skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So, in other words: when links aren't links--when they're really tabs, or buttons, or menus that happen to look like links--don't make them behave like links. It's a start, but there's obviously a deeper issue here: why are you confusing your users by making these other page elements look like links? Just because they're techniically implemented with <a> tags is no excuse.
Err, host it somewhere that's not ludicrously overpriced and move on.

A 500 dollar app on a 300 dollar server? Sheesh.
Why Reddit and Digg are doomed but Metafilter isn't
I think both markm and tonystubblebine have made good points. Require all of the money originally agreed upon, and do your best to over-communicate and get things done the way they want them.

Be willing to admit you may have made a mistake. Even if you believe that they are ultimately responsible for the breakdown of your arrangement, start off your communication by apologizing for poor communication, or something along those lines. They will appreciate your honesty and humility, and be more willing to listen when it's time to talk about money. Do your best to be calm, patient, and kind, while being firm, and you'll likely at least gain some respect.
I Would Rather Be A Jazz Programmer
It's a Rails app at hostingrails.com. Great customer service and nice options, but they forced me to pay a year in advance. Hence the ludicrous cost. Also, a friend who's made some nice apps with Rails recommended them to me.

Anyway, I can also cancel within 30 days of signing up and recover the cost, so walking away doesn't hurt me financially.
So,this may be a minor grievance, but why is the last name field white unlike the first name and email field even though it is required?
If the writing is good, it will stand on its own. All I'm saying is that the difference between "Tarry Tao (Fields medalist) on time management" and "Terry Tao (don't click this link) on time management" is pretty small. They both make you want to click on the link to see what it's about, and they are both totally irrelevant to the actual content of the article.
You must not sell a lot. I get the "oh, I didn't realize Buy It Now means I bought it" excuse a lot. eBay instituted a secondary screen explaining that bidding is entering into a contract for a reason. I still get complaints when I sell, everything from "oh, I entered the wrong price" to "oh, I didn't read the item description".

The point is when he clicked that buy button he entered into a contract. The one-click aspect is just his way of trying to weasel out of it.
I hope I can use "honest mistake" more in court. That's the two magic words people should put more faith into.
It's almost 1900 words for an article about time management. But being that my time is worth zero now I read through it all.
Samsung i900 Omnia Unlocked 
Samsung i900 Omnia is available with 3G network support. The TFT touchscreen enable accelerometer sensor for auto rotate and hand writing recognition. The 8GB internal memory let you store maximum amount of songs, videos, images.

Deal Price: - $999.00
BTW: When are you launching?

Depends how you define "launching". I haven't got the accounting code written yet, so revenue is still a month or more away -- but if you mean in the sense of "providing a service which people want", tarsnap has been up and running for three months.
If the writing is good, it will stand on its own.

Indeed -- and if this were, say, a fiction contest, it would be a great way to do things. But when someone is giving advice, the identity of the advisor (and the success they've had by following the advice) is important.
If they don't pay you, tell them that they are not allowed to use your software.
If they do howeer use your software, they are using pirated software which will be very very expensive for them (If you call in the police and they confiscate all the computers and data).
(Maybe add some function to the code which occasionaly requests a site on your webserver so you can check if they are actually using or not).
He's simply making the point that even when your business can't capture a fraction of the total market that's worth discussing in numerical terms the numerator can still be quite noticeable. Your average small web company wouldn't mind having 100K paying users right now and they probably won't when 1M is less than 0.05% of net users. Reasoning about percentages and limits is relevant if your target user base is of the same scale as the total market or you're counting on a VC pitch based on winner takes all. It's not mandatory if all you care about is building a sustainable business: My local coffeehouse probably has a few hundred regular customers and their share of the worldwide coffee business is effectively 0%, but they're doing just fine financially.
Give them the app for the $500 they promised you. On a DVD/CD. Hosting it is another cost, which you would be glad to do/arrange for them, once you get that cost paid to you.
My question is this: Did you confer with them before you signed up for the hosting?

