skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN contractors: do you charge to write a spec?
I've been involved in the contracting market for the last couple of years. Lately I've seen a big uptick in large (100+ hour) projects with bad or nonexistent specs that want pricing information. 3-page "outline" specs, specs with ridiculous requirements obviously written by clients (100% uptime), etc. There's grey area too--I often see specs that need a 25% or 50% rewrite, or need a few features reworked to be feasible.

I'm concerned that writing the spec needed to eventually determine the pricing information is a bad ROI vs, say, writing actual code with my time instead, working on paying projects, etc. At the same time, nontechnical clients don't always understand why they need a spec, or don't understand why the spec they have is bad, or why I can't determine pricing information from it, and usually the trust isn't there at that early stage of the pre-relationship to convince them.

What do others in the contracting market do in this situation? Do you just invest the 10-20 hours in speccing all the projects, do you tell them to come back with a spec, do you offer to do it hourly? How does that conversation usually go? Where do you draw the line between free and paid work?
For statistical genetics at least, it's common to process much of the data in parallel, so the RAM limitations on one R instance are not the gating factor.
damn, i dropped out, so i guess this make me unemployable.
I would be interested to know what % of students would state if asked whether they would prefer to stay in the Bay Area vs. relocate (assuming assistance) to another city. I know some companies on the East-coast don't focus too much energy on recruiting in West-coast schools because it is assumed there will already be a much lower % which would be willing to relocate in the first place. I'm just wondering what the actual survey #s would say and how tied the students are to the Bay Area tech culture.
Unfortunately, this is one of things that I have found very challenging to convey due to the scope of the code base.
#startups is the most popular subreddit for HNers. You'll find some dislike for HN though. Moderation/YC rejection issues mostly.
The "Post PC" era is coming, have little doubt of that. However, it'll be more of a phase transition than a cataclysm. Mostly it'll come down to different form factors, different operating systems, and different UIs. And yes, ultimately the markets will be even more symbiotic than they are today.
Interesting, his idea about interactive pictures is what was my initial frustration with programming. "Why can't I just make that stuff go?"

If you are into games, a solution to interactive picture generation by artists would be akin to a particle editor. You let them define a few parameters and valid ranges, then the artist supplies graphics in the right places: voila. A good looking animation. Now restrict the end user to a few well defined ranges of these parameters as well and you have an interactive picture.
The whole needing an app kills it. If its built into the native camera to recognize these codes I can really see it taking off. No more needing to type long landing page urls when you see a billboard or needing an exclusive short url when you can just point your camera and see the intended page open up on your iphone browser.
IPhone 4S Browser Performance Review
Yup, tried that one. Had a hell of a time getting it to work. Once it did work, it just didn't feel right. I realize that's very subjective, but it matters.
From the description, it seemed like there is a mode to handle this transparently in hardware
Neat. But will the whole thing last a full 24 hours, or will certain longitudes have a better shot of seeing them than others?
That, however, throws the effort from publishers to readers without lessening it as much as one would like. I can see specialized audiences investing the time required to get a web of trust going, but not mass audiences. Mass audiences, when contemplating "is this any good?", don't usually go for "I know, I'll rate how much I trust a bunch of people that I know or know of and algorithmically consult their opinions!" They go for "probably not." This is the parallel to how, when you're creating a new web site, your enemy is less the competition and more the Back button. So there are serious network-effect problems with this proposition - it has big barriers to entry. I would love to partake of its benefits, because they sound awesome, but I think that you're underestimating how difficult it would be to get this off the ground.

See also: http://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt
Which distros work like that? (speaking as a Ubuntu user that has never tried any other distros)
The infinite runway is the key point of "ramen profitable", not comparison with market wages. The latter differs enormously between a founder who just dropped out of college versus one who's switching out of a highly successful position in mid-career, but that doesn't make a difference to the startup's likelihood of success.

And, even though the difference in lost market wages can be relatively giant, it's still negligible relative to the potential of a startup to create something new and incredibly valuable and to change the world.
Bing, DDG and Blekko IMO; naturally Bing have the largest index of the 3.
Would there need to be some sort of syntax test at the door?
And a huge amount of communications gear, e.g. routers, cable/dsl modems, wifi access points etc
> When you're selling hundreds of thousands of phones each day, you no longer become conspicuous.

No true. Increased availability of a product certain reduces the status associated with it, but products serving the purpose of conspicuous consumption exist at almost every level of affordability. There are some product which only the top 0.1% can afford and others which 90% of the population can afford. (Even the homeless community has a hierarchy partially defined by possessions.) Further, the degree to which a product exists to be conspicuously consumed is a continuum, in which the iPhone sits around the middle (although falling, due to it's sales).

