skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Does Google "beta test" their search results on their employees? I imagine Google could allow their employees to flag bad sites and search results to improve their search algorithms. Google can't trust anonymous internet users, but they can presumably trust (to some degree) their 24,000 employees's real-world feedback to improve their search algorithms.
The previous link didn't compare. Here's one that actually shows the traffic comparison (for your convenience).

http://www.alexa.com/search?q=odesk.com+vworker.com+freelanc...
Still only 8mbps up. That's another big problem, people want to backup their data and access their media from outside their home. Upstream bandwidth is a big factor in this as well.
Stop the presses. Apple software like iTunes and Safari STILL RUN ON WINDOWS XP. The difference is in how many users are on XP (50%?) vs. older than OS X Leopard (low single digits).

Related: Firefox, Chrome, Safari, and Chrome Frame are all more advanced than IE9 and all run on Windows XP.
> The products (...) had good reputations

Considering I never met anyone who actually owned one, Microsoft employees excepted, I am not surprised the reputation was good.
I would buy this right now if it worked with iPhones. I love my iPhone, but Apple's restrictive policies are really starting to get to me.
Well, of course. That is how fandom works. I don't particularly care if Bella gets with Jacob or Edwards, but I don't like the Twilight books. In order to dislike a particular team/company/entity, you probably have to passionate about the field in general.
Is it Co.Support, Co.Support.us, or CoSupport? I see all three variations on the company's home page.
Yep, I've saved that tutorial and am reading it, it looks comprehensive and on one page. I'll have a look at the book too, thanks.
Or you could go to Monoprice and order a baker's dozen for the same price or less.
I already have a tendered offer on the table. Does flippa.com provide contracts outside of their ecosystem?

Also...not too keen on paying commission to a third party for a deal that has already been negotiated.
Ah, good point on why we should look at employment vs. unemployment. Makes sense.

I was tempted to argue that the decline in construction doesn't support the "obsolete jobs" hypothesis, because the jobs were created by an overheated housing market and shouldn't have been there in the first place. But regardless of whether the jobs were justified in the first place, they're not coming back. A technological shift isn't the only thing that can make a job obsolete; a one-time speculative bubble can do the same thing.
Random wiki image as wallpaper

Trivial to do...but er, no. With my luck, that would plop the most hideous images of arachnids, chemical burns, etc. on my monitors.
Find yourself someone who is really, really good at getting products built. Then work with them and trust them.
I just don't see this happening. In order to enforce this, it'd need to be enforced across the board. Do you really think they want to make Rovio pick a platform for Angry Birds? Or that that in order for there to be a Facebook app it'd need to only be on the iPhone? If they were to go this route, it'd be the fastest way to kill their app store ecosystem, and promote HTML5 as the platform of choice for developers. It's just not going to happen.
"""Suspension of special event service, such as baseball games and Bay to Breakers """

Those trains are packed, so they must making money from that ... don't get it.
Command line social networking
My 18-months old can't speak or dress himself but he is getting very good at several challenging iPhone apps that involve assembling shapes, matching tiles from memory, mixing music, etc

Which apps are those? I'm experimenting with making an app for kids and am trying to figure out what apps my 1 and 3 year old nieces are into.
I really need to get around to reading this. The original LOTR did have a rather "western" bent to it. Looking at things in another way would be pretty fun.

Also related: http://www.mcsweeneys.net/2003/04/22fellowship.html, if Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn watched The Fellowship of the Ring.
The sabotaging of Iran
Show HN: Mystery Internet Theater 3000
http://mit3k.com/

It's a simple site I built yesterday. The idea is to get people watching the same movie and allow them to comment on it in realtime. Each movie is a $0.99 iTunes movie in the spirit of the B-movies in Mystery Science Theater 3000.

I wanted to play with realtime push, so I used the realtime comments in MIT3K as an excuse to do it!
According to the Topaz developer[1], it was cracked over a year ago; apparently the Topaz algorithm was, like .azw before it, trivially bypassed by prodding at the KindleForPC application.