If you didn't then I'm not sure why you're demanding money for it. You're owed the $500 for the coding since you did it to spec, even if it's not as fanciful as they had imagined it.

But really... $300 for hosting? Are you serious? If I had someone come to me and try to that pull over me I would be furious. You could have easily showed them the site on a laptop without hosting and then talk to them after wards about extending your contract to consult for them how to implement the site.
Hackers' Screenshots
We had a good screenshot thread over 9 months ago. It's always interesting to see how wizards perfect their craft.

Show us how you hack!
You have the code. You have the power:

"While I fell behind schedule on a few of the deadlines, I feel that, in the end, everyone agrees that a great product was produced relatively on schedule. In addition to the work I initially agreed upon, I incorporated X's suggestions and extended the site further, even though, based on our initial discussions, it was determined to be feature complete. As such, I cannot accept any payment beneath the initially agreed upon amount.

If your team is unwilling to pay this amount, I will be forced to take down the site and cancel the service to recoup my losses."
http://monaco.nirv.net/~tran/screenshots/20080807/montage.pn...

Those are my six workspaces merged into one image. I use Linux+ion3 and emacs.
Previous screenshot thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=74605
PhoneGap Converts Webapps to Native Apps
I think his second assumption that people know who the high performers are is wrong. Often, recognizing competence requires a great deal of competence.

Also, I think d0mine's right that kinder people who are easy to work with but not necessarily great performers will get lots of points.
I always felt that "for people too busy to spend years" on the subject at hand would be a more apt description.
That books looks sweet, thanks for pointing it out. Reminds me of a good post by Seth Godin I read the other day: http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2008/07/let-me-see.h...

I started down this path, looking at things like:
- number of people who Emailed an individual asking about a specific topic
-percent of time spent in Outlook vs Visual Studio vs WoW (RescueTime-esque stuff)
- number of IMs initiated from someone at least one level higher than them

But at the end of the day, can that really tell you quantitatively that Bob is better than Suzie? Even the example above about being stressed - I know people who are super chill and excel at their job, and others who are stressed all the time and also excel (and vice versa).

Maybe the answer is to pull in hundreds of these variables and run a neural net against actual performance rankings to see if any statistically significant correlations pop out?
Yes, of course I did. They're also not physically present and not technical at all. Just emailing them the code wasn't an option.

Is $300 really such a bad deal for a whole year in advance, by the way? It works out to about $20 a month.
I think the token economy thing is a good idea. You could also do a market approach of rewarding people who pick the top performers, but that gets really tricky.
The beagleboard (.org) is way cooler than this thing. Its $149 and has a much more powerful ARM processor with a built-in DSP and 3d accelerator (probably similar to the chip powering the iPhone). It already has an HDMI/DVI output and can also output S-Video. Probably similar in size as well. It has linux running on it already as well.
I did not find the article particularly insightful or informative. Here's what i learned:

1) it's good to identify a problem
2) it's good to find a solution that improves upon competitors' flaws
3) it's good to go broad or go niche, whichever
4) no solution is perfect
Why eBay loves the Brett Favre trade
Here's mine right now:

http://www.ur-ban.com/galleryv2/d/15417-1/hn_001.jpg

Using: Flexbuilder, Textmate, Photoshop, VMFusion (Vista)
Zuck, is that you? Just let those winkelvoss twins go and do it on your own.
All the research on token economies shows they don't work, at least according to Punished by Rewards.
I agree, the only advantage I see in this product is as a potential teaching tool. There isn't a lot of opensource hardware out there to go with all that software.

This board looses in all categories I would consider important when choosing an embedded linux board. Those being speed, size, and price. As you mentioned for a comparable price Beagle Board is much faster with cooler i/o features. If you are going for price and size the lowest cost Gumstix (gumstix.com) is like a third the size, slightly more powerful and only costs 100 bucks.
TuneWiki: Android’s iPhone-Like Media Player That May Become The Platform’s Standard
Hacker Claims Apple Can Spy On iPhone Users, Disable Apps Remotely
Actually, I agree with you. Fit is important. I just want to encourage people to look for the cheap fit before heading for the more expensive one.

