skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Dealing with clients is all about setting expectations. I really view our contracts as just the expectations codified and hopefully never read again. The key is what the clients actually expect you to deliver. If we ever have to turn to the contract language, we have already lost something in translation.

I won’t go over all the articles points; I think it is well written. I am a bit envious that they have a product to transition too. However, I will point out two ways to help small agencies deal with clients. Specifically on how to take payments and whether to accept certain clients. Both of these areas will help alleviate stress in running the business.

1. Not getting paid. To fix this issue simply demand more up front. We start projects at 75% due. Have done this for 10 years now. Larger contracts, over $15,000, we will start with a 50%, 25%, 25% split. We have never started a project for less than 50% of the entire.

The key is that you never work on collection model. Never send an invoice for work completed. You always are working from your funds you have, so you are never at a loss.

Sure some clients balk at the higher up-front costs, but do you want those clients? Stick to your guns. If a client likes you and your portfolio, they probably will sign even if it means a bit more upfront costs.

2. Owning your time. We get our fair share of "interesting" clients, but have found a way to weed them out in the sales process. This way we only work with clients that we like and want to help. Key tips that it will be a "interesting" project and you may want to pass:

- Wanting to change our standard contract. Our contract is a short 1-page that is really fair to both sides. The more they change the harder the project will be, always. Stick to your contract.
- The client needs to start, now, now, now. Basically someone internally has dropped a ball in scheduling and now it is your problem. Charge more to help them or pass on the project.
- Disorganized email chains and hectic meetings. The client won't suddenly become organized during the project, which means you are now their organizer. Have fun with that project if you accept, but charge more for project management.

Anyways, I think going the product route is great for web agencies. But you can make a successful agency model work and have fun, we have for 10 years now.
You mostly need engineers who think converting between 15 different types of strings is a useful use of developer time.
Original is rarely "too obvious." | Mini Saga
Darpa program wants to coral zany social media world into a science
I see your point but you're nitpicking. MySQL is also the name for the database product, and so it's easy to read this and think that PHP are getting out of the business supporting MySQL.
Definitely a step into the right direction! It's just scary how many bad developers are passing unescaped values into SQL statements.

I remember one guy who was a PHP developer at the company for years. He was really good at it though. However during my apprenticeship I asked him about best practices querying databases and showed him my code.
Looking at it he said: "Why the hell would someone escape those values? It's a database, not the Pentagon."
(10:23:34 AM) info@adrianlamo.com: I’m a journalist and a minister. You can pick either, and treat this as a confession or an interview (never to be published) & enjoy a modicum of legal protection.

maybe not...
I've seen quite a few articles saying and describing how or why Google+ is going to fail. But so far Google+ has been only growing, and according to the figures released yesterday, they are doing great. I don't think it's anything revolutionary, but at least I like it better than Facebook (maybe exactly because it doesn't have so much crap), and that's enough for me to use it more, and will probably even stop using Facebook once all my friends are there (currently I have about a third).
I'm the other founder of DevStructure. True story: I met Matt in the Slicehost IRC in 2007.
Why Nerds Make Great Boyfriends
Forgive my ignorance here - but how did the fake email manage to have been signed by facebook.com? If anyone knows, I'd love a detailed explanation or a reference link. Thanks!
Google will delist them eventually. You can also speed up the process:

https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreport?hl=en&...
Why on earth would anyone want to use Java the language on anything else than JVM and get rid of the one and only alleged advantage that Java has?
I was thinking "Hacking Hurd for GNUmanity" as a play on "Habitat for Humanity".
Yes. The other big problem with this setup is that a single node must be able to handle all queries if the other node fails. Fortunately, we are nowhere near saturating the capacity of our nodes under normal operation (we are only doing about 1,200 queries/second). We are also able to offload read-only queries to slaves that are replicating off of the masters, which should help with the read capacity, which is our biggest demand.
Crash Tags
The lack of AI progress in the last 30 years is not a good sign. You're also ignoring things like the materials that have come out of studying the pads on geckos' feet.
[edit to remove bug report]