Furthermore, Topaz is a rarely-used specialty format. It has existed for at least three years (based on the blog's date and text), but AZW/mobi continues to be by far the dominant format for purchased Kindle books.

[1] http://beesbuzz.biz/blog/e/2010/01/07-interesting_topaz_drm_...
> Yes, even better than iTunes.

Beating iTunes is not exactly hard.
So was their success mostly based on the non-scalable aspect? (namely that organizers were happy to get an excited person to work the door for free)

Or is there a hidden scalable app in there for sending out people to do conference name tags in exchange for advertising in front of certain audiences?
Edit: "I'm now comfortable to write an intrusive stack."
I mispelled it as "not" by accident.

I tried editing the post, but edit functionality doesn't appear to be working correctly.
Next 3 steps.

Network, hustle, hustle.

In that order.
So where does one go to find a really really good product builder. And no, oDesk, elance, getafreelancer are not where I want to take this. Preference would be to get a 90-120 day plan, build it with some local USA developers and get this moving fast.

Is there a paddock of "Internet Guns for hire" that work on this and are proven?
Evolutionary computation at Dow Chemical (page 4)
> Does anyone know what regulation prevents someone from doing this?

The same regulation that pretty much defines modern securities - the Securities Act of 1933. It basically states that securities cannot be offered to the public without first being registered with the SEC, and the company must report all material information related to the security - essentially these requirements are the reasons that companies are avoiding IPOs in the first place.

> there is a _huge_ demand for a liquid market for privately held stock

Privately held stock is, by definition, privately held and not publicly offered on a liquid market. The only potential loophole I see here is that accredited investors (individuals w/ net worth > $1 mil or income > $200k/yr) are exempt from these rules as they are considered "sophisticated investors". However, a market that's only open to accredited investors probably wouldn't be very liquid.
People have long talked about how OO failed to generate code reuse, but I don't understand how they do it with a straight face. You reuse masses of OO code every time you write a non-trivial program using a modern standard library.

I think the people making this criticism are looking in the wrong place for the reuse, and / or had weird ideas of what could be reused, and how it could be reused, to begin with.

The reuse that OO gives us comes from raising the level of abstraction with which the program is written, in particular because runtime libraries are so much larger ("batteries included", etc.). The hierarchical namespaces and encapsulated structure of modern class libraries reduces their cognitive overhead. For example, in .NET, you can work with WebRequest, TcpClient or Socket, depending on what level of control you need; and the conventions for working with these things are pretty uniform across the board. Larger applications are self-similarly written at a higher level, reusing code within themselves in a framework-like way.

But the people who thought there was going to be some kind of central library of domain-specific classes in your company, that you would reuse in multiple disparate applications, I think that was always fairly naive; reuse implies coupling, and coupling of things that are individually subject to change in ways that affects their users is fraught with problems, and always has been.

The best candidates for reuse aren't usually representations of the domain concepts that are central to a business, because each application in the business will probably be wanting to do something quite unique with those domain classes. Rather, it's concepts that are self-contained, universal, not likely to change much over time nor need different intrinsic behaviour from application to application, which are best suited to reuse.
Ask HN: Hourly rates? (iOS)
Hey HN,

I'm a college student who just got hired to do some iOS consulting and they need my hourly rate. I've only ever done fixed cost stuff. I'm fairly competent with the iOS SDK but obviously on the "in" side of experienced. What should I charge?

THANKS!
Thanks - networking is huge and I have a huge network. I just want to make sure that I am fishing in the right pond.
Brainstorming Egypt's future with Google Moderator
Oh I didn't even realize this until I reread some of the article. There's no way this will float.

It's setting a minimum advertised price (i.e. price fixing) using a percentage rather than an absolute value. The FTC will have a hay day with this.
> What's it called when you scrape your competitor's results and then have teachers pimp your product to their 5th graders?