Really, the most important lesson is that you only need one good chef's knife. If you take good enough care of it (i.e. avoid needing to sharpen it so often that it becomes a matchstick) it will last a lifetime. So, really, go for it. Blow the $99 if you've shopped around and found the most comfortable knife in the world. It's not much money when amortized over your entire life.

(Incidentally, the first irony here is that my own chef's knife was a gift, from someone who probably does not read Cook's Illustrated, so it's probably a $70 knife.

The second irony is that, after a few years, I've concluded that my knife really doesn't fit me very well. So I'm probably going to end up buying another knife or two in an attempt to find something better. I'll be starting in the $26 range!

Which brings me to my last piece of advice: Don't give knives as gifts. Give gift certificates to stores that sell knives.)
I agree. Apple = evil.

And metaphorically speaking, the devil can look good, it doesn't have to ugly and have horns.

Talking about evil, I bought a Mac Mini, and iPod touch, which was suposed to be free, with student discount, and never recived it (the voucher). I emailed customer support, nothing yet.

The only thing I have is going back to one of their stores, and start complaining until somebody resolves the issue.

$300.00 they owe me back, is a lot of money.
Boredom May Let the Brain Recast the World in Productive, Creative Ways
What I Learned Buying a Rug in Turkey
Hell yea its sweet! :) I initially was pointed there by this great presentation: http://www.tomtaylor.co.uk/talks/delighting-with-data

I think you are right about pulling in hundreds of these variables to correlate with both intuitive and quantitative tests that we have to define 'productive' employees. Then you can send an electric shock whenever someone's theta waves get too low or something..

Seriously though, our first level of productivity is dictated by things biological, and if you can create models to paint a strong enough picture of a productive worker then it gives you a feedback loop. And don't forget, not everyone is a knowledge worker like us, people still drive trucks for a living, pick fruit, do construction, etc. That is a huge market.
Robot sea bream
The point of the post wasn't to provide a rigorous performance analysis, it was to highlight the overall improvement. We prefer to attack the problem of performance from as many avenues as possible so that we can get the most

That said, the vast majority of the improvement was from the application changes, and not the hardware upgrades. Between server-side caching via memcached and conditional GET using if-modified-since headers and ETags, we were able to see dramatic improvements. We've also spent a lot of time analyzing the behavior of the Ruby garbage collector in our applications and making changes where appropriate to improve performance.

Did the database server upgrades make a difference? Of course they did, but it was an incremental improvement -- think along the lines of 10%. The point was to give us a longer scalability runway before we have to do things like sharding the database, not to provide an instant performance increase.
http://i37.tinypic.com/2cgimuc.png

I usually have Terminal open as well.
http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2014/2742115501_c46810cdb6_o....

Nothing special, Vim and a python interpreter.
More like $25 :)
Upcoming Nokia's blast is nokia 6600 fold
Nokia 6600 Fold will be launched with an OLED display of 16M colors and a resolution of 240 x 320 pixels along with a second external OLED display of 128 x 160 pixels over its 1.36 inches wide screen.
Web 2.0 Bubble
Tool on iTunes - Good stuff :-)
A picture says a thousand words (in this case about 20 are useful)
BINC TV  Episode 1
So cancel and get a $20 slicehost slice. Or linode.
Did they okay the expenditure? Did you work out how you were going to transfer the code to them?

300 annually is 25 a month. Linode.com and slicehost.com both have plans starting at $19.99 and doesn't require prepayment. That might be something easier for them to swallow.
"So candidates working for these companies have to be wearing a nice sized grin on their face knowing they are working for a company with clear strength and sustainability."

Assuming that what you're looking for is a steady job with no real promise of a liquidity event. I'd think that going to work for a BigCo would give you that (and probably pay you more). And probably more interesting, exciting, and look better on a resume than being employee 100+ at a startup that's battening down for "nuclear winter."
Black Hat 2008: FasTrak toll system completely broken
seems like you are right
Large Hadron Collider to Get First Taste of Proton Beam
The really fun part is that Apple's policy states the developer must reimburse refunds 100%. Apple's 30% cut stays with them.

