branches, while the "dev" and "canary" channels receive snapshots from trunk.

Regardless of your channel, you can turn on different features in Chrome by going to "about:flags" (or sometimes by passing command-line switches) - but only if those features are in the build you are running.
news.arc seems to trim apostrophes from URLs, so your link correctly is

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_Law_of_Headlines
My contention is that the value to be obtained from SAP consulting is $50 for the consulting and $200 for the indemnity against being fired.
> Back, except when it's Google Reader that opened a Browser window, in which case it takes you back to the previous page that Browser had.

Normally apps like Google Reader open new browser windows when links are clicked. When an application's link opens a new window, back closes the window and goes back to the previous application.

However, the browser has a limit of how many windows it can open, so sometimes applications can't open new windows and have to re-use existing ones. In this case, the history of the window is preserved, so back takes you through the timeline.

It's a bit annoying, but the alternative is either (a) delete browser windows without user confirmation or (b) let the browser grow out of control, consuming more and more resources. There are third-party browsers that choose to do (b) but also warn the user and ask them to close tabs themselves, which is probably a better solution.

tl;dr: close your unused browser windows.
That device doesn't seem very portable. I guess there are trade-offs to everything.
It is only copyright infringement if they re-publish. Just getting an archive is not infringement, otherwise, you'd be infringing every time you view the site with your browser.
I think we all know that Jason is using nice round numbers to make the article read better. I'm not attacking him for saying that bill rates are $100 when they're really $150. I'm dinging him for suggesting that bill rates have anything at all to do with full-time rates; the two are only partially related.

You are also right (I considered editing my comment to reflect it) that there is a huge market of sweatshop commodity consultants for whom this analysis is completely true. Yes. Avoid this work. The nice thing about being the kind of person who participates in online forums where every other week there's a thread like "Ask HN: What New Technology Should I Learn This Month" is that you tend to be flexible enough not to fall into that trap.
Also very helpful. This one seems to have some different features regarding hiding/showing elements. Great stuff!
Ask HN: Is this Credit Card Form Secure?
I've been browsing tumblr's theme directory and noticed a nifty form for credit card payments. If you click purchase a lightbox come up with a small form to enter your credit card. The question is, is this secure without the whole page being behind SSL?

Check it out http://www.tumblr.com/theme/9376
As a general rule it seems fair to assume that consulting shops aren't going to get 60 hour weeks out of their employees

Yes and if I wasn't clear I wasn't saying that. The point was some weeks will be 30 hour weeks, but some will also be 50, while you will lose some time you will also make it back. Your industry seems different from mine. Ours don't tend to pay overtime or "aggressivly" balance vacation days (this happens but only maybe 2-3 days a year), but we have larger and faster burn out rates. We do tend to have significant bonus structures however.
Google I/O registration now open
That requires a major commitment to backwards compatibility, which is a massive time-suck and reduces your ability to innovate. Look at Microsoft for an example of how nasty that can be.
Bots? Maybe?

37 Signals is a pretty popular company so I imagine people get excited for any kind of inside information on their inner workings.
Qualcomm And CAA Back Creative Mobile Labs To Make Entertainment Apps
بلياردو
The Palm Pre uses a left swipe for the back gesture. I'm unsure if that in turn was based on something else.
I don't mind faster releases if they're doing things we traditionally associated with minor version numbers, such as performance improvements or slightly UI tweaks.

I really hope they don't change any rendering components at the same pace, though. I already have to strike any contractual obligation to test/support Chrome in commercial web development projects, because it's a moving target and Google do release breaking changes. If Mozilla browsers go the same way, then I really will start coding for the nice, stable, standards-friendly world of IE -- and that's never a statement I thought I would write on a serious forum with a straight face!
> 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.

Either that, or the ideas are presented within the pages as interesting and novel, but they're actually simple takes on simple questions. You get all the aesthetic of intellectual challenge and none of the challenge, and then you get to congratulate yourself for understanding something so highbrow. Kind of like literary video games.

I put a lot of hacker-culture sacred cows (Vonnegut, Twain, Huxley, Orwell) in this category.