Microsoft

Oh... I believe it was a rhetorical question...
No weekend service at all is troubling. I'm not clear as to whether these are just random proposals, or if they will actually be implemented. A fare increase might be the most palatable solution.
Google starts "Future Institute" in Berlin
PhoneGap provides, if you include its JavaScript file in your PhoneGap-wrapped web app, JavaScript APIs to the camera, stored photos, the address book, and some other stuff.

Some of this stuff is in 'HTML5', like geolocation, but much of it isn't. Apple could have provided custom APIs to the camera and so on and allowed people to access it from their iOS-specific web apps.

The way that an API gets to be a standard is that someone implements it and people use it - if Apple had included a camera access API in Mobile Safari, it probably would have found its way into a spec and been implemented by other browsers.

Your last question seems confused: HTML/CSS rendering and JavaScript processing is part of the device's OS (in the form of its web browser). No browser does everything that's in the standard, and most browsers do things that aren't in the standard. Just adding it to the spec for HTML5 wouldn't be directly meaningful.
Maybe a good place to start is here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_web_application_f...
PhoneGap sees itself as a temporary measure and everything should be a browser capability. They bridge the OS capabilities that are not available now in the browser.
Very good point. Somehow everyone is skipping the fact that Ted was a CO-OP STUDENT during his work at RIM.
A workers union to which the IT department workers belonged, but the lecturers didn't. I don't know the particulars.
Cocoa with Love: IMP of the current method
I don't think you could ever describe facebook as having low adoption rates and it doesn't seem to be hugely affecting the uptake of sites like quora.
X-ray laser finds structure of a single virus as it vaporizes it
On Quora, Journalism, and Disintermediation
The convergence of notability and verifiability on Wikipedia
It may deter you, but for every person it doesn't deter they get 5 more people to sign up.
"No deal, amateur."
Agreed. How can you possibly expect a computer to make a non-optimal decision, such as humans regularly do (e.g., the lottery, short versus long-term output, etc.)? Until we can model these decisions, there will be areas that tech falls flat.
Twice the rate you would make working at a full-time job.
I never said low, I said lower. :)

Quora… how popular is it really outside of the tech community? Do we really have any idea about what its adoption rates would be otherwise? I don't.
Especially the hardware. Nice build quality overall with solid plastic and metal, slick braid-covered earbuds instead of plasticy ones. The UI was pretty awesome too, minus a few usability annoyances.
With all the trouble that the Caltrain is having, and with all the good that it does for employees at Valley companies, why don't they do something about this? Google could certainly buy the train outright, though they probably don't want to run it... but a group of companies such as Google, Facebook, VMWare, Oracle, NVidia, etc etc together easily have enough money to donate to help fix the Caltrain's financial issues.
These can be combined!
Tools -> New Incognito Window
How's this different than JSON-RPC, for example?
You cannot have anything but a monopoly in your OWN environment.

I.e. Apple has a monopoly in the iOS App Store. Why wouldn't they? It's their store.
Similar here. I used Zune pass since I loved the fact of getting an album, literally in 1 click. But I was tied into a zune, and windows, 3 physical machines top to be exactly. Then some albums starting dissapearing, and when I tried to setup an account for my dad,I couldn't since it was outside the US. In short I wish it was given a bigger push.

I'm using rdio now. Works on any computer with a browser, good album selection, cheaper, and I can get the songs on my iPhone.
I would be interested in contributing. Is there someway I can contact you to determine if my skills match what you are looking to build ?
"More recently, watchers of the New York tech scene will recall Google’s purchase and shutdown of Dodge Ball."

Interesting... I wonder when Google went public... undoubtedly it was back in the heyday of small tech IPOs, otherwise they would have had to sell themselves!

Seriously though:

His other example, Wal-Mart - inflation adjusted would be >$100mm today at IPO.

To expand on hristov's list, some recent, smaller IPOs:

AcelRx: $85mm market cap (ie. post-money)

Kip's Bay Medical: $130mm market cap

Trunkbow International: $170mm market cap

Ossen Innovation: $87mm market cap

SGOCO: $80mm market cap

UniTek: $150mm market cap

through the midpoint of November. Some slightly larger ones as well that I've skipped.