Do you really think people, when deciding whether to buy an iPad, don't factor in the fact that all of their friends will ooh and ahh over it when they first see it?
So must of us are quite familiar with reactive programming, we just don't realize it. Anytime you've ever made an excel spreadsheet, with functions, you've done reactive programming. Seeing that the spreadsheet is one of the few areas where nonprogammers actually program, I'm hoping that as we better understand reactive programming we'll be able to expose it's power to general users.

For more information on functional reactive programming, I'd recommend looking at FlapJax and FatherTime
If symbiotic, then not "Post PC." I don't buy it. Maybe I need to phrase it as a question:

Why would you get rid of your PC once you have more form factors, more OS's, and more UIs? Especially, why would you get rid of your _keyboard_?
I'd seriously consider getting a mid-sized electric SUV, but these small sport cars are just plain useless. However, I understand that for novel products like electric cars it's best to start by marketing them to people who can afford them and who can influence others to buy them...

And the headline is just misleading (like most headlines on Yahoo News): not only did the company say they've spent the money in the US, they actually can't spend them outside the country...
Personally I'm waiting for the "Sorry, you cannot currently search with us as you aren't logged into Google+" message.

(Am obviously joking, but I agree with your sentiment that G+ integration does seem to be... going quickly; I can understand why from a business POV though)
Just pushed out a new version with support for text snippets! Expect it within 10 minutes :) You like it?
I'm less bullish on Google. They are very data-driven, which works until it doesn't. I can't imagine what data anyone at Google would have provided in 2001 that could have convinced them to build an iPod.

Google doesn't seem so much paralysis-by-analysis, but more paralysis-until-analysis. I'm not a googler, but have several friends who are. The stories of designers who have come and gone from their teams aren't well published, but I guess frustration is a norm in those circles when it comes to design. Apparently, design vision doesn't lead a product -- it follows.

I know they have made managerial changes there (I was told the move of Meyer out as head of product management had something to do with design), but the culture of data-first seems to be holding them back.
Not if your phone costs thousands of dollars to manufacture and you haven't yet worked out how to make the 3D interaction actually useful for anything.
ARM, especially ARM-thumb mode, is the gold standard for instructions/watt. That's why it's in phones since way back. I don't see MIPS challenging that.
I want to preface this by saying that I'm not implying there is any problem with the Ive/Apple situation, I'm merely arguing against the idea that you can stop an ambitious person from climbing as far as they want to climb.

You can never compensate a person what they would make if you actually promoted them. I.e., you can't pay your CEO less than or equal to your Chief Engineer. If I'm wrong on this feel free to speak up and/or down vote me.

I think you're making some assumptions here that are not necessarily correct, 1) that by being CEO you don't get to do the fun stuff, we only have to look at Apple's own former CEO to know that's not the case, and 2) that a person at this level is going to reflect on the choice and not think they would be good at the higher position. I'm no John Ive, but even my little ego has never allowed me to think I won't be equally good at some higher position than my current one.
I think this is precisely the reason. +Name is already used as a form of reference in Google+ analogously to @handle in Twitter.
Sony Ericsson Forces A Fan Site Into Submission
Given the ease with which I was able to port one project from codeplex, I am not surprised that Microsoft is lining up the ducks.

The project which I couldn't port (Ncalc) relied on ANTLR and thus a .dll.

The other (Irony) was .NET based and the main difficulty was cleaning up the structure created by VS Professional to Work with Visual Studio for Windows Phone [Express] and converting the console based code to event based...and that was easy even for me.
How is a dividend more tax friendly than a stock repurchase?

Some of AAPL's cash may have to be repatriated, at which point they'd have to pay corporate tax on it. Then the dividend would be taxed at a rate equal to income for US taxpayers. Whereas a repurchase ultimately results in capital gains, and the money may not have to be repatriated either.
Klapy upustowe
On Android that's how it is.
ASUS Zenbook UX31 review
Payday Loan Consolidation
Oh, ok. That's just a manner of understanding how humans work (when viewed as a machine). The experimenter has some idea in his head which is encoded in the connections between neurons (although no one knows how...which is why it's hard to be totally confident that people are deterministic). This idea is translated into vocal cord vibrations and lip movements, which vibrate air in a certain way to product sound. This sound wave travels to the subject's ears. It is translated into electrical signals traveling on neurons by the ear, leading into the subject's brain. This changes the state of the subject's brain (the connections between the neurons) in such a way that a day later, while going through his normal routine, the subject's brain directs him to exercise.
Anything that involves saving files will have to be reworked, since you no longer can use System.IO.. I'm trying to port a compression library and have run into this issue.
In Snapier, it will be better if you have a message why you are asking for emails. More importantly, provide a message which is a little more than "Thank you very much" when I enter my email. Though I got an email within a second, it will be more user friendly to give a "We'll connect back soon" in the site itself.

Also, in the email you mention 'check us out on Twitter' but fail to provide the twitter id.