I liked this "how to hire" post from last year: http://www.makeleaps.com/blog/en/2010/07/hiring-your-first-e...
"With titles like these,Forbes is poised to fail."
Do you do any TDD training/coaching?
Free Mini Book: Essential JavaScript Design Patterns For Beginners
Pickled Onion, aka Paul Tomes is still working at Rackspace, however not directly with slicehost.
How to Cure Deep Procrastination
> I'm less interested in features (data layer abstraction) and more interested in performance and security concerns.

They both offer the same security (though I believe mysqli offers more rope to hang yourself with, and PDO's API is simpler and smaller).

In the past, mysqli had the performance edge. It's probably still the case, since PDO is db-independent (PHP bundles a dozen of PDO db drivers in the standard distro) whereas mysqli is db-specific. Mysqli will also offer access to more db-specific features if mysql.

PDO has ditched the procedural style entirely (no PHP4 compat), has a smaller API and lets you use the same API for different DBs (across projects, so you'll hit a MySQL and a Postgres db using roughly the same query API).
Agreed, this was a very shocking/confusing/misleading title. "PHP slated to deprecate ext/mysql for newer mysql extensions" is much clearer, and far less exciting.
I don't think there are many people that have debugged a class that used free instead of delete as there is simply no reason to write the word "free" in a C++ code base.

Even if this somehow happened, allocators include protection at least in debug mode that will let you know when you're doing something obviously wrong.

Writing int won't break your program, I don't see why it would, unless you're making assumptions about range - which you shouldn't. If you need an integer of a certain length there is stdint.h
Where do you find the 'personalized information' about hiring managers etc? You mention it's important to customize your approach, but don't give any hints about where we're supposed to get that kind of information. Or do employees at the companies you deal with put the entirety of their company's structure into Linkedin or something?
It's not that the behavior is unclear, it's that going back is not always what you want to happen.

Sometimes, you jump directly into an app, but then, you want to do other things inside that app; since the back button normally is used to move up inside an app, it's not always obvious how to do that (and it's sometimes not possible at all).
Five Problem Solutions to Motivate Your Startup
Great idea! You may think my request a little odd, but believe me it will help me. I am not fortunate enough to have a family of my own, and since you mentioned the words 'mediocre work-life balance' please take my fifteen minutes of favour and go and spend them with your children. Have some real quality time together, do something really fun with them so that they get an extra quarter of an hour with their Dad, who would otherwise have been working. It'll make me feel good to know that I can make someone else's kids just a little bit happier by the magic of the internet.
Good insight. A lot of security breach management just involves having someone else to point a finger too. It is about hiring contractors that have paper credentials and then when shit hits the fan they can point to them and say "look we hired the best, if they can't do it, nobody can." In the government world is it about passing the security script test, having the right stamps on your cerificates that consist of random 4 letter words.
On related news, US and the dollar: On the edge
That is a great skills matrix. I have some set learning goals for myself(outside of work) this year and this matrix just confirms that I am heading in the right direction.
> MySQL is also the name for the database product, and so it's easy to read this and think that PHP are getting out of the business supporting MySQL.

No, I don't think it is because it makes no sense at any level of resolution. MySQL is by a very long shot the most common pairing for PHP data persistence, unless the project is taken over by Microsoft (and drops support for anything but MSSQL) there's no way for such a thing to happen.