Not to say that increased regulation and disclosure requirements have had a negligible chilling effect on the decision to go public, but this blows it out of proportion.

What may be a legitimate worry is that companies are choosing to stay private through sales to VCs and PE funds, saving millions in public company costs and the time that would otherwise be devoted to dealing with the general investing public. Whether this is a good or bad thing is debatable, but it does keep these companies out of reach for certain investors.
What you said may be true, but their main justification for the cost is the supposed supreme quality over cheaper cables that has been disproven time and again, and some of their cables cost much much more than $60. That's not to mention their litigation practices. They are truly a horrible company.
Thanks! Really looking for a number though...
Blame San Mateo County for rejecting BART 50 years ago.
http://www.bart.gov/about/history/
Wow - this is a huge, and, if it goes through, will completely reshape how CalTrain is used.

For those not familiar with Silicon Valley, we have several major mass transit systems, "Muni" - which is a light rail system that serves the City (aka "San Francisco"), BART, which is a traditional mass transit system, that spans fairly broadly around the Bay, but does _not_ go all the way down the peninsula, or to San Jose. And finally CalTrain, which is responsible for covering San Francisco all the way down to San Jose (And a few cities afterwards - I've never been further south than San Jose)

Right now - when I'm coming home, or heading to the City, I only have to wait a bit longer outside of commuting hours. During Commuting hours, I usually just walk onto the train, and, if it's a bullet, I will be home faster than any car can get me there.

The elimination of the local stations, is _not_ a good thing. People who wanted to avoid those would take the express anyways. Now - you have no ability to get to those cities with caltrain.

Also, look at the Southbound schedule (Northbound is a reflection):

11 Trains Leaving, from 5:45 AM to 6:55 AM, And in the afternoon, 11 Trains leaving from 3:45 to 4:55 PM.

This is not a "drastic service cut" - this is a complete gutting of the peninsula transit system. These changes are so severe, I'm wondering if it's a bluff, and they will walk it back after public outrage.
All-white living room, instantly re-decorated with a mapped projection system
Not that I've ever heard of.

From my experience, your best bet is to find someone you trust that is a great programmer (even if they can't work for you), and have them vet candidates for you. The truth of the matter is that there is an amazing lack of correlation between people who seem (to non-techs) to know what they're talking about, and people who actually know what's going on.
Settings -> General -> Restrictions.

My pleasure ;)
What is your evidence to support that statement? All I see is many attempts that indicate Google gets that social is important. All those attempts seem to illustrate (to me), that they don't get how to do it, or what the core ideas in "social" are about.
Apps may not be the antithesis of the Internet, but the concept of an App Store arguably is. Internet = decentralized freedom, App store = centralized control.

The data is not the problem, the communication medium is not the problem, the issue is the control over the distribution channel.
I'm not arguing that a Honda Civic alternator won't work in my Mercedes and that's a bad thing. That's like saying I'm upset that apps built for the Google OS don't work for an Apple OS. I'm wondering why I can't buy an 'aftermarket' part for my Mercedes without Mercedes taking a cut.

Last time I checked, I could buy a new sound system for my car without paying the original manufacturer. Buy new tires for my car without paying the original manufacturer. I can buy a new engine that's not built by Mercedes as long as it fits in the engine compartment, can't I?

Or am I wrong and Mercedes does get a cut of my new tires, even if they aren't tires that Mercedes builds itself?
The HBGary booth at the RSA conference
What you're saying is that Apple doesn't understand social networking and cloud services. I agree, but I suspect Apple is working on those; although it's anyone's guess what they're going to do with the massive data center they've just built in NC.