Any money the dev got through "accidental" purchases is likely going to fly away again with interest.
Gary Vee on how to have a successful website: content and community
...in Russian :~)
Well, being easy to work with is in itself a valuable trait in a co-worker.
Using Squidoo to Market Yourself
Mmm-hmm.

Um, would someone please provide a link to a different article, entitled "How To Sell Out?"
Yes, no. I suppose I could have emailed the code to them, but as non-technical people, they wouldn't be able to do much with it beyond passing it on to someone else.

Anyway, thanks for the hosting suggestions; I'll definitely check them out.
Fun fact, Terry Tao is an alum of this program: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=269717
My usual desktop; a Cygwin development environment, Notepad++ for editing, PuTTY connected to a remote shell for my IRC, and Elecard Streameye for video stream analysis.

http://img381.imageshack.us/img381/5126/hackerdesktopyu3.png
By "easy to work with" I mean qualities such as being amiable, outgoing, funny, or good-looking. Those are valuable traits, but pointing out who's the nicest guy in the room's not the problem here, and it's not even a difficult problem to solve. Everyone always knows who the popular people are.
Fooled by Success: The Dangers of Delivering Projects On Time
Hey, I've never done one of these before.

http://www.matasano.com/ba02a15a70759d0389a6fa3f4c1.png

Mac, Emacs, Ruby, Hex Fiend, Terminal. On a product day, instead of a research day, you'd sub CSSEdit in for Hex Fiend. On a blog day, maybe Illustrator too.
Using Digg to Market Your Website
gahhh comic sans comments!
Another site to estimate valuation
Bulgarian :D
OW MY BRAIN. He also line wraps source code.
Ethics of Data Transformation and Republishing
Right, but the proposed solution wouldn't involve asking people which of their co-workers they like, it would be based on hopefully meaningful work-related interactions (emails). Obviously, the model breaks down if people give the thumbs up to forwarded joke emails or to mass "oh crap my review is coming up, can you give me a thumbs up" emails.
3 Tips to Getting your site Indexed Quickly by Search Engines
I'm too lazy to change the defaults on the fonts. Blame the Notepad++ guys. And I rarely notice the comment issue that you pointed out... as sadly most of the code I work on is sorely lacking in comments.

The line wrapping isn't an issue because I usually make it much wider, and if when its wider there's still line wrapping, the person who wrote such code should probably be forced to endure great pain. Most programs I work on have a "please don't make 250-character-lines" policy, for good reason.
Damn, that's a small terminal font.

Pretty common for old-school desktops back when X had bitmap fonts that looked poor at large sizes, but personally I'm glad we have the choice now.
What do you like about Notepad++?
Making an Internet purchase is different then walking into a store and buying something.

If you clicked on a link that says "Buy Now" and for whatever reason it ran your card on file and you didn't expect it to then that is good enough reason to get a refund from the merchant and if not from the merchant then put in a dispute.
We're getting fatter
For Windows, try Poderosa rather than Putty - it's got tabs.
Split-screen editing (of the same file even; most editors don't let me split-screen edit the same file in two different windows), automatic syntax highlighting, bracket-matching (the standard stuff), tabbed editing, and the various built-in tools.

I do sometimes use vim, but I find that a simple tabbed GUI text editor gives me the most productivity. I've never liked IDEs, especially since I would rather just type "make" than try to use an internal build system. Add to this the fact that both my company and all my personal projects are based on the GNU toolset in some form or another.
You're right, didn't look closely enough.
This comment is actually better than the original posting. I could get all friend-feed, Dave Winer-ish and start talking about "conversations." :-)

