skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm sure it was independently thought of by many people (me not included; I read it years and years ago...). Can't remember from whom, or if it was attributed at all. It has, to me, the feel of a Henry Spencer-ism.
No, the difference between 1 millisecond (and the latency of the good exchanges is smaller than that) means that the faster guy gets the trade, and you don't. You don't provide the liquidity, you don't get the trade.

Or, worse, you get half of a two-part trade that you were going to do, and you are stuck holding something or owing something.
I don't see this bubble popping any time soon (the next 10 years) but I do think the availability of knowledge will have a lifting-of-all-boats effect. While the latter may happen, I believe the level of increased knowledge will happen at the entry/lower levels and not have an immediate effect on the top-end.
What Makes a Person Ugly?
Per-employee earnings may make sense as an indicator of the health of a company but they do not mean much in this context because without the collective team, the earning per employee may be impossible to achieve.
A big factor is expense vs. purchase for companies. Purchase requires a timely permission process that can takes weeks. With subscriptions, they can now get the software quickly and move on, expensing when it's convenient.
Based on cost to the company the average hacker at a large company needs to creating over 200k / year in value or it's not worth paying and managing them. At the high end Google programmers generate closer to 1 million / year in value.

PS: An average programmer doing government consultant for for 40h/week at a large company can be billed at over 1,100$ / day and pull home ~80-100k / year.
Windows 7 share tops XP for the first time in U.S.
Definitely for small scale specialty manufacturing, like 3D printing and other rapid proto methods. However, we've seen a lot of automated processes being shifted back to manual lines since manual labor is so incredibly cheap and becoming better and better in quality. This typically happens after some years of automated production in higher-wage countries like the US or Singapore. Once the process/product is mature and the equipment amortized its often cheaper to get manual labor to take on big parts of the process.
That sounds like a competitor to the page speed plugin, but anything running over HTTP/1.x has fundamentally limited performance.
"Be able to launch the SaaS in 3 months work."

I don't see ANY mention of marketing in there. I can't tell you the number of SaaS-on-the-side startups that I've seen launch to nothing but crickets.

If you launch a SaaS offering, understand that you'll be competing in your on-the-side marketing efforts with people who are spending lots of time/money to grow their business. Going to try SEO? Your competition has going full steam with SEO-- how are you going to compete? Adwords? Most SMB SaaS can't afford adwords. Facebook ads? Bit of a minefield, but possible. Word of mouth? There's a lot of noise out there

In other words, have a customer acquisition plan and be prepared for that to be your fulltime job. 37Signals, with their early fame and following, took 12 months before they could afford to set aside consulting. It's a longer road than you think.
Actually, I think it's (red - (green + blue)). Equal parts red, green, blue, e.g. FFFFFF or 555555 is just gray. With this formula, that would be zero -- so no red.

With his formula, he's getting any pixel that has 100 out of 255 increments greater than the green and blue channels combined.
Review my app: Track and share casual bets with friends
In recent weeks/months there was some discussion over the connotations of the term "hustler." To be succesful, you have to put forth the effort (hustle) in every single area of a business.

The assumption made is that skill (and determination) alone can lead to success. It can, but you need the determination in all other areas outside of hacking alone.
Accessing Google Speech API
I have to whole heartedly agree with oskee80 on this one and I feel the need to chime in on it. Jelmer, Phil, you guys are fantastic when it comes to public relations. Dan, not so much. I feel the same way as oskee80; as a mid level developer I do feel a little discouraged about asking questions.

As a framework that is designed for simplicity I'm sure it's going to be an attractive choice for junior to intermediate developers, especially because there is a lot that you can learn from it which I can attest to as I already have. Thank you BTW. But that being said, and as you guys already know, there will be a lot of no0bish questions and seemingly stupid things said simply out of ignorance (Within the true meaning of the word ignorance as in "uninformed or lack of knowledge". Sorry, had to put that in there as I've seen and heard that word get misused a lot). Those questions need to be dealt with professionally. Lest we forget that we were all no0bs once. Never forget where you came from!

Going forward, I would suggest that all PR should be dealt with by you and Jelmer. At the same time though I can understand that that's a whole lot work that you guys would rather not have split between just the two of you. But what else can you do? I know you guys understand.

Anyway, something I know that you guys don't hear enough: Thanks for all of your hard work for giving us a sweet new kickass PHP framework. It really is f*#king amazing and I fall more and more in love with it every time I play with it. As a CI user of 2 years I now feel bored when I have to work on my CI based projects. That's a good thing. Cheers.
Startup Idea For Helping People Design/Test Websites Faster
I'm designing a website and I need a product that I couldn't find. Essentially, I want to test whether a webpage I've designed looks identical (or close to it) in different browsers or not. Let's forget Javascript/AJAX for a moment, just how the page looks when it loads.