The article was about Apple trying to control how people interact with content on the internet. The author feels that that's against the nature of the internet, hence: "Apple doesn't understand the internet".
ETF Stripping: Insider Trading scheme that uses ETFs
Google Voice now supports conference calling
Pull the trigger. Use the money to build a development team that you trust. And trust them with building your first version (MVP). Iterate from there.
That makes no sense. The cost to the publisher of an additional electronic subscription is tiny. Really tiny. It's comparable to the cost of sending one more eMail when you're already sending out thousands. If they had to give 30% of all their existing revenue, they'd be down, but if these Apple subscribers are new subscribers, then they've made some more profit.
This is interesting, and I prefer the term "patchworker" to "freelancer" so kudos for that. I'd love to see employment in the U.S. either regress and become much more static or move forward towards a more dynamic model like this. In the '50's and '60's, being an employee of a company carried a certain set of obligations. You were a "company man" and, in exchange for doing your time and climbing the ladder, you'd be taken care of with a pension, great health care and near-guaranteed employment. Now, the benefits are almost all gone and that makes long-term employment with one company a suckers' game barring extraneous circumstances. Some places hire long-term contractors, but I don't think this is what the article is talking about as long-term contracts generally carry the same demands on your time as a full-time job does, making it much more difficult to keep several irons in the fire, so to speak. This patchworking concept is, as I see it, the ideal circumstance for someone who knows their shit and can get things done.

However, the link doesn't say very much about the obvious problem with the model it advocates. How do you convince companies that they can, in fact, get work from part-time patchworkers that is just as good as the work they get from full-time employees? I understand that there is a mentality that assumes you can't manage someone who isn't in the office, but I don't know how to disabuse someone of that notion and replace it with a results-based view of work. THAT, to me, is the lynchpin to breaking out of the 9-to-5 rut, and I'm not sure how to convince a business that the code I wrote at 3 am in my living room can do their work just as well as the code I'd be writing at 11 am in their offices. THAT's what I'd like to see in an article talking about breaking free of the 9-5 rut.
Maybe the problem is expectation of privacy when we act in a public sphere (The Internet). Imagine a situation without a computer where a murder suspect with an insanity plea was seen weeks in advance browsing a gun store and asking really specific questions of the clerk. He was acting in public space and has no expectations of privacy.

Should we amuse that any unsecured, unencrypted activity is equivalent to doing it in public and if we want privacy than we should encrypt our communications? Maybe there should be an easy to use mode in browsers which encrypt your traffic. Any information stored on your computer would be treated as private in the same way as mail correspondence is.

Also, the judges should really be careful and demand that any search history evidence presented before them should really be relevant to the case. Just because I was curious at one point how much a handgun would cost, does not necessarily mean I am guilty of the murder that I am accused of. The evidence should be persistent and without doubt linked to the crime.
Apple's price fixing will fail: FTC's analysis on MAP by the record industry.
I really dig Zune as well. I originally wanted to get the HD model but held out for WP7. The subscription idea suits me better then the iTunes model.
Hire a lawyer. If the dollar value is that good that it makes you want to do it right. Then its probably worth the cost to do it right and get good advice.
So it goes :) can't complain about NYTimes love, though.
Similar to a 'first-world' problem, this is a 'dumbass' problem. Should you give a child an easy-to-use device which contains all of your data? There is a simple and clear answer to this. Parental lock is irrelevant. If it becomes simpler for the average parent it will only become simpler for the average child to defeat. Add in the fact that the device is breakable, and it becomes all the clearer. I don't know - perhaps Scoble's children are angels who never break things. Do you think?
> Doesn't anyone else see a huge opportunity here?

Forgive my ignorance, but isn't this essentially what sharespost and secondmarket are doing?
For curious folks, here is Mozilla's C++ Portability Guide (last updated July 2010, so it is still pretty recent). It is not a style guide. It contains some good lessons about writing portable code for "25 different machines and at least a dozen different C++ compilers."

https://developer.mozilla.org/index.php?title=en/C%2B%2B_Por...
Go on Github. Search for programmers in your area/using your technology. Check out their projects and send them introduction emails.

You could also look through Craigslist.

Definitely get them on the phone. Anyone that doesn't want to meet or talk to you isn't worth your time.