skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Without details it's impossible for us to tell you how to price any of this stuff.

But I will say if your goal is to make money off selling your services, then yes obviously you should include a bunch of line items in your proposal for hosting, support, etc.

When you offer them a proposal, try to establish a few tiers ranging from "way more than they'll probably pay" down to "what you think they will pay". Don't ever say "we could go lower" unless it's coupled with "but only if we remove these features".

A 30,000 person company is likely trying to buy enterprise software from you, so read up on how enterprise software is priced and sold. Don't sell yourselves short.
HBGary's proposed plan of attack against Wikileaks

http://www.thetechherald.com/article.php/201106/6798/Data-in...
"The coder said he didn't support all they did, but that Anonymous had its moments. Besides, "I enjoy the LULZ.""

Who among us hasn't?
There are already such apps on the App Store.
Shortcut to Hacker News
I pretty much know something like 0.1% programming and have very little artistic skill but decided to have fun with building websites anyways with html using frontpage and dreamweaver. They came out alright as i used a template then hacked the crap out of it. It took a lot of work still and gave up for a while. Then i decided to make a prank site and used moveable type first and tried a few other blogging software, ending up with wordpress because it was more flexible than moveable type at the time and much easier to use. I think this was version 1.5. I still have that blog up somewhere on a free server, oh man was it easy to use compared to today. Later i got a job at a local web design firm. They had their own CMS based on .Net. It was actually quite good, quite easy, and powerful as hell. They charged $4k to use it. I wouldn't know what to do with it even if i had access to the code. I played with some other CMSes while there, drupal being one that gained steam while a bunch of others. Oh man are they hard to use. It takes quite a while to figure them out. I gave up on websites yet again. A few friends needed a site so i fired up trusty wordpress, now at 3.0. Wow did they change a lot. Stuff that should have been there from the beginning are finally there. Its now 30x more complicated, trying to teach someone WP3 almost defeated the original reason why i chose wordpress, it had a simple backend. But its still a good bit easier to use than most other stuff and I know it well enough to hack most things up. And the themes/plugins jesus, try even searching for a theme for moveable type on google, i came up with 2 ugly ones. And Britney Spears website comes up as Movable types featured showcase? That can't be good...

WP makes thing easier and harder for me at the same time. Well I guess its like money, the more you have the more problems it brings. As for the backend, But try WP 3.1, it adds a top bar that was so useful from a plugin i used since 1.5. Also wordcamp rocks.
This isn't always the case. I don't feel comfortable disclosing my salary today, but for some reason I don't mind telling you my salary 4 years ago :)

At the time, I was a developer doing mostly web stuff, with 7.x years professional experience, in a low COL market, at $80k plus bonus.

My girlfriend was a "Jr. BA" (she held an MBA but little experience) and her wage was $45k. I doubt her salary would be doubled if she had a few more years experience.
Ask HN: Simple way for service to pay money out to users?
Is there a service out there that makes it easier to send users money? For example, in a marketplace user-a pays $100, user-b gets $70, while the marketplace gets $30? Also the marketplace would need to hold on to the money for one month or so to be ready to handle any chargebacks or requested refunds.

I've looked into a few solutions:

Amazon FPS - doesn't appear to be white label.
PayPal (WPP & MassPay) - requires user-b to have a PayPal account to receive payments.

The ideal system would be able to mail checks, direct deposits, and maybe even have the ability to pay through PayPal.
We're using Spreedly on top of Ogone and Atos Worldline. The notable thing about our setup is that we're based in the Netherlands and it took us 6 months of painstaking research and headaches to figure out the combination of services that would allow us to accept subscription payments. I wrote a blog post about the ordeal last week; I recommend it to anyone in a similar situation (eg. non-UK Europe):
http://blog.quplo.com/2011/01/looking-back-on-the-quest-for-...
Ray Kurzweil was on Opie and Anthony last week (February 4, 2011).. was obviously light-hearted, but pretty decent interview:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kHlmt5xz4RM
totally!! been testing Quanat (a news curation app) and been seeing that. thought my developers were playing a prank.

salah
quanat.com
All of that? perfectly reasonable; the original claim? still slightly absurd.

