skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Of course this is a good message to send to big clients with big projects who merely "don't get it". On the other hand, there are a lot of small businesses and other clients with very limited means who have maybe $1000-$10000 for a project. Web development is new territory for them, and they have no other way to approach the problem other than to put a fixed-budget stake in the ground, and of course their requirements are going to evolve as they learn.

One of the reasons I joined a startup was because I was sick of working under those conditions, and writing an FU blog post like this is the luxury afforded to those of us who can more or less pick what we want to work on.

That's great, but there is still a pool of small clients who can be profitable, but you have to understand how to work with them:

- Learn to use off-the-shelf software to build lots of functionality quickly in a predictable fashion (WordPress, Drupal, Expression Engine).

- Charge a flat fee only for something you've done before, and make sure it has padding. It's not unethical (as suggested by another commenter) because this is how you are able to afford a flat fee. You'll be churning out hundreds of these so you need to work the law of averages. This allows you to be a bit accommodating instead of going into conflict mode every single time.

- Turn your creativity to your own systems. Face it, on a $5000 budget you are not going to do anything revolutionary for a client. You can however build your own systems that you leverage in order to serve a hundred clients better. Do it well enough and you actually build a business that scales better than top creative agencies working on 6-figure budgets.

- Be customer-service oriented. Face it, someone paying you $1000 a year is just not very important to you and it's easy to let that attitude show. The thing I've found is that small clients actually are more accommodating than big clients as long as treat them with respect. That said...

- Dump toxic clients. There are always those with unreasonable expectations and no respect for what you do. The worst is when they are sort of borderline stringing you along, but you end up losing time and money over the long haul. How you get rid of them is a matter of tact; maybe you say you are all booked, maybe you raise your rates for them to an exhorbitant level, maybe you just give it to them straight ("I am not profiting from having you as a client"). I don't have a one-size-fits-all solution, but get rid of them you must.
In my experience a range of, say, £5000-7000 usually means £5000 to the client and it can take hours/days/weeks to budge that perception no matter how initially prepared they seem. I've also found people who, while comfortable with the upper estimate if it goes there, will then expect freebies on top as recompense for making them pay 'extra'.
Footy Station: Scotland v Wales 25 May 2011 Live stream online
yes it is. I'd budgeted for 4-5 months of time, figuring it might go to 5-6. I'm in month 9, and it will be at least another month. :/ Huge lesson learned, and hopefully this will be the last time I learn it. I don't typically take on projects this large, and in the past if there was a 80% time estimation error, the impact wouldn't have been as dramatic. :/
All in all it's a good move and the system to do it really is not all that complicated. It will be interesting to see the user experience side of things since this has already been available in FI's for years under different names.

Am I the only one thinking this might just be a white label of a solution they were already all using?
Of the 40-50 kids I knew in college, not a single one took College Alegbra.

But this kind of "College Algebra" is, understandably, considered college-level material. That pretty much happens only in the US (considering countries with educational systems...), and choices such as this influence the overall academic level.

my freshman English Comp classes was one of the most intense, interesting, useful classes I took in college

That's great, and I happened to enjoy a lot my electives such as Theater 101 as a math undergrad (even if I was critical of the curriculum)... but the main point is: Should English composition courses be given at the college level? What, then, do you do during those twelve (OK... last three of those twelve?) previous years? I was puzzled when a student who clearly didn’t need English composition defended this setup, arguing that “a college student should know how to write”. Well, “a high-school graduate should know how to write”, was my response then and now, and if you press me elementary-school students should be well on their way to accomplishing this.

I’m not saying this has an easy solution. Some countries “fix” their K12 woes by resetting the academic level at the college admission tests. As a result, a good chunk of the population has to find a way to raise their level, which is not ideal either. But what the US opts to do lowers the undergraduate level, no doubt. I wonder if this will eventually trickle down to Ph.D. programs.

Edit: All this leaves out grade inflation and related issues... It is downright hard to fail most courses of some majors. This is bad enough.
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I don't think Thiel is naive enough to think that anything you can do with twenty people and two million dollars will "destroy" academia, but he does seem to have an agenda and the desire to prove a point.

The point, however, is silly. Cherrypick the twenty brightest students you can find, give 'em a bunch of money and all the connections that come from having Peter Thiel invested in your success, and I'm sure that a lot of 'em will do well. But that doesn't scale.
I'm interested to see if they will clear the funds instantly or sit on them for 2 business days like they currently do.
>It doesn't matter how smart you are: you don't work in a university lab at age 11 without someone pulling strings for you.

