skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My cofounder at Leanpub wrote up his experience publishing "Flexible Rails" here: http://www.peterarmstrong.com/?p=266

Here's the tl;dr:
* Peter made $48k from Flexible Rails.
* $34k of that was from sales of the PDF.

I'm biased, but it seems to me that giving away the PDF (where you make close to 100% profit) to sell a paper book (where you make much less -- The 40% profit from the article is by far the highest I've ever seen) is crazy.

If you have an audience and a good book, you should be able to do well on an e-book. Keir Thomas in the article has both, but he gave away 500 000 copies of his ebook and only made $9k on the paper book. Yikes! He could've sold the book for 2$ a pop and got 1% of the downloads and still made the more.

Keir is right that you have to give away something for free. So, give away a good chunk of the book (say, 1/3 or so) as a PDF and sell the full thing.

Or, give away the whole book for free as HTML and sell the PDF. That's what Eric Ries http://leanpub.com/startuplessonslearned and Nivi and Naval from Venture Hacks are doing (http://leanpub.com/venturehacks) and they're doing quite well.

Really, I don't meant to be too hard on Keir. It was a good post, with interesting data. I think he has shown that giving away the e-book and selling the print book is not necessarily the way to go.

I'd love to see a lot more experiments and write-ups about this. I truly believe that authors can and will soon be able to make good money self publishing technical e-books.
DNS spoofing on a Wi-Fi network is quite simple, the whole MITM process including certificate generation is already automated with a wireshark-like tool. http://monkey.org/~dugsong/dsniff/faq.html
Counterpoint: I love it. It's memorable.
I just VPN out using a PPTP vpn; I've never seen it blocked.

The key with the Apple configuration in OSX is to select "send all traffic over VPN" in the Advanced pane.
Sounds wrong to you. Just as the American usage sounds wrong to me. It's utterly subjective and completely meaningless. Might as well be arguing that people in Scotland talk wrong.
Fukushima and Engineering
Targeted ads are so obvious that I don't understand why they haven't implemented it. Google did it successfully. Facebook did it successfully. In fact, if someone would have said to me a year ago "Twitter will totally ignore their massive pool of user specific data in favor of blanket ads!" I would have literally laughed in their face. "Twitter isn't that thick!" I'd say.

It reminds me of the time I tried to partner with a local print heavyweight over a local portal site w/ a super premo domain. His suggestion was to purchase and post AP content on it.

I just don't follow Twitter's strategy here.
Calm down. Sheesh. The ad firm happens to be the best in the business. Mason said he was relying on their expertise for the ads because they had never done anything as big before.
People here seriously don't recognize the Greek letter omega? What kind of geeks are you anyway?

Anyway, this project is long dead as far as I know, although much (but far from all) of it was incorporated into C#.
The problem with the Bill of Rights is that it refocuses grievances from "where do you, the government derive the power to do such things?" to "what fundamental citizen right is being violated in this case?" Which sounds OK but it's just wrong.

The latter question is relevant in terms of inter-citizen disputes like theft, but in terms of government intervention the former is the appropriate one. Unfortunately it's usually the latter that gets asked.
The bay area has a huge number of early adopters that can get an product to critical mass. It is incredibly useful to someone who doesn't have a platform or serious marketing dollars.
I've seen plenty of iPad touch targets that are a little hard to hit on the current screen size.
It's truly just... insane. There's not a better word for it than that. My tweets are a wealth of data about things I care about. There are so many ways to sell truly useful ads against that – you have to be off your nut not to take this approach. Real-time ads that solve your problems without you doing anything more than gabbing away could make Google look like a two-bit lemonade stand.

"Fuck, I hate AT&T. Worst cell phone service ever."

"Join Verizon today! Get $100 credit when you switch from AT&T."