If you want to look at it by comparison to the iphone led smartphone revolution, the timeframe there was:

first iphone release: 1/2007

first android phone: 10/2008

first touchscreen BB: 11/2008

first webos phone: 6/2009

(all dates courtesy of the wikipedia articles for the specific phones or OSes)

and then you didn't really get a phone which competed well with the iphone until, arguably, the nexus one which was in 2010 (or even the Pre which was middle of '09) making it a full 2.5 - 3 years later.

The point is that this stuff progresses in fits and spurts over a long period of time and that the next six months are going to be no more significant than the six which follow it, contrary to what HP's and Motorola's marketing people tell you today (or Apple's will in a few weeks time).
Just two general thoughts...

First, don't underestimate the distraction of hosting and maintaining a separate code base. Now every time you start on a new feature you have to think about two deployments, two separate user bases, perhaps two UIs.

Second, you almost never make money on your first "hosted" deal like this - there are too many one-off things you have to do to get started that don't directly benefit the client so you can't easily charge for them. different deployment systems, hosting, monitoring. support, documentation, perhaps a UI refresh on your ugly admin tool because only you two used it, etc.

Bonus third thought - either charge all operations and support as passthrough, then track and bill hours, or setup a big monthly recurring hosting fee that is enough to make you glad you are getting distracted.

Extra bonus Fourth thought- don't promise feature upgrades. Sell only version 1. Tell them that version 2 is not included and then you can sell them version 2 next year when you have time. It's easy to accidentally promise infinite upgrades or let them assume that any upgrade on your main site they should get free.
Startup catering towards Indian art
P.S : I'm not affliated with the site- But it certainly seems to have great polish for a service launched, reportedly- just this week!
Presenting Free Roll / Free Pitch Simulator
The Math Forum Internet Mathematics Library - topics
Newsflash: You can do what you want on a jail broken iPhone. This includes running Keychain tools.

The same goes for laptops, and has been true forever. Physical possession = no security applies. Not news, exactly.
Related youtubes for the impatient:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yGUcoUUYAx0

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=44PU8cZSt_c
He'd hand you your ass. I'm a serious martial artist and I wouldn't want to fight him (outside of training). http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=318
How to use metrics in a startup
I'm not sure that schizophrenia is any better an explanation than straightforward arrogance. Assuming that the leaks of his work are reasonably accurate I'd be concerned if the government actually started using his research to arrest people though.

I'm not sure that Barrs interest in finding patterns in publicly available information in order to sell his intelligence is any different to advertising analysts doing the same thing. The attempt to socially engineer Anonymous via IRC is a bit more extreme, but I haven't seen any evidence that he intended harrassing them; the problem would have occurred if and when law enforcement bodies started harassing innocent people based on his dodgy intelligence. If you start making any investigative work or social network analysis carried out by private citizens online illegal on the basis of stalking laws then you risk censuring a lot of people actually doing good work.
Thanks for this. I appreciate it is difficult to give proper advice when you don't know exact details.

Like you say we don't want to sell ourselves short but without having experience with this kind of thing before we also do not want to kill the golden goose.

Research is key, like you say, so we will get reading!

thanks again
"I do it for the hugs"

Awesome
I'd just multiply my usual consulting rate by the hours it's going to take me. If you don't have a consulting rate, ask around you area, because it depend of your country/city.

> It will take us 14 days (full time) to satisfy the request

An organization that employs 30,000 people has probably a lot stakeholders. Unless there's a hard deadline, you will be looking into a huge amount of "release fallout". Expect stupid requests such as "change the font —why? —Because the boss says he doesn't like it". I'd estimate 20 hours of petty changes spread over three weeks.