BUT BUT ... meritocracy
Great minds will go on to do great things no matter if they go to college or not, but you should start a business because you are passionate about a product or service, not because a billionaire entrepreneur is bribing you to do so.

This program could very well be successful, but I would argue the participants would have gone on to do great things regardless of thiel’s invovlement.
That's an awesome offer! Thanks Namesake and BetaCandy!
ShopIgniter: Lessons Learned From the Financing Process
Glad to help; email is in the profile.
> And yet another scored 5580 on the SATs (on a total of 5 tests, but still).

So he averaged 1116 on the SATs? Even before the switch from a 1600-point test to a 2400-point test, there's nothing impressive about that except that he bothered to take the SATs five times.

> Faheem Zaman has shot the moon on nearly every SAT test he’s ever taken: 5580 points across 5 tests.

Clearly I'm missing something...
While I'm not archaeologist that sounds about right in very theoretical level. To explain this more practically it comes down to heating properties of matter.

As specific heat capacity is inverse proportional to density, sand and pyramids react to temperature changes differently. In desert temperature changes between day and night are huge causing sand and pyramids to have different temperatures. As thermal radiation is infrared in temperatures near human body temperatures (didn't check the exact temperatures but pyramids should fit in infrared spectrum), sand and pyramids will show up in different 'colors' in infrared mapping of area.

This is probably the basic idea behind these findings, of course what they are doing certainly goes beyond this level of explanation with use of infrared spectroscopy.
I'm at the point now where the time invested in the project has paid off - I understand the business problems much better now, and some of the intricate work I did months ago is paying off in spades (basically, having put together a flexible data model up front). Things that might have taken days to do before I can do and redo in minutes or hours. But it's taken way too long to get here, and ultimately this is a one-off - most of the knowledge gained isn't transferable to any other projects directly.
If It Walks Like an Entrepreneur...
For the record, I'd love someone to cook up a blog and keep tabs on these people and their endeavors. Hell, I've got half a mind to do it myself, if only I knew more about the startup world.

Of course, that said, I'm curious if one of the things they'd suggest is "keep the media a good distance away until you're ready." I imagine so.
Aside from incredible portability, I'm not exactly sure what GWT/HTML5 based game development brings to the table that flash/AIR doesn't.

If you wanted portability to mobile devices, wouldn't something like Corona or Torque be a better way to go?

In my experience, there really is no such thing as "free" portability across platforms. You still end up having little tweaks and custom builds usually for each platform you target, regardless of the toolset.
I was also very surprised that the author didn't mention the urban heat island effect. While some of the temperature increase can be attributed to global warming, some of it might also be showing that Bostan has become more urbanized since 1890.
True, but software isn't going to solve that. (Note: I am a classroom teacher.)

Teacher to student lecturing happens for a combination of three reasons:

1. The teacher believes it's the best way to present the material.

2. Generally, a lecture is easier to prepare (and easier to keep on task) than any other form of instruction.

3. To the average person (and many administrators) a classroom full of children sitting silently in rows, all taking notes, looks "right".
tl;DR AmazonBasics HDMI cables
I'll admit. I'm a sucker.

I have mail accounts to both Yahoo and Google.

Because Google.com just has a search box, I always enter mail.google... to save time.

But since Yahoo does have a rotation of stories (often very bad but I still sometimes get sucked in) I go to Yahoo.com first and then click to the mail section.
I'm trying this out at the moment (14 pt S DZ) but the current line marking in VIM for example looks weird because there is more whitespace on the bottom of the characters than at the top.

Other than that it is a welcome improvement to Menlo regular.
There are definitely different magnitudes of innovation. There's innovation in terms creating new products and services that people will pay for, and there's innovation that nudges the entire human race forward a little bit.

The scientists and engineers who enable the first manned mission to Mars will not be college dropouts.
6 Unknown Facebook Tips to Increase Brand Awareness
Do they look at day-night differential images? That would a priori seem to confirm your hypothesis and also provide a better imaging result.

No I didn't read the article.
While I have never spoken at either a DjangoCon or a PyCon, attending them feels like taking part in a community where some members of that community are volunteering to speak and provide some content, the same way others are writing documentation, or submitting patches to open source projects.

The "speaking" part of contributing content to the community is decoupled in my mind in "community-oriented" conferences such as these. There is far more value, at least to me, in these conferences, than the content of the sessions. It's the entire experience, the opportunity to network with others, that is worth it to me. In fact, this past PyCon, I only attended 2-3 sessions all week, figuring that I could watch the content online later and instead focused on interacting with others who I don't regularly see.

Quite frankly, I would see it as a sign that someone probably shouldn't be presenting to the community if their motivation is to get out of paying the nominal conference fee.
Ask HN: Handling unsolicited technical recruiter calls
tl;dr - Tech Recruiters keep calling me, how do I get them to stop?