In general, in my opinion, profiling languages in web applications is a minor win because generally they're just glue. The real payoffs are on the client side (which you've just brought up) and the database side (which I wanted to make more prominent).
What's wrong with comic sans? Haven't seen that complaint before.
http://bancomicsans.com/
Turkey is nice, been a few times. You really need to become immune from this kind of thing, or at least play them at their own game. If they say 100 euros, you say 20 and agree on 40. Seriously - they are there to rip you off and would sell anything for any price if they thought they had got you to pay more than you first wanted to. :)
http://megadeth.myrok.com/screen.jpg

Obviously rearranged little. Firefox tends to be on the smaller screen opened up to whatever documentation I might need. Terminal lives over there, too. Textmate is fullscreen on the big screen most of the time with various other utilities (CocoaMySQL, Transmit, iTunes) living somewhere behind it.
This headline would work better if there wasn't actually a software product out there called Jazz (http://www-306.ibm.com/software/rational/jazz/).
Even as a teaching tool it would suck because it's all surface mount. Sure you could just buy all the parts, but it'd be near impossible to get surface mount working reliably in a classroom environment.

My buddies built a robot controller using a gumstix board running linux, so for doing robots like the article said its pretty shitty for being bigger and probably having higher power draw.
If they knew all of this going in then you're definitely owed the money. Good luck getting paid.
The State of Aspect Oriented Programming for PHP
Because he's exaggerating. The work may be of graduate-quality, but that's because these kids' are usually coddled by the scientists who take them into the lab.

There's a world of difference between doing good science when you're being doted-upon by a professor and post-doc, versus doing it on your own as a graduate student. These kids are smart and motivated, but they're still living a privileged life.
I was giving them the benefit of the bootstrapping doubt. But they don't seem to be around to talk about it.
Scalable Web Architectures: Common Patterns and Approaches
I always get a laugh out of the "Income Tax For Canadians (for Dummies)" whenever I am at the bookstore. It's just a regional version of a generic book, but the "for Dummies" part is in a pretty small font.
Also Vim support tabs ':tabnew some_file'. 'gt' and 'gT' to switch between them. Even more, you can split several files in each tab.
There are some good points here. I would definitely in the future separate your costs from your work. Hosting is their cost. It should have been paid by them upfront, not from you. Its one thing you should require in the future. Not only will it weed out people who can't really pay, but it helps separate in people's minds what work you're doing.

To your customers, that hosting cost is now included in their minds of what their site is "worth." It shouldn't be. Your work is separate, and the hosting costs have nothing to do with how much your work is worth. Mixing them up was a mistake on your part. You now have to prove what you did was worth $800, instead of proving that its worth $500, with $300 hosting costs (which would have been paid before this).

I'd say stick to your guns, but also come up with a "carrot" instead of the sticks everyone else is talking about. Yeah, you might not think you need to, but adding in a few extra features to make sure you get your $500 might be worth it if you can pull them off quickly.

And by carrot, I don't mean saying you'll do what you were going to do in the first place. To work psychologically, it has to be beyond what they were expecting.
Most things are SMT these days. You can still solder SMT by hand w/o much trouble. People are just intimidated by it. It's a lot easier than it looks. There are some great video tutorials on youTube as well as at sparkfun.com and http://www.curiousinventor.com/guides/Surface_Mount_Solderin...
First off....Jeopardy torrents! Where do you find daily Jeopardy releases? (Email has been sent, I must know this)
Emacs? Zsh? Nice!
http://img237.imageshack.us/img237/8366/desktopiu3.png

Dock (usually hidden): Minefield, Camino, Safari, Google Reader (fluid), Mail, TextMate, Terminal, Localhost (fluid), RailsDoc (fluid), Coda, Color Schemer Pro, CSSEdit, Transmit, OnTheJob, Photoshop, Yojimbo, iTunes, Fusion, System Preferences, Github (fluid)...

Menubar: Quicksilver, DropBox, Skitch, Mailplane, Monocle, Coversutra, TextExpander, SlimBatteryMonitor, Mozy, Little Snitch, Spaces, iStat Menu...

Wallpaper:
http://interfacelift.com/wallpaper_beta/details/1596/big_cit...