> Should we be offering to support it going forward (we have full time jobs) and if so how much should we charge for this?

If you have full time jobs, avoid it like the plague. Recommend someone you trust.

> Should we be charging them a monthly fee for using our technology as well as a one off fee?

Is your technology infrastructure? Is it open source software? Proprietary software? You're potentially looking into a handsome amount of money here, depending on the nature of what it is, and if it can be easily replaced by something else.

> If they ask us to host it I presume we should be asking for a hosting fee as well?

Yes, they will expect you change a monthly amount for this. Usually it's billed under "support & hosting" for a fixed monthly fee, which can be substantial (say, 500 USD/mo). But again, avoid it if you value your free time.
We just selected MetraTech for all of our billing needs due to the complexity of our pricing models. However there are lot of great less expensive services if your needs are simpler. A few that come to mind are Zuora, Vindica, Monexa and Aria. If you are pre-revenue Zuora may be a good choice because they have a pricing model that charges a percentage instead of requiring a significant upfront investment.
How to Decipher a Social Security Number | eHow.com
Apple Mail's Organize by Thread feature is retarded. It considers any messages that have the same subject to be in the same thread.
Gmail's Conversations identify the actual threads/conversations instead.
A tightly rolled newspaper or magazine can be an effective weapon; some schools of escrima or arnis demonstrate how to roll one and use it as a substitute for the short stick.
It's just a great summary of the concerns I'm living with on a day-to-day basis. Everything is there for non-geek to understand the big picture. AI, Robotics, Singularity, Biotics will lead us to the biggest disruption of the mankind era. One subject that I like that is not talked about : the ability of those supermind to work together lightning fast to form an even more powerful machine or robot.
He was on "I've got a secret" in 1965, Wikipedia says born in 1948. So pretty close to 100.
I'm also pretty sure this is why software houses run as widget factories will produce sub-standard solutions. The hierarchical structure gives more weight to the ideas of the people managing. This works if the manager is an expert (or at least as knowledgable as their reports) in their field but with software it results in the most informed opinions being ignored or devalued especially if the costs/benefits are not immediate, so lots of technical debt. If you are managing a team of good developers your role is one of administration and occasionally cat herder (someone has to call time on yak shaving arguments).

I've seen a bunch of government software contracts go down this road, they all try to use the same "tried and trusted" solution even when the assumptions that underpin it have changed wildly (developers are just looking to play with fancy toys and so can't be trusted). They hire based on cost, 3 developers being paid 20k are worth as much as one developer being paid 60k and generally won't fight to retain staff. I find this incredibly ironic since government projects are often challenging and novel, they are dealing with scales or activities that businesses (mostly) don't touch. It always struck me that the area crying out for a creative, original solutions implemented by a film crew team.
Why does everyone seem to think that machine intelligence is solely a function of processor speed?
Scott McNealy on Oracle
"...if you go do a survey of people over the last 20 years, who’s been one of their favorite vendors of all time, and they will tell you Sun before it got acquired by Oracle. I don’t know what’s happened since. You’ll have to go ask the customers after Oracle." - http://mixergy.com/scott-mcnealy-sun-interview/
Charge 2 people * 8 hours * 14 ddays * 200$ = 50,000$, plus an obligatory 6-month retainer of 10 hours a month = 2000$/month for 6 months. Total = about 65,000$.

That would be reasonable. If they negotiate it down to 50,000, you're still ok with that, I'd imagine.

If they ask you to host it, charge plenty for that as well.

(The rather high hourly rate takes into account that you're selling them something you already built before.)
“The next six months are going to set the foundation for the future of personal computing.”

That’s the claim. Still seems reasonable to me. What’s wrong with it? I don’t understand what you are getting at.