"... Go on."

edit: And assuming you use Twitter mostly for passive consumption, there's still useful to be derived from your stream. "Boy, this guy sure follows a lot of people from Portland, let's show him Moe's Bike shop ads."
That was an HN typo, as I had already closed the window where I typed the JSON.
It's interesting that people are not really paying attention when the facts presented differ from their own mental models - I suspect this also happens a lot in school and university settings. I remember the only useful lessons were those that actively engaged the learners (and not in some phony interview style either, but real exchange with the teacher).

When watching almost any tutorial video, I find myself zoning out a lot. Often times I even open up the browser and read something completely different while the videos is still running.

A few weeks ago I had a discussion with a friend who challenged me to convince him his adamant assertion that videos are the inevitable future of all media is wrong. At the time I just felt instinctively video was never going to replace the written word and 2D graphical presentations, but I couldn't make a convincing argument. It only now occurs to me there might actually be scientific data in support of my suspicion and that instructions on video may have an information-to-brain bandwidth similar to a very boring teacher after all.
To me, the most interesting thing about these comments are that almost nobody knows anything about greek nowadays. Honestly, people, you should at least recognize this from your experience at Uni at some point...
Ask HN: Freelance web dev best practices...
I just started doing freelance web dev and design. But I'm inexperienced. I've been starting everything from scratch, just blank textwrangler and photoshop.

What are some best practices to get fast and efficient? (For instance, should I be developing on WordPress, using custom form templates, etc?)

Thanks.
It provides protection if you have access to a reasonably trusted network. Let's say HN adds https with a self signed cert. I trust my home network, more or less, so I'll agree and accept the cert. Then if I take my laptop on the road, I can verify that the cert I'm getting over public wifi is the same cert I downloaded at home. That is tons better than the current "broadcast your password in plaintext" scenario we've got going on now.

It means you can't trust sites if you're out of the house and you haven't been there before, but every site I care about trusting gets visited from in my house.

And how big are certs? Not that big. It's conceivable you could download a bundle of them beforehand. We're getting almost back to CA land, though, so I'm going to cut this idea short, but you can imagine a service that collects certs and verifies nothing except that they are the same as they were last week.
There are multiple software packages that make it trivial to set up a rogue ap or attack a physical network (with say, arp spoofing). The same is true for proxies that will attack ssl by replacing any certs that it needs to.

These are not theoretical attacks. Any 16 year old with a $300 netbook can download software written by others and perform these attacks at your local Starbucks in a few hours. They would be able to see all traffic (even https) and without self-signed warnings the only outward sign would be the lack of the green url bar associated with EV certs.
For anyone else who didn't know: HBCU = "historically black colleges & universities".
You are very right. But, why not start simple and just lump people in broad categories based on follows.

Jessica follows a lot of celebrities. Bryan follows lots of tech icons. Billy follows lots of comedians. Etc. Etc.

Even that isn't easy but it is hundreds of times more likely to work than blanket ads and last I heard they have millions in VC money. Spend it on talent specifically for this.
MITMing someone with selfsigned certs on an open wifi network is trivial. Any scriptkiddy can do it with mere minutes of setup and technical rampup: (http://www.thoughtcrime.org/software/sslsniff/).

In the real world, self-signed certs provide neither identity verification nor security.
Why Being Bad At Math Is Ok, But Not With Reading
He said "boot camp", not active service. My best wishes to your dad.
Regarding "pseudoteaching" mentioned in the article - every great teacher is to some degree a con artist. They know that in the end it is up to the student to engage with the material - the only thing they can do as a teacher is to communicate their excitement about the subject and provide a point of view that would make the material easier to absorb, at least to some. Their goal is never to reach everyone yet everyone leaving their lectures feels like they have been made a party to some exciting secret.
How many dozens of Twitter NLP companies for tracking brands are there? Twitter should buy their favorite, and offer brand reinforcement and steal-away ads. Better already.
that's my phone as well. no problems so far. $150 up-front cost is great. but mostly i like the $25/month no-contract with unlimited data/text/web. i really wanted the Dell Streak, but that was a $75/month MINIMUM contract
Tongue-in-cheek.
i think, lockhart's-lament (http://www.maa.org/devlin/LockhartsLament.pdf) should be a required-reading for all educators...
You know what, you're right (and if I may add, on both counts ;-).