I need a website where I can enter my URL, choose 2 browsers (say IE7 and FF4) and see 3 horizontal tabs - how the page looks in IE7 (image file), how it looks in FF4 and the difference between those images (think of pixel-by-pixel difference i.e. empty when the images are identical at that pixel and some colored pixels when they're not).

While there are some sites that do some parts of it (e.g. http://browsershots.org/), no-one really does what I'm trying to do. I think there would be a market for a SaaS startup doing what I described above. What do you think?
That was a pretty good post, csomar, but I'm going to critique it anyway. (If it was a crummy post, I wouldn't even bother.)

What I like about it: You're focused on building something that supplies an actual demand. Good!

What concerns me about it: You're still too focused on yourself. Every one of your bullets was about what you want your business to look like.

I think you're focusing too much inward when you need to be focusing on your prospective customer and how they will benefit from the value you provide them.

Examples are everywhere, just a few off the top of my head:

- salons that wants to optimize their scheduling
- retailers that want to improve one on one communication
- actors/artists that need better portfolios
- shopkeepers who want to capture more POS info
- teachers who want to play bingo in class (never mind)

Get out of your office and find people like this first. Ask them, not us, what they want. Then figure out how to provide them with what they crave. (Once you find one niche and get going, you'll be surprised how much fun it is and how well it works out.)

The rest (your bullets) will take care of itself. The shape of your business will be the byproduct of doing whatever you must to satisfy your customers' needs.

One great resource that will probably help you:

http://www.amazon.com/Start-Small-Stay-Developers-Launching/...
Is Sumo Paint really disrupting anything?
Use your social network, no-one's going to hand you a completed spec, you need to find the first few customer who will be willing to spend time with you to discuss their needs, and that generally means using your network (don't discount things like family friends, etc.)

Whenever you meet someone ask them what they hate about their job or what takes the most time at work. That can often give you a good idea on what areas have potential.
I wonder how much the anonymous pressure weighed on their decision for a quick settlement?
My name suggestion: ZCombinator
(one more than Y)
Tell HN: We're hiring a Perl/Catalyst Web developer in Vienna/Austria
You are a skilled Perl hacker experienced in web development using Catalyst/jQuery/MySQL/Redis, you've a strong entrepreneurial mind, want to work in the VoIP/Telecom industry developing appliances and systems used by hundreds of thousands of customers each (read: scalability, high-availability), and you'd like to live in the most livable city in the world (I'm not making this up :) - see http://www.mercer.com/articles/quality-of-living-survey-report-2010 )?

Then we'd love to hear from you, check http://www.sipwise.com/news/jobs/sipwise-is-hiring-perl-web-developers-around-vienna/
This is awesome! I know many have tried before, but have not been successful.

Also, I thought i would put this out there:
As with the creation of the new AirPlay protocol, the RAOP (AirTunes) protocol was also changed (to support album art and other metadata, I assume). My proof of this lies in the Apple TV. If you analyze network traffic between iTunes and the ATV's airtunesd daemon, you can see that the initial pairing does not have the 'rsaaeskey' field but instead a 'fpaeskey' field. So instead of a RSA public/private scheme, it uses something else to encrypt the session keys. I found this out when trying to reverse the airtunesd binary, trying to get the key that way. :P
I would also add that there are unfortunately alot of hackers that don't understand a pretty central business rule.

Closed mouths don't get fed.

They never ask for or seek market wages. And the business people they seems to fall into the hands of get wide eyed and/or start slick talking (because to them they've found a sucker) and next thing you know they're working crazy hours and taking a low wage because "they're just coding" "some else's" "big idea (TM)"

Many say things like "I don't really care about money." or "I can wait a couple of years."

And those things can be true but if they were a bit braver and spoke up or found employment with a group who appreciates their talents they would get paid better.
Google Maps Terms of Service Opens Mobile Uses, Adds Advertising
Yes exactly. With the caveat that f should be a meaningful procedure that does some real work, not direct state manipulation.

The OP is kind of ridiculous actually.
knowing me, if I didn't think today may be my last day on earth, I might just end up procrastinating :-P So, death clock based on life expectancy would probably have a negative effect on others like myself :)
I suspect there isn't anything more to know, except who paid which legal bills.
You're asking if everyone you'll interview will be:

virtually impossible to do collaborative work with

always measuring his power and negotiating for advantage

emotionally tiring to deal with

spending all their mental energy making sure things are done the way they want them

behaving like a CEO, when it is not their job

orchestrating power coups every chance they get?