It simply is not a sensible interpretation of the headline.
Most people in EU invest their money in real estate or some other hard value. But contrary to US, most people do not handle their economics for the retirement by themselves - this is handled by the governments. So there is really not much to lose if some banks will go bankrupt. It would finally clean up the whole mess. Looking at the figures above I ask myself why Americans did bake the US government to bail out the banks - seems they should have even less interest?
Hmm... the scores you printed are not correct (look at the two board edges):

C++:
sh -c "time ./bin.release/score4 o53 y43 -debug"
Depth 7, placing on 0, score:2
Depth 7, placing on 1, score:8
Depth 7, placing on 2, score:8
Depth 7, placing on 3, score:8
Depth 7, placing on 4, score:8
Depth 7, placing on 5, score:8
Depth 7, placing on 6, score:2
5

Your Haskell code:

sh -c "time ./score4.bin o53 y43 -debug"
Depth 7, placing on 0, score 0
Depth 7, placing on 1, score 8
Depth 7, placing on 2, score 8
Depth 7, placing on 3, score 8
Depth 7, placing on 4, score 8
Depth 7, placing on 5, score 8
Depth 7, placing on 6, score 0
5

I'll try to see why your code miscalculates on the two borders, but I don't speak Haskell so don't expect much :-)
The line is actually from a psychology address that I've had bookmarked for a few years. It's pretty interesting, so I decided to submit it as its own topic:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2767867

Or the address here:

http://www.psy.fsu.edu/~baumeistertice/goodaboutmen.htm?

The line itself is unsourced, or at least taken for granted, in the address.
Thanks guys - I think I've fixed both of these. I've been doing a lot of work on the site recently, so these fell through the cracks.
Genome-wide DNA editing performed in live bacteria
It's not more clear when you're trying to examine the codebase as a whole.
Here's the deal. First, read this: http://blogwarleaks.blogspot.com/
Note that this was written back in December, and it absolutely NAILS what's in the logs.

Second, here's the TL'DR for that link:

Lamo and Poulsen have been journalist/source for years. Poulsen met Lamo right around the time that Lamow as acting as the "homeless hacker" and being all leet by setting up fake Lexis Nexus accounts on the NYT's dime. Remember that?

Poulsen was also a pro-hacker back in the day: he intercepted a phone line at a radio staation so he could be the 100th caller and win a Porsche. Twice.

As such, Poulsen was able to connect with Lamo and use him as a source for years. It's Poulsen who made Lamo famous. And it was that fame that drew Manning to Lamo. Lamo is known, in the undergound 31337 hacker circles, to be gay. Manning, who was questioning his sexuality, saw this as a reason to contact Lamo, expecting some sympathy.

Of course, Lamo had since started working for the government, as any successful hacker can do once he's out of jail. The US likes hiring hackers for their team, and Lamo eventually turned in Manning to win points for himself in this capacity.

Poulsen surely kept Mannings info secret. The leak was entirely Lamo, as anyone who actually knows him can confirm. As I have said a few times in this thread; Lamo is a twitchy, untrustworthy little rat fuck. Despite being gay, he's had restraining orders taken out against him by women. He's that creepy and fucked up.

Not only was Poulsen not involved in outing Manning to the feds, he went all the way and protected Manning's privacy by holding these logs for a year, so far. As we now see, these logs are mostly personal, and there is nothing gained by us all reading them, except confirmation of what those of us in the "scene" already knew.

As the above-linked blog states: there is no conspiracy, there is only gayness. And thanks to Greenwald's incessant whining and conspiracy theory-mongering, we can all now read the very private conversation of a very troubled young man struggling to come to terms with his sexuality while working in an organization that, at the time, held homosexuality as tantamount to treason.

Oh, and we get to see more of Lamo's untrustworthy nature.

Good job, Greenwald. You just made things even worse for Manning: now the idiots who are already against him also know he's trans and has had a very difficult upbringing. Don't we all feel better now about locking him up in solitary?

Lamo hacked, he got hired. Manning hacked, he got publicly humiliated and will never be let out of jail. Justice, eh?
Google, So What About Chrome OS?
I don't understand how facebook DO NOT see the danger to their own long term success here.

It is clear that being dependent on them for any significant part of your business model is risky and currently ill-advised.