The wikipedia page I referenced, loosely summarized, is referring to an ordinal number with the cardinality aleph-1. The plain omega that I should have referenced has cardinality aleph-0.

Unfortunately, the ordinal I wanted does not have its own wikipedia page. WTF? Merely countable is not notable enough?
I've found that most baby boomers have this mentality. They trust the government to do the right thing.
"it would take about 30 minutes for someone to start republishing paid users' content."

That'd be something that Twitter should be able to keep on top of, at least for naive automated retweets...

The more I think about it, the more I think it might work. Especially if they can get micropayments worked out.
The same ad agency produced the failed Microsoft Seinfeld ads. I wouldn't hire them.
Well, we have that to the degree most people need it with SSL. Private correspondence doesn't work that way yet because webmail clients don't support it.
(I have to make some assumptions about your understanding of relativity.) The big breakthrough that Einstein made in general relativity was the 'relative' bit. There is no absolute thing of 'time', no universal tick of a clock. There is the time as experience by the traveller and the time as experienced by the brother. So there is no discontinuity that has to be merged when they meet.

It seems to me your question makes an implicit assumption that there is a universal tick that is thrown out of whack when the brothers meet. But there isn't, so the question is invalid.

I wonder if perhaps you regard space as one thing and time as a separate thing. It might help to throw that out and regard it as a four-dimensional object called spacetime.

For the merry-go-round, I'm not sure why you say one voice sounds low and the other high. They won't. Einstein's big thought experiment was to realise that the speed of light is constant no matter the speed of the observer.

As an aside, it is an unfortunate historical artifact that we call c the speed of light. It isn't. C is the "speed" of any massless particle in spacetime; it is unitless and equals 1. Photons are massless so they travel at c.

http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/g6zbd/if_we_depa...

http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/fu5io/help_me_un...
They don't understand that government is not going anywhere, and that government can be as good as it can be bad.

No way in hell. Where, in either the future or the history books, is the saintly leader who will counterbalance a Stalin or a Mao?
An Ex-Regulator's Take on AT&T Buying T-Mobile
My Background Broders Design Collection | Sadia Komal.Com
Benefit of Web development in Ahmedabad
Web development industry is gaining strong foothold in Ahmedabad, which happens to be one of the fastest growing cities in India. It is witnessing a real estate boom. Major Corporate houses are opening their offices, here. IT companies are not lagging behind and are investing in infrastructure.
it happens daily in china, it's the norm--it shows who's boss and if you don't do it, you ironically don't gain respect. maybe the angel investor lived in china for a long time? :)

this is an excellent anecdote, lucky the waitress f'd up.
Freelance web dev is a wide open landscape (and getting wider all the time with the addition of things like mobile apps, platforms such as Facebook, etc.) Couldn't even begin to tell you unless you were to be more specific. I suggest you focus on front end or back end. Take a look at the work out there and decide where you want to go. Sometimes the decisions are made for you (looking for a Wordpress developer and sometimes you have full decision making power.)
I'm in Chapel Hill - making plans to head out to SF myself in a few months. I applied to S11 with this: http://tribefind.com - it's like eHarmony for friends.
i agree, feedback is king for those that want to improve. delivery of feedback though requires practice.
Twitter can make $45 million with little effort
I read somewhere that Twitter has around 750,000 applications registered. They don't want people to build "clients" because that's their bread and butter, their way of making money.

I say, why don't you charge the app developers a nominal $5 per month per app. The most optimistic figure if all the apps registered right now agree to pay up would be $45 million a year. Hey, that's a good start!