I've been getting daily unsolicited calls from technical recruiters (mainly from various employees of 1 company). I've emailed them politely mentioning I'm not interested. This caused a brief pause in the calls but now they are back.

I'd imagine quite a few HN readers have dealt with this problem. Advice?
Would the reaction be as mixed here if it was PG doing it? Because YC in effect does the same thing right?

I enjoyed my college experience and as the first ever college graduate in my family I wouldn't do anything different. Colleges provide something far more beneficial than the shot at FU money.

That said, some people are better off dropping out or never going at all. I'm highly suspect of learning how to be an Entrepreneur in a college setting and guess something like YC is probably better for that.

I think of YC as almost a trade school for start ups but it still doesn't replace college. I wonder how many successful start uppers go back to college later? Any of you? Like Shaq and Troy Polamalu? :)

And I guess that school-like vibe is why YC is better than simply dropping out and taking 100k. Even if you fail, you still get the YC experience to help you with your next venture.
PyCon is so cheap that if I get selected to speak again and get discounted tickets, I'll end up donating the difference to the PSF anyway. Putting together a quality talk is a lot of work, and being given a platform to present it was enough of a treat for me to go through the process for PyCon 2011. It was an awesome experience and I'm looking forward to submitting talk proposals for PyCon 2012.
I'm suspicious of experimental method. Did the "false memory" students really not eat the popcorn? Really? Students? They didn't get their friend to sneak them some, or go in after the test and taste it? Surely they would not have revealed this 'cheat' to the interviewer a week later in any case.
You seem to imply the employees have access to the password as was discussed above at length. This has not been proven.

My passwords are unique - If my newegg password is compromised I supposed people can order some computer parts and ship them to one of my addresses. Pretty sure changing delivery address of stored CC requires card info re-entry like amazon. And I'd just report it stolen and get re-imbursed. BFD.
SAT Subject Tests: 800 pts * 4 = 3200

Actual SAT Test: 2380

Total: 5580
Variable-width fonts help with natural language, to detect phonemes or even words. Unfortunately, we are mostly dealing with machine language, where audio is not so important, so character-by-character reading is the norm.
The actual motivation of the Fellowship, which is all over the press and has been related to me by Thiel Foundation workers, is that students with great potential accumulate tons of student loan debt in college and subsequently, instead of taking on projects that might actually help the world, are financially pressured into working at hedge funds and the like

Surely kids as brilliant as these ones sound are getting full scholarships to college?

If you really want to test the hypothesis: that university is not worth the cost for people like the Thiel fellows then I reckon you'd need two groups. One drops out of university and gets $100,000 and extensive mentoring. The other group stays in university and still gets $100,000 and extensive mentoring.
Should Nestio have a free or paid iphone app?
Awesome link, I've been using Inconsolata for years and had the exact same issue.
Are you saying that if I write a blog post and you translate it into Russian, I do not have a copyright over your translation of my blog post?
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neebz I think you nailed my sentiments perfectly. I wish HN has a +10 vote-up bomb you could use once a month.
PG's stance, at least nowadays, is not to take college students unless they are going to leave anyway. I dont think he would do it in the way that PT is trying to do it.

My understanding, having been sucked into that trap myself, is that college debt forces people to go to hedge funds or other lucrative jobs that don't utilize the full potential of some of the brightest college students. If you can give students an opportunity to build something, unencumbered by the issue of money, the outcome would be far better for society.
Pensioners offer to rebuild Fukushima nuclear plant
In case the author sees this - the page is unusable on iPhone, there is a white block covering the article text, maybe some broken ad.
Liberation Mono would be a good addition to the list.

https://fedorahosted.org/liberation-fonts/
It would seem that this "crack" could simply be circumvented by using an alphanumeric password and/or setting the iPhone to shred its crypto key after 10 consecutive password failures. Obviously, neither of these are standard features, but both are available.
Hash with Python
CDN Performance
If I may ask, what school did you go to? I find a strong clustering of disenchanted replies at certain schools
If it has lots of comments, it’s probably buggy
I would've at least expected more traffic from South Africa.
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Lasers, filters, and fiber add up to 26Tbps data transfers
Names You Need To Know: GOBBLE
It's 10 years since Metallica sued Napster. We just had a major motion picture (The Social Network), set in the past, where this event is in the past in the film.

If piracy could kill the music industry, it would have killed it by now. The music industry is not dead. Ergo piracy will not kill it.
It's very important in any discussion of these issues to distinguish weather from climate.
http://eo.ucar.edu/basics/index.html
I reckon you'd need two groups.