An alternate hypothesis is that being raised by two professors of literature turned me into an insufferably snobby twat.
How To Build A Product In 99 Days
I seriously don't know the SAP market at all. It may be the case that there are indie SAP implementors who charge $50/hr. But $50/hr is so low that I don't see how any consulting company could stay in business charging it.

Yes, some consulting firms do charge a premium for their brand†. But all consulting firms charge a premium for shouldering project, scheduling, and employee retention risk on behalf of their clients; those factors alone, before you even factor specialization into the picture, seem likely to be worth more than $50/hr.

I think you may be falling into the same trap Jason Cohen fell into (which would be weird, because, aren't you a consultant?).

† On the other hand, note that some big shops, particularly in the big 4, offer huge discounts on consulting rates that they make up on audit works.
This isn't even an implicit thing going on within the buyer's head. Large companies do this explicitedly.

The company I am right has people who spend all day looking at "risk-reduction" in the engineering effort. They map the process and anywhere there is a question mark, they bundles of money to turn it into a check mark, especially if it is on the critical path. As an engineer you definitely don't introduce question marks for silly reasons like "lower billable hour rate", you would get chewed out for even thinking about that.
the entire registration page seems down now..
It's incredibly strange to see this on the front page given I was doing research with him last semester and ended up taking this semester off due to a massive course load. Looks like I left just a bit too early, could've got myself on the HN front page :)
I've been reading great things about advertising with Stumbleupon. One person told me that it's $.05 per view, and you're getting targeted views based on the type of sites that people are interested in. https://www.stumbleupon.com/ads/

I don't have any firsthand knowledge yet, but we're going to try it out later this month and I'll post a report on how it works for us after we launch.
I can't say for certain, but based on some classes I have taken regarding financial management and accounting, I would assume items such as the following would be looked at:

1. Have you received any outside funding and at what valuation.

2. What were and are the current shares valued at by the company.

3. Expenses, burn rate.

4. Cash in the bank.

5. Intellectual property (are the patents, trademarks).

6. Comparison with similar companies in the same market.

7. How far away from achieving profitability or revenues are you? Is the product still in development? What is holding up revenues?

8. Overall general analysis of the company structure, books, etc... to determine how strong the company is. Management background, etc...

The appraiser may take into account details the same way a VC or investor would to determine a general valuation.
Unfortunately, it's not uncommon for a zip code to be shared by more than one town, city, or municipality. http://bit.ly/e6mOs5

So while you could use this system to make an educated guess, you'd want to be very careful about getting confirmation before using the address, and that could defeat the original purpose of streamlining the data entry process.

--edit--

It might actually be uncommon, but I think you still need to take it into consideration.
A little Hackernews hack
tldr: change topcolor in your profile to black. Soon you'll have no idea what your karma score is, and you won't care. Your individuality improves.

Karma. It's pointless.

After a while, I find myself focusing too much on that little number. Happened on slashdot, digg, reddit, and now hackernews.

I find that I just can't help treating it something like a game, upping my karma score.

It's a mildly destructive pattern which tends to lead to shallower comments, echoing popular opinions winning out over genuine insight in my commenting habits. I'm sure it contributes to meme propagation on other sites (thankfully HN is still relatively free of memes).

The hack: in your profile page, change topcolor to black.

Then hackernews looks like this: http://i.imgur.com/eK796.png

This means I literally have no idea what my karma score is day-to-day. It's liberating. Try it.

If you need to see where the 'threads' link is or etc, just Ctrl-A or Cmd-A on mac, which highlights all text and you can then see where the links are. I find that for 'new' 'newest' and 'threads' I've learned where they are.

Yeah. Just a small thing. If you find yourself caring too much about karma, try it.
A great lesson in investing: Sardar Biglari (letter to shareholders)
There are a huge, huge number of clients who are neither sclerotic BigCo nor the corner bakery.

Sounds like you've hit the sweet spot!

EDIT: My comments on this article are railing against firms like Accenture, not against folks like Jason.
Huffington Post and AOL: You've Got a Mess
I've had a Nexus S for a few now and find myself thinking the same. It feels like Android needs a good alt-tab like task switcher, which would reduce reliance on Back for a lot of things. Haven't found one in the app market so far.
I can probably help with the Google tour. Send me an email if you're interested.