P.S. This will probably draw flak from a lot of app developers, but twitter can always build more features such as app analytics to justify the fee. I have a twitter app http://justunfollow.com and from the point of view of an app developer, I wouldn't mind paying a small fee to keep twitter running smooth.
Why? T-Mobile isn't getting the iPhone, so they aren't getting access to any new subscribers.
This is great, thank you! I am currently on the "Talk to users" step. Should I be excited to be halfway there?
Are you suggesting it doesn't exist anymore?
IOS 4.3 battery life
'Economics in One Lesson' refutes this logic in its chapter "The Curse of Machinery" (http://steshaw.org/economics-in-one-lesson/chap07p1.html). Some highlights:

--

If we assert automation removes the need for labour. Then it follows that to maximize labour, we must make our jobs as inefficient as possible.

--

Not only should we regard all future improvements as calamitys, but we must also regard all past technology with equal horror.

--

Why should freight be carried from Chicago to New York by railroad when we could employ enormously more men, for example, to carry it all on their backs?
The best part of standards is when you have so many to choose from!
I think your assumption is wrong that the FTC will only block these sorts of deals if a company has a monopoly. I think they actually have rules they generally follow about how big a company they'll allow given the number and size of other market participants. Not sure if it varies by industry.
Joe Nacchio (former Qwest CEO) says Qwest refused to comply and spy on behalf of the NSA, and that cost them contracts:
http://www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/20071013/news_1n13ns...

Granted, he's been convicted of insider trading and may be a biased source, but I'd say it's a good indicator that Qwest isn't named as a defendant in the EFF suits.
For what it's worth, Boost, et. al are MVNOs - they simply resell/rebrand Sprint service. They're not 'real' cell carriers.
Google: China is messing with Gmail
I think this should be required reading for anyone doing code review. The big problem I see with code review is that people treat it with the same broken beliefs as with things like unit tests. That is, they assume that any code review is better than no code review, which isn't true. In fact, it's incredibly easy to get code review wrong. I certainly can't claim to always get these things right.
I was thinking an IP-only, no 'voice' service network, with no caps. Just assume from the start that your users will be heavy users, and work from there?
Succinct Data Structures: Cramming 80,000 words into a Javascript file
In defense of .coop, .com and .org are rather poor fits for many cooperatives. However, I think TLDs are rather pointless and idiotic in general.
Domain Registration
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Thanks for responding...just the answers I expected. Communication is changing at an alarming rate, we are literally in the middle of the communication revolution. It's interesting to think about how humans will interact in 10 years.
That no country has practiced complete free-trade means Smith was wrong about free-trade?

Scialabba is saying Smith was wrong to argue that protectionism would never be a net economic benefit because richer countries have in fact been more protectionist than poorer ones. Admittedly this doesn't follow strictly logically, but that's a technical point. More interesting is whether the claim about rich vs. poor countries is true. If it is, it's significant. Has anyone here read Ha-Joon Chang?
Isn't that pretty much what they're doing here?
So after applying to YC today (worried that I borked my app) I had the following idea - which is an evolutionary idea from the one I applied to YC with, I dont know if this is possible - but I want to throw it out to HN:

I would like to see mobile end-to-end secure communications apps that allow for users to have completely encrypted message passing.

I had the following idea - please tell me if this would work:

You have a distributed truecrypt file system with a client that the users run on their device, and intermediate cloud storage.

Each user device is a "folder" on the file system - messages are effectively truecrypt encrypted files that gave saved out to the remote folder that == the recipient.

The system would notify you that you have a new file that has been pushed to your folder - you can then decrypt and read it.

However - I feel that the weakness would be in the required key/passwd to open the files -- this might not be securable.

It may require that folders between two users have a known password on each eand - and that for every contact/recipient you would have to have a separate key (they could be the same value, but still separate) thus a communication looks like this

[typed mesage] --> [truecrypt'ed file] --> [to: folder] --> [routing engine/store and forward] --> [from: folder] --> [truecrypt decrypt by user] --> [user reads message]

But in a mobile environment...