Just my two cents. If any of that sounds badly phrased, I blame the clock for showing 3 AM. Cheers :)
Yes, we did had to invest on new servers. Not only we need more RAM, we also needed more storage (which as expensive because we use SSDs). All things considered, SQL Server licences are not cheap either (6K-7K each) so in the long run I believe we will be saving money.

Our training was very much hands on: (1) we migrated a piece of code, (2) tested against a full-sized database, (3) profiled performance under load, (4) learned from the results, moved on the next piece of code (1).

Our plan if MongoDB wasn't good enough consisted basically of: (1) crying ourselves to sleep, (2) drinking heavily, and (3) contributing to MongoDB's development to make it good enough.
What a three-dimensional phone may look like:

http://www.zsqts.com.cn/product-photo/2009-05-06/9d783160c8b...
Well the upside is that the lender develops successful technology that has a big impact on the economy and the movement away from reliance on oil.

It's subsidized research.
Very nice study. Kudos to Denmark for using proper database normalization across the board!
I just tested again, with measuring tape, and I can get the lock screen sliding in less than a milimeter. What device do you have?
Yep, that's science for you.

It's an exciting time to be a planetary scientist.
Thanks ktsmith! Will note it down and see what's possible.
Smartphone senses nearby keyboard vibrations and deciphers sentences
http://www.reddit.com/r/rstats

http://stackoverflow.com/tags/r/info
Really? Reddit has lost all integrity with me, since digg imploded all the problems that digg had migrated there way over and the voting system has drawn out the very worst in the digg crowd. I used Reddit from 2006 till later this year where I reached a level of disgust I feel no need to associate myself with it.

Theres a terrible sense of group think there and the karma system creates a sense of validation for bad behavior (especially considering its known for bad moderation). And as many people use multiple sub-reddits this bad behavior has just spilled over everywhere. Reading the comments is like a diary of a mad man, just a pile of sycophants trying so hard to be funny (and generally failing).

Even Something Awful and 4Chan have taken moral high ground against the decadence going on there. I'm not sure if anyone here saw the media recently when SA users decided to hunt out pedos in reddit and took it to the main stream media. There is a great thread on SA covering it step by step and Reddit really doesn't come out looking that great.

Its a site which needs a seriously clean out and serious moderation, but I suspect it to late for that, they have created a tone and it will stick. Just like every other community has a tone its known for.
That's a really nice feature, though it's surprisingly hard to find on their site. I wonder why they prefer to promote their Tour rather than the Live Demo (found via a small link in a list on the right rail of the Tour page).

Would be interesting if a Live Demo doesn't convert nearly as well as a Tour.
This supports something I've long suspected: that much of Apple's singular success is due to their ability to mislead their competition into making poor design choices, and distract them from real innovation. How much money has been wasted trying to copy the iPad?
Regarding requirements, we were looking for something that was free and open source because we are planning to scale up our operations in the near future. Because we have both Windows and Linux servers, we also wanted something that could run on both platforms. Unfortunately it turned out that MongoDB doesn't perform well on Windows, but you can still use Windows servers as replication targets which is great.

Given our C# code base, the fact that MongoDB has a couple of somewhat mature C# drivers was definitely a factor.
Startup bootcamp: James Lindenbaum (Heroku)
With SQL Server (or any RDBMS) there are known backup and recovery strategies and a WAL as added security. What kind of disaster recovery strategies are you employing with MongoDB?
I love R--but I end up using Stata more often because it is easier to produce vector graphics that can be imported to Illustrator. I wish that the R community would start to focus on graphics.
You're right, a lot of the people who decide to "chase the dream" do fail and they do pass up more secure opportunities, but most of the times that's a good thing.

The experience and lessons learned when starting a business are invaluable, but of course, everyone who fails has to decide for themselves whether they want to continue or just settle for something less or more secure.

I know I hated myself for passing up a few good opportunities (especially when my big plans went belly up), but I wouldn't trade the hustle (and stress) of doing what I like for anything else.
The brain is much messier than a physical system. ... So it does not lend itself to being easily described by simple mathematical laws.

Here is a nonsense that I really wish people would stop repeating.

The only simple physical systems are the ones found in introductory physics textbooks. Meanwhile here in the real world: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N-body_problem
Everything has overhead at scale. I think the 'HTTPS is hard on computers' stage has passed by though...its just not that computationally intensive on modern hardware.
Rising gas prices may be to blame for economic doldrums
Sliding the numbers isn't the interesting part (I agree, it is horrible from an accessibility perspective). The interesting part is the automatic updates.