If you think that tablets will be important in the future there is nothing wrong with thinking that a lot of groundwork will be done in the next few months: Honeycomb is coming, HP and RIM get started. That sounds to me like a solid foundation.
That looks like a neat trick. Thank you.
If you recall a while back, a blog post became the top result for typing "facebook" into the firefox address bar (or something along those lines - see http://jonoscript.wordpress.com/2010/02/18/some-people-cant-...).

If the conclusions of this are to be believed, I would say that the URL matters very little.
I use Paypal, Authorize.net, and First Data, and we use their built in recurring payment options. It is torture. For First Data, I have to maintain a screen scraper because they don't even have a Reporting API.
They don't, and neither does Ray Kurzweil
Nice video of Ray Kurzweil talking about all that and Watson(IBM) playing Jeopardy!. http://www.usatoday.com/money/media/2011-02-09-kurzweil09_ST...
I have some experience with this. My old company did a bespoke type project for a 40,000 person company with a small footprint of developers.

- 30,000 people means they have deep pockets.

- 14 days is how many man hours? You can do one of two things: 1. Charge by fixed pricing (which may put you in the hole if it goes past 14 days...humans are terrible at planning things so this is not always the right choice) 2. Charge by hour with the assumption of "Time and Materials" basis. [1] Remember - companies like this WILL come back to you when something doesn't look right.

- If you want to charge support you could consider this possibility: Hire up a junior guy who's only job is to support the system. Spend time ramping him up while you are actually supporting the customer. Charge the customer what the cost of that junior person requires (and maybe a very small margin). This is a great starting point for then being able to build out a future practice. Some may argue to make a larger profit margin here, but you could get push-back on price from the customer.

- Think about bundling hosting and support as a whole entity. Nota bene - For a 30,000 person type company you will face major IT challenges. Many large companies require strict security regulations. In many cases they will require to go through loads and loads of lawyers and IT people. Big client customers will always require crazy security things like this: http://mediatemple.net/company/technology.php

Feel free to ping me on email (in my profile) if you want more info.

[1] - http://b.lesseverything.com/2009/5/7/be-wary-of-time-and-mat...
Point taken. I found myself purchasing a few hours later. Nuts.
Oh, for that application, my suggestion of gray code is even worse then binary.

Though actually, you are not really arguing for a large base, but for unary. (Or a mixed unary-large base system.)
Node v0.4 announcement
Reading the story, time and time again his programmer warned him about anonymous, and said he shouldn't be messing with them.

Then what do you know, he gets attacked by anonymous. Do you think maybe his programmer is in anonymous? :)
Review HN : EatToBeat, iPhone app for learning healthy food choices
The Law of Futurology: y - t = 0

y = approximate number of years left in the life of a futurist

t = years futurist thinks it will be until immortality is discovered

http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=1968
The first bit indicates: Chinese are not smarter than anyone else.
All of Kurzweil's predictions are based on extrapolating exponential growth.

That's all very well, but exponential growth in physical systems is usually restricted within limits. In a such a system the negative feedback may also be growing exponentially, which means although initially it may be too small to be noticed, after the growth passes some boundary the negative feedback becomes relevant and the overall growth is no longer exponential.

Unfortunately it's impossible to tell where we are on the growth graph (Although some claim that probability suggests that we are closer to the end. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_argument). Kurzweil makes the assumption we are at the beginning of the growth curve. We could be at the end where the negative feedback is about to overtake and growth will slow.

There will be limits. The speed of light could be a hard limit on computing speed. Or ultimately heat-death could be the hard limit, but there is a limit somewhere. The question is how close are we to the limit and that is something we are only likely to know when we reach it.

See - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exponential_growth#Limitations_...
This is great thanks! We may well take you up on this. Once we have done our reading and taken on board all your comments we will go back to them with our proposal. Fingers crossed!
What’s New for Web Designers – February 2011
New apps and websites appear on an almost daily basis, but trying to find the good ones among them can be tough, especially considering how many are not that great. That’s why every month we research and showcase some of the best and latest resources available for web designers.
A full page load is very disruptive to application flow, and being able to have new data appear without incurring that penalty is great

On many examples I don't see any real disruption to application flow with just using normal links, though there are more full-fledged webapps (like gmail) where I would agree. Playing around with old v. new Twitter, the old one actually has considerably faster navigation performance, at least on my setup (and I'm using a recent Chrome on a recent Macbook Pro). Sure, some HTML header/footer stuff is being retransmitted, but it's not very big.
The real questions are: will users respond to technical superiority or are we looking at another NeXTStep/BeOS? will it undercut the iPad price (necessary to entice users to the unproven)?

(I say this as a Palm/WebOS fan hoping that the TouchPad, despite its uninspiring name, can survive in the market)
Any comment from Australian devs as Im about to go through this myself.
PayPal is the anti christ, not an option for me.
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This isn't really accurate. For example, if I have good whole disk encryption on my laptop, and it's stolen, I am reasonably well protected assuming I used a good password.

Yes, the hardware could be tinkered with, the laptop could be given back to me, I could enter my password and then the laptop could be stolen again, but that's not quite the same thing.

It's significant because some other smart phones have fairly strong encryption options that would prevent an attack like this, AFAIK.
Ask HN: Best way to write an app for both Android and iOS?
I need to write an application that can run on both Android and Apple devices. At this point I have found a couple of solutions:

* Use a framework such as Appcelerator Titanium or PhoneGap,

* Use C++, and then write the UI parts both in Java and Objective-C (as C++ can be run on both platform),

* Write everything twice...

What are your experiences and suggestions regarding this problem?

EDIT: I'm working on the mobile application for our school, we need more than a website because we want to do stuff like Wifi triangulation, maybe also AR.
I read pretty much exactly the same prediction in "The Mighty Micro" in the early 80s (intelligent machines. immortality) etc. - which pretty much influenced me to do a CS degree and go into postgraduate AI research.

Nobody would be more delighted than me if immortality is achieved in 2045 (I'll be 80!) but do I expect it? Not really, nor do I expect effective commercial fusion power either (which also has a habit of being a couple of decades away and has been for the last 60 years).

[Edit: Note that I do believe that artificial general intelligence is perfectly possible (we do, after all, have a working example) just that it won't happen any time soon.]
Lost iPhone? Lost passwords (flaws in iOS Encryption Security)
A youtube movie explaining the flow: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uVGiNAs-QbY&feature=player_embedded
no, with google's proposal, the #! links are all from the site root, see Lifehacker and Twitter's implementation. So these ugly half and half URLs never exist, and you're not paying a double request price
I've used CheddarGetter (http://cheddargetter.com) for a few projects and I've been extremely happy with their service.

* API is reasonably nice to work with (wrote a Python client called Sharpy https://github.com/saaspire/sharpy)
* Lots of options to control exactly how and when your customers get billed.
* Support for a bunch of payment gateways
* Tools for handling tracked items and one-off charges (e.g. discounts or fees) as part of your subscriptions.
* Fantastic support - I don't think I've ever waited more than a few hours for a response and their support team has been very helpful.
It looks like some miss guided people, that wrongly interpreted Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club.
You left out the two most significant data points to help us help you. What is the scan resolution and bit depth of the images inside these pdf's. Because if you have scanned these books at 600dpi 32-bit color, then no wonder page flipping is slow. If so, you should reduce the color depth to 1-bit (black & white, assuming when you say "book" you really mean "book" as in black text on white paper). Going to black and white would likely seriously reduce your file sizes, while also seriously accelerating your page flip rate.
Youtube illustration of the 'hack': http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uVGiNAs-QbY&feature=playe...
You'd better hope it is. If hardware is what limits the rate of improvement of AI, you get slow growth. If knowledge of how to write the software (perhaps by copying algorithms from the brain) limits it, then you get sudden improvements and serious potential for a runaway singularity.