I agree. It's not really a valid experiment, which is why I said "might plausibly be" instead of "is", just to acknowledge some connection with the education bubble debate. Though two things to keep in mind for a valid experiment are that from the 100K for the second group would have to be subtracted the costs of university over two years (for me [mostly my parents actually] that's more than 100K), and that at good universities at least extensive mentoring is readily accessible. So it's a reasonable approximation at least.
It would actually be interesting in what kind of misconfiguration lead to this - was it a simple DNS misconfiguration that wasn't accounted for?
Update: Found a Technical Co-Founder
Two months ago I reached out to the HN community with this post: "Looking for a Technical CoFounder" (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2332349). That message isn't typically welcomed with open arms, so I was careful to be very clear.

I have received a number of emails asking for the results of that post...asking if it worked...if I had found a technical co-founder. I was told by business side guys, if you can't find one with that post...then, it's hopeless for the rest of us.

My review:

I found a technical co-founder. My co-founder, Eric, didn't come directly from the HN post...he's a long time friend who I've worked with in the trading industry for 6 years. Eric had been involved in the project from the beginning as an advisor, and connecting us with devs early on to build the site. He offered to help with the co-founder search as well...through that process he learned more about the business and the vision...and ultimately decided that he wanted to be completely part of it.

Further, the post generated a lot of stimulating conversations with other like-minded, hungry people. It really helped to refine the idea and vision, both for myself and Eric.

After the post, some people told me they were using it as a template to post on craigslist or other places looking for a co-founder. That was great, but they didn't understand something I had learned: Eric is like my girlfriend, and I didn't find her on craigslist. To work on something together, that you're both passionate about, and that you are both willing to sacrifice for doesn't just happen. A co-founder isn't an employee. They have to care as much as you do. And to get thru the shitty times, you have to disagree, fight, and move on. Are you willing to chance that with someone you just met?

Here's what I got out of the post: The most amazing feedback and support from the HN community. I was introduced to interesting people from all over...and I've had coffee with some of them. I definitely know a post isn't the best way to find a co-founder, but it certainly has provided me with more than I was ever looking for...

Andrew

Co-Founder Spaciety
Actually, I think forplay would be best characterized as a specialized library, dependent on GWT, with other backend compilers that also depend on GWT.

See, for example the instructions: http://code.google.com/p/forplay/wiki/GettingStarted (note how it's the GWT toolchain)

Issues like https://code.google.com/p/forplay/issues/detail?id=12 show how the GWT is used to build the Flash version

Still not convinced?

flash.gwt package: https://code.google.com/p/forplay/source/browse/#svn%2Ftrunk...

or

https://code.google.com/p/forplay/source/browse/trunk/core/s... uses om.google.gwt.core.client.JavaScriptObject

same class: private native String get(JavaScriptObject data, String key) /-{
// TODO Auto-generated method stub
return data[key];
}-/;

(Note the GWT convention for "native" code to be used by the Javascript/Actionscript runtime)

Edit: also Joel Webber & Ray Cromwell are both on the GWT team at Google so it makes sense they'd use that toolchain.
Subtle(?) jab at Twitter in the HTML5 spec
HTML5 and Accessibility
Learn to use off-the-shelf software to build lots of
functionality quickly in a predictable fashion
(WordPress, Drupal, Expression Engine)

Bravo. This is the way I look at it: if it has been done before, somebody, somewhere has productized it. If it isn't a full-blown CMS, it's a bundle of Rails plugins and all I'm doing is writing glue code.

If it hasn't been done before, because it's really specific to a client's domain and idiosyncratic processes, it's R&D and we shouldn't pretend we know how to do it with enough rigor to provide a competitive quote.

In many cases, the problem is that it has been done before, buut the client doesn't want to "colour within the lines" and run with the limitations of an existing CMS or other platform, they want a bunch of customizations that have little or no ROI.

The Big Sell in those cases is convincing them to scale back their expectations about customization and live with having the 20% of the features baked into the off-the-shelf system that deliver 80% of the ROI. Even if they want to pay by the hour, it's not a good investment to build what amounts to business chrome.
They should release two, an upgradable free app and a paid app. Because as they say, there is little overlap between free and paid users, only time paid users download your app if it's free is if they independently look for it due to advertising, etc.

>Free/Paid/Upgrade Combo

>This has been broken down really well by others, but just to reiterate, there is little overlap in user bases, as they rarely ever upgrade. We’d also be forced to maintain two versions of the app. Meh.

Your "being forced to maintain two versions" is a build flag with a #ifdef. It's an easy peasy two versions.