Why they aren't taking issues like this seriously are a mystery to me. IMO - its stuff like this which will end up sinking them.
Sorry if this is a silly question but where does MDB2 fit into all this? http://pear.php.net/package/MDB2 It looks like it uses mysqli already, is it superseded by PDO?
It might be helpful to know where you are, as obviously the options vary hugely.
I was thinking the same thing. It's not clear to me though how the search results / feed in sparks is sourced. I assume it's a merging of +1 and shares with some sort of keyword matching, but it seems to show articles in random order and I haven't really figured out what makes it better than a google or twitter search. It seems like they are trying to make it better than a static group because it will include content from any user related to a topic, but it doesn't let me find other people who share my interests to add to my circles and it doesn't show me why something appears in the Spark feed.
I hope so too. Google has a poor track record at getting group-stuff right. Google Groups being a great example.

That said, I'm liking Google+ so far. The circle model lets you operate in a way that is similar to real life, unlike Facebook. IMO, wall posts are about 75% of Facebook, and Google+ is already superior to what they are doing.
people want subreddits.
That's exactly what I thought. That's not the case?

(I'm a gamedev guy, not a webdev guy.)
Quite a while ago here on HN, someone posted a link to a description of what makes posts show up in one's Facebook feed ("home page"). Links I found by a Google search just now

http://www.science20.com/science_and_music_your_ears/blog/ho...

http://www.bizchickblogs.com/2011/06/facebook-edgerank-or-im...

describe what process appears to be happening, according to reverse-engineering by observation of what Facebook does.

My own recent comment, from before when any of us had tried out Google+, on the Facebook user experience

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2661316

largely relates to the high relevance of the home page feed and the convenience of forming private groups, so I think the author of the submitted article is on to something. I like Facebook because it shows me what I like. Google+ is failing to do that so far. Another HN user

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2736693

specifically noted two weeks ago Facebook feed relevance as a point of superiority over some competing services.

Before Facebook fixed this problem, it was very off-putting.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=689842

Google+ could easily have the same problem for a long time if it doesn't fix it, and that would cause Google+ to lose engagement, big-time.

After edit: I'm also not sure when I +1 a post whether I'm giving karma to the submission or to the poster. One plainly superior feature of Facebook's interface so far is that if lots of friends share the same link, I see that as a statement in my feed that "Jim-Bob Smith and five other friends shared a link" rather than having each reshare of the same link show up in my Google+ feed as a separate thread. It's annoying to see the same thing over and over again.
The interests of the ruling elite of Greece do not coincide with the interests of the average Greek. Greece is part of the EU and it's leaders are part of a ruling social group within this context. How they view things is differently than how the average Greek views things. Or how you and I view things.

The Greek government has bond payments to make and needs money to make those payments. The funds recently released by the ECB are for Greece with the understanding that it is just going to take the money and pay make the bond payment. The ECB wants Greece to sell assets. There is money to be made by for foreign companies buying national assets of Greece. The ruling elite stand to make money from this as well. The average Greek stands to lose big time. Hence the demonstrations.

Greece should default. It should leave the euro. Its government should not exist to serve the interests of the banking elite.
Anyone going? Maybe an HN meet up could be fun.
I think that's a bit dramatic. If a coder can't assimilate into your code base and follow the patterns already in use, they would fail regardless of the language.
Um, Google Groups? It's not perfect, but it does exist. They could easily add a list of my Groups in the sidebar under my Circles list. My guess is "shared Circles" is going to be real, as many people in this two week Beta trial have expressed that as a need.

The article makes a valid enough point, but the headline is stupid and sensationalist. If a product isn't all things to everyone on day one it's "poised to fail"? Know how many FB groups I belong to? Zero.
Foxconn iPhone Orders Could Hit 85M in 2012
While i can see people moving from facebook or to google+ (a lot of my friends already do), i dont know anyone who quit linkedin for g+. FB and google pretty much feed on each other. And i dont think it will stop there. G+ is just the second "real name" nonprofessional network , maybe in 3 years there will be a new cool toy and everyone will jump ship once again.
Google Q2 Revenue Jumps 32%
The challenge for the Chinese leadership is not how to keep the Chinese people under a Communist regime, but how to keep them well fed (literally and figuratively). The game of politics is far more forgiving than the laws of economics.
resilient to what?
Except that the loans in question were made to the Greek government, not the average Greek. The creditors should have taken into account the Greek government's inability to collect proper taxes.