Of course, if you can't slap your own UI (or there aren't better UI's), then that's problematic. Given the author's other work, though, I don't think that is a problem.
Read the linked paper by James Hamilton too: http://dss.ucsd.edu/%7Ejhamilto/Hamilton_oil_shock_08.pdf . It may turn out that we simply can't do anything about macro economic performance without working on energy problems. This kind of information has been circling among economics bloggers for quite a while but hasn't made much way into the mainstream.
I saw one use of the QR code that impressed me: in my city (Lyon, France), on bus stops, there are QR codes. Following them leads to a web page where you get the waiting time for the next buses. This is a quick and cheap way to display the waiting time without adding hardware to the bus stops.

The only good point I see for the QR code is that it makes it easier to get to a webpage. That made perfect use of it.
Bajar de peso, paso a paso...
To add to that idea I think is that it obviates the need to remember and recall a website name for [later] retrieval, for example.
Ask HN: Review my startup
I'm particularly looking for feedback about the music listening experience. Is it easy to find new music

www.indiebychoice.com
A good example of why companies should avoid taking government money if they can: even if the government doesn't impose a lot of restrictions on you upfront, the press will retroactively.
Actually, you're wrong. Windows is far from the a poor man's OS X. The dock in OS X is copy of Stardock, which was originally done for Windows. NeXTStep was not definitley not the first OS to have multitasking. In fact, Windows 2.0 which was released 1 year had it first. Once Apple released a development environment and office toolkist that is as widely used as either Visual Studio or Office 2010, then maybe you can make that claim. Or when the company creates it owns command line processor, or IDE for a phone.
I realize many people such as yourself like to believe Apple is some innovative company, but they're just as guilty of stealing ideas as every other tech company in the Valley. Apple's strength is taking those ideas and weaving into a consistent and polished UX.
It's badly subsidized research.

Compare to, say, the budget of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colorado.

For five hundred million dollars, you can get, say, five thousand man-years worth of actual research. As opposed to a business that makes a few funny-looking sports cars for rich people and then goes broke.
Thanks for the feedback. It was very slapdash but we hope to replace it with something more... robust soon.
That is an excellent question. It is trivial to back up a live SQL Server instance because it supports shadow-volume snapshots. The same isn't true for MongoDB.

Instead, we had to resort to running our MongoDB database on a 3-node cluster and this is our main strategy for resiliency. Additionally, one of the nodes is set to do a daily full-database dump, which is pretty much guaranteed to be in an inconsistent state but still provides us an extra degree of peace of mind.
As I saw it, the CueCat's problem was needing to be tethered to a computer with web access, which nobody at the time habitually carried in their pocket.
> Developers still have to opt-in with a one-line XML file change, due to compatibility issues.

Only if they are targeting a pre-ICS SDK version. Applications targeting 4.0 have hardware acceleration on by default.
I believe the OS can, optionally, make these decisions itself if it wants to.
Maybe I'm missing something, but doesn't the way the app authentication works preclude it from being used for client-side apps?

For example in https://www.dropbox.com/developers/start/authentication#pyth... you set both APP_KEY and APP_SECRET. Of course anyone can read the source and get these, so what keeps them from impersonating your app by using the same key and secret?

For iOS and Android this is probably less of an issue, but someone could probably glean the values by searching your binary.
What you are looking at is part of a standard, accepted and necessary editing practice whereby pronouns such as "he", "she" and "it" are replaced with their antecedent pronouns; in this case "he" was replaced with "Jobs". There's nothing suspicious about it.
Don't worry. I heard Android has been completely "re-invented" in version 4.0.
Exactly. If they end up making the whole process frictionless, I feel QR codes will come out alright.

That, and a bit of education on what they are / do. As he states in the article, even in SF most consumers are in the dark.
Particle Debris (wk. ending 10/21) Some Serious OMGs
It would be faster and easier for a Short URL in place of a QR code in most cases.

For example - at the bus stop with a QR code I would have:

- locate an app I rarely use in the Menu

- open app

- depending on app, hit button to go to camera

- snap photo

- processing time

- opens web browser... (sometimes I'd get a confirmation page prior to the action)

With a Short URL:

- open browser thats prominently placed on my phone

- tap in Short URL (bit.ly/xYz123XyZ)

Manually typing a Short URL is a very low pain point in comparison to QR codes these days.
Keep in mind this post was originally from 2007. jQuery started in mid-2006. When this was originally written, there really weren't many effective abstractions of the DOM.
This reminds me a bit of the MikeRoweSoft thing[1] from a few years back. For SE's sake, I hope they come to their senses like MS did.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_vs._MikeRoweSoft
An attachable electronic viewfinder might work, but then you can't use an external flash together with the viewfinder. Plus, it's just one more accessory you have to buy and carry around with you. Pretty stupid.
Bullshit. Unless 95% of your jQuery usage is just finding some elements and the… doing nothin with them.

Meanwhile others do some stuff: like attaching event handlers, manipulating attributes, class names; doing animation, making AJAX requests, etc.
Most of these differ to some degree accross browsers and that's there jQuery comes in: to unify the API.