Seriously? You think this is even relatively normal?
Playstation Hacker Geohot Settles with Sony Computer Entertainment America
> the Conservatives appear to be trying to force this through with little or no debate

That's why they want a majority of seats in the House of Commons: it gives them a de facto dictatorship for four years.
If you have a day job, look for the problems that your day job has to solve. Undoubtedly, these problems will be echoed at other companies like yours (and maybe even not like yours), and you have an opportunity there. You might have even been able to work on solving the problem, so you already have a leg up when you generalize it for others by knowing what to expect.

I'm practicing this at the company I work for, and I have many ideas. Be cautious about legality, here, and don't get too specific with how your employer solved the problem, just use the tactic to identify the problems.
スノーヴァ口コミ・評判・効果が学べる。
I am so curious to know who are those two companies. And I can imagine it is not easy to meet their requirements. I can imagine there are issues on authentication, security, access to data system, resolution conflict orders, consistent inventory accounting. Those topic are not rocking science but to do them well and make the system reliable (even just meet the requirements) is not a trivial task.
HackerNews Front-Page Funnel Analysis
Start by talking to customers (or prospects) in detail about their evaluation and purchasing process.

I assume you know folks in big organizations; otherwise you wouldn't be screwing around with TFS, right?

So, find out how they find out about software, and how they decide to buy it.
The pros and cons of different styles is another discussion entirely. This is about judging how 'OOP' something is, so it's probably most fruitful to compare it to its original definition rather than to the derivatives it inspired. Hence Alan Kay.
Not Harvard, but Yale has put out more US Presidents than any Ivy league school (or any university for that matter).
Sucks. He should have gone down the road, fighting for his rights to legally hack the PS3.
Couldn't agree more. The setup time of SimpleWorker is alot ( especially when dealing with specific gems ) and the fact that for DB work you have to create a separate non concurrent connection to the DB per job makes those times you talk about a reality. Ok, you could use the 'expensive jobs' but Heroku's DJ's win hands down in all tests I've done. Plus who doesn't like the handle_asynchronously :function.
My peeve is the pronunciation 'nitch'. It's pronounced neesh, it's a French word.
PHP/Other. Zend Framework, and work stuff includes Symfony more and more.
Pandora’s privacy problem: a quick timeline
Social spam, prevention and management. Data replication. Peer scaling and availability.
New Disposable, Medical Camera Is the Size of a Grain of Salt
Moving to The Valley in pursuit of greatness
Dropbox vs. Amazon Cloud Drive – Which one is Better? (A Detailed Comparison)
People in the valley have this weird notion that what is happening in the valley is happening everywhere. It's not. Most people go to mediocre state schools with a little bit of debt when they graduate, and then live in that area for the rest of their life. Most people don't go to Stanford, Harvard, Yale or Princeton and rack up $80k+ in student loans.

The real bubble is groupthink.
Your numbers for Google seem to be good, but I think it's more important to look at the profit, rather than the revenue.

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=google+revenue+%2F+goog...

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=google+profit+%2F+googl...
George Hotz, Sony quietly settle PS3 jailbreak lawsuit
I guess he's just simplifying things, but the more complex truth is that a hacker's worth to the company is unlikely to so neatly correspond to a salary figure like that. (BTW that salary figure is about 10 years out of date; hackers are making more like 130-150k now, if only salary is considered). I've had years where my worth was 1x my salary, 10x my salary, and 100x my salary, based on unique contributions where I took the initiative to do things that most others would not have. I suspect most of us have good years like that, but they partly happen because of the context in which you work. It would have been unlikely for me to have such big contributions without being part of a team that was also contributing a lot.
Software suites like this cost huge amounts of money for bundles of tools that generally follow the 80/20 rule for any given user.

The problem is, any given user might need a different 20% than the next person. It makes it difficult for lighter versions of the software to compete, because there's always that one thing that they need, and is only in the high-cost package.

This is a prime example of why a model like the Canon Cat or Apple's abandoned OpenDoc approach should be reconsidered, in my opinion.

In those models (I think it's called a component model?), users buy interoperable tools instead of complete applications. Rather than opening a program, you open a document, and select which tools you want to use on it.

The operating system contains the ability to open file formats, rather than individual programs. Programs are replaced by tools which can manipulate data once the file format has been read by the OS.

For example, you might open a photo, and decide to use a magic wand selector by Adobe, but apply a filter from SumoPaint, a resize tool from Panic Software, and manipulate the text with a Microsoft tool.

All of your tools would be in a "toolbox" that you could customize on the fly, much like you'd deal with a toolbox on a workbench.

You don't go into your kitchen and turn on every appliance in the room when you just want a piece of toast - why should your computer act that way?