Let's be honest, tax evasion is pretty much a national pastime in the US too -- the difference is that here the IRS will come after you if you cross the line.
It's a lot easier to run to the vending machine when you spill coffee on your keyboard than going through the IT dept.
The problem is not the former professions of the bureaucrats, but rather the fact that individuals can write the words "my money's on the government" truly believing them.
"I understand good design from bad design. Aesthetics are not lost on me." I might just have to steal this sentence from you...

EDIT: more seriously, have a look at my CV [ http://www.gwenhael.net/p/english-cv.html ] and tell me why it sucks and how to land a decent job in Vietnam or France ;)
That's silly. Most people I know just mute facebook groups and move on.
The Vorlons and Shadows of social networking!
Precisely, unless he can show the PrimeSense guys based their technology upon his then they can use a clean-room defence to get the patent invalidated.
Re #5, when I was looking online for laptops it was really annoying how some retailers just would not have pictures of the keyboards. Given how terrible some laptop keyboards are, this is kind of important. I hate when the important keys are squished up to fit in keys that just start up their bloatware. I want a decent-sized tab key, not a key that launches Outlook or Spammy Games Center every time I accidentally whack it trying to indent a line.
I agree with you, though it seems like there was some decent money and time put into this (the video production seems professional), I can't figure out what 37sigs motivation for this is though. Eventual DVD sales?
ReceiptLoader
Some people try to force/shame TDD on others because it's more "efficient". "You're going to have to do it anyways." they say. Well, it's your mind and it's your time not theirs. Only you will know what's right for you. If TDD doesn't work out while learning a language then drop it. If it works out then great. I'm sensing this TDD arrogance that really pisses me off. It's not the only way to write a program. It all depends on who/what the program is written for.
I don’t think you can have a stable financial system without a government that is willing and able to step in when things go pear-shaped.

(You might say “if the government weren’t doing that, then lenders would be more careful with their money and things wouldn’t go pear-shaped”, but the string of crashes in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, before the Federal Reserve was created, suggests otherwise.)
For #1 - I've always been pretty disappointed with the shipping companies tracking systems. Maybe I just don't understand what problems they are having, but if you have to scan items each step of the way, regardless of scale, shouldn't it be fairly straightforward to get the newest data for each package to the website pretty quickly?
Wilmington, NC.
Not a computer nerd mecca, per se... well....per anything, really.
I've thought about maybe Craigslist, but that seems 'off' somehow. I don't use facebook.

I dunno-- I'll find people, but I'm still open to suggestions. I may try something interesting.
Researcher finds dangerous vulnerability in Skype
One more aspect: a lot of PPC advertisers do not like to use network ads (i.e., partner sites) because they are perceived as yielding lower quality clicks. Clicks from Google itself are seen to be more likely to monetize for the advertiser.
So your argument essentially boils down to "there should be some coding style in a project", which is true for all languages, not just C++.
Bingo. It's truly amazing that after all the world has seen in the past several years, many fail to recognize a house of cards when they see one.
IANAL but I don't think that is how patents work. If person A patents his invention, and person B completely independently invents exactly the same invention without having any knowledge about person A's work, person B still cannot just ignore the patent.
Was one of the first things we did.
Watch Monte Carlo Online Free
Watch Monte Carlo Online Free
Monte-Carlo certainly be an attraction for the female audience with its history which tends to be simple and herbs stored in a love story while for men who have been forced to see her boyfriend does not need to look Cross tides.
Bad People Project