Anyway - half baked stream-of-thought idea... Why would this not work?
>The government is not just them, it's also you, and sitting on the sidelines being cynical is supporting them.

One can be cynical without being resigned. Cynicism is recognition of the depth and breadth of corruption and not necessarily equivalent to apathy.

But you're right that the corruption we see in the government is a reflection of our own corruption. The mess we now find ourselves in wouldn't be possible without generations of self-deception, apathy, and twisted values. We let ourselves be conned into building the world that the founding fathers warned us against. We'll likely only wake up when survival itself is at stake.
The TVC in question for those who have not seen it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vVkFT2yjk0A
Is this why the at&t+T-Mobile merger is being approved?
... but corporations are A-OK. It's the government that's the problem. Right?
Steve Huffman, Co-founder of Hipmunk and Reddit Answers Reader Questions
Web-apps are worth nothing. The business around the app is what valuation is about. You can build an app for guessing color of user's underpants, but if it ain't paying or doesn't have potential business lurking around - it's just worth nothing.
T-Mobile's Anti-AT&T Ad Campaign (Video)
Moving PostgreSQL data directory on Windows
This will result in people moving to a decentralized twitter mode (like having their own domain names)
It's a little early for Groupon to describe itself as "industry-changing", muchless a "profit machine". In a year, it could be described as merely a "has-been, internet fad".
The whole Tibet commercial was totally fucked from the start, on one side by Groupon's attempt to expand into China, and on the other by the feelings of the rest of the world. Trying to play the middle ground like they did? Crazy, imo.

I'm surprised "Tibet" isn't a taboo word to Groupon like it is to the rest of the international business community.
AT&T disallows tethering, loophole is falsely rumored
AGBeat dispels At&t tethering web rumor - get the facts.
> - .jobs: pity they won't take my registration for Blow, Inc.

They did take RIM...

(http://rim.jobs is Research In Motion's careers site)
What I'm suggesting is that you should raise prices sharply, and just ignore anyone who this discomfits. If they think they can do it in a weekend, let them. They won't do it because pathological customers are flakes, but hey, if they were hypothetically not flakes, it is a free Internet.

There exist programmers who happily pay $50+ for ebooks. Empirically, there are enough of them to support successful businesses.

P.S. See also consulting rates, writing OSS, etc. After somebody hits my patience for free support I just quote my daily rate at them. If they don't like it, well, enjoy the code.
It could also open the floodgates of phishing. Decentralized trust is one hell of a problem.
Some research project about a new language and the top comments are about how weird its name is and how the character looks like a butt? I'm speechless.
The joke was fine till .me, .co and .tv but .cat, .tel and .xxx? That sure is bound to be of use to nobody but the ones selling the domain.

The point where he questions if he is desktop or mobile, is actually very critical. The web is one. Especially with new ways of designing and developing a site including things like media queries make the entire point of a .mobi appear like a joke to me.
Microsoft is the same company that produced the products even lousy, high-profile ads couldn't mask.
What about something like viglinks? Turn every bare outbound link from twitter.com into an affiliated link, turn every link from t.co into an affiliated link, etc.

Yes, people will be able to avoid this by using shorteners other than t.co, or by using a third party client, but if what twitter is saying is correct (the majority of users use the official client or use twitter.com), then this shouldn't be a problem at all.

Are they already doing this? It seems incredibly obvious, it's totally transparent to the users (I don't imagine that any of the users would be against this), everybody wins.
Basically I do this too. But I'd add: Moved to country in vastly different time zone? Put pictures on facebook and send newsletter style email every now and then.
Would you mind elaborating ever so slightly about your visa situation?

When people leave such big cliff hangers it makes me secretly despise them for their ability to get me transfixed until the next blog post.
It is actually that women maintain slightly more relationships at every level of trust. The standard levels are: 5, 15, 50, and 150. Women tend to do around 8, 18, 80, 180. It is fairly fascinating research. Let me know if you guys have any other questions, love talking through this stuff.