Of course, the operating system itself would have to be built with that in mind in the first place - but is that such a crazy idea?
Why You Should Care About Level 3 Buying Global Crossing
First of all, a lot of software projects fail. A successful software project is worth millions, but a failed one is worth zero or less, at least in terms of value created for immediate capture. A well-organized and large company can squeeze value (wisdom, code) out of the failed projects but small companies (which are often single software projects) just go out of business.

Second, there's risk. Capitalist society always allocates most of the reward to those who take the monetary risk, not those who do the work. From a humanist perspective, it's unfair because you are taking more risk with every job you take-- you're risking your career and health, they're just risking money, which they have in abundance-- but that's how the game works. If you don't like it, become politically active and try to change it.

Third, "business people" are better at capturing surplus value. It's about leverage, negotiation, and putting oneself in the right chair.

All that said, I don't think an unproven programmer is worth anything near $3 million per year, or even 1/20 of that. The worst programmers are not very skilled and are a liability-- negatively productive. I would say that base salaries are about right-- $50,000 for an unproven beginner, $80,000 for a top beginner, $120,000 at the mid-range, and $200,000 for experts-- but that companies should extend much, much more in the way of employee profit-sharing and creative control. Where programmers get stiffed is not in their compensation (which is quite fair) but in their lack of autonomy and "say" in how they do their jobs; often they are held back and prevented from unlocking their talents by meddling "executives" of mediocre intellect and vision. That is what should change, not base salaries per se.
Yes, because he "predicted" the dot-com bubble and "predicted" the housing bubble. He's also a super smart dude who created PayPal, is extremely rich and successful.

Yes, I'm being snarky. I'm open to his opinion but I also missing where he's qualified to make a more informed opinion.
I was thinking along similar lines last week with regards to APIs. Obviously you want people to use them, and they only will if they're understandable and useful. It would be good to have something like http://fivesecondtest.com/, where people can comment on your ideas for "karma".

(aside: I can't actually work out if people who complete reviews at 5 sec tests get paid? Or if they do just get karma)
In case anyone else is in this situation, I would get the spinning Y from time to time but never would see anything highlighted. It took me a few minutes of thinking about it to realize that I'd need to turn off my AutoPatchWork extension (similar to AutoPagerize) so that the content was in the expected form. It works now! Too bad I can't live without AutoPatchWork.
No but instead of complaining about bugs he can either submit a bug report and let someone get around to fixing it, or dig into the source and fix it himself.
Excellent point, and I think that's the challenge for hackers starting a business. You have to learn the other skills required and that can take time. It took me 5 years running my own thing on the side to even feel like I know what I'm doing at all in some of those other areas, but I've only just scratched the surface. I'm amazed at how the ycombinator startups pull it off. I think that's part of the reason the training they get from the program is really valuable.
Agreed that the work is not nearly as appealing as an outsider imagines. My point is merely that when I graduated (caveat: ~6 years ago, pre-collapse), a majority (literally) of graduates were going into banking or high-profile consultancies. There is no way all those folks came to Harvard with the goal to join The System four years later, so the net effect of their education was to redirect their ambitions into existing power structures.
I loved his disclosure at the end.

"You should always assume that pretty much every link on this blog is an affiliate link and that if you click it, find something you like and buy it, I'm gonna make some serious money. Now, understand this, I'm not talking chump change, I'm talking huge windfall in commissions, bling up the wazoo and all sorts of other free stuff. I may even be given a mansion and a yacht, though honestly I'd settle most of the time for some organic dark chocolate and clean socks. Oh, and if I mention a book or some other product, just assume I got a review copy of it gratis and that me getting it has completely biased everything I say. Because, books are like a drug to me, put one in my hand and you own my ass. Ethics be damned! K, you've been warned. Huggies and butterflies."
My failed side project: downrip.com
"Sony is glad to put this litigation behind us,” said Riley Russell, General Counsel for SCEA."

likely because they realized they were being dipshits half way through. glad this case is over and i can't believe it wasted so much time. my respect and empathy goes to hotz; i'm sure his past few months were miserable.
Yeah but at the same time it's not just him that should have to deal with all the trouble that fighting would have caused him. Sometimes you have to pick your fights.
The rule of thumb is that the company expects to generate profits at least one order of magnitude larger than your salary. Hence I would say the 80K hacker should be able to do work worth about 1 M a year to the company.

This gets back to PG's second assumption: "Assume a hacker can in turn be significantly more productive working for themselves."

Most hackers are not more productive working for themselves for a multitude of reasons, some of which have been discussed (i.e. lack of marketing focus) but I think that most hackers who work for someone else hone very specific skills that are suited to the task at hand, which build value for the companies they are working for, but those skills arent necessarily valued in the marketplace.
I wonder if the recent Anonymous attacks, specifically on Howard Stringer's family, had anything to do with this.
The comments on that post seem awfully one-sided.