skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't know why this is getting downvoted. This is pretty much exactly why the government (mostly DOD) uses cost-plus in some cases.

The pendulum in government acquisitions tends to swing along multiple axis: sometimes the trend is towards the government do the integration itself, sometimes the trend is towards contracting out the integration to a prime contractor; sometimes the trend is towards cost-plus, sometimes the trend is towards firm-fixed price. Even though one way of doing things might be more popular at any given time, the other options are always considered and often used.

The choice of reimbursement structure (which is not just binary "cost-plus" or "fixed-price," but rather an entire continuum) is based on risk projections. If you insist on fixed price for a very risky project, contractors will bake that risk into their bids, pricing everything for the worst-case scenario. If you don't get the worst-case scenario, you'll still end up paying for it, in which case you would have been better off under a cost-plus contract. Conversely, if you pick the lowest bidder and they didn't bid conservatively enough, and then you do get the worst case scenario, they might very well run out of money, in which case you have a choice of either granting them more money or cancelling the project and eating the sunk costs when the contractor collapses. So, for high-risk projects, cost-plus is generally the best way to go.

I think that the swinging of the pendulum is due in part to a succession of over-corrections: "We used cost-plus too much and contractors wasted money! Lets use fixed-price as much as possible from now on!" Followed by "We used fixed-price too much and ended up paying too much on most contracts! Lets use cost-plus as much as possible from now on!" and then back the other way. However, I think that it's also driven by cycles of technological development: a lot of technology tends to go through phases where one generation of equipment really pushes the edge of what's feasible, and then the next generation mostly just matures and refines the technology used in the previous generation (e.g. Windows Vista and Windows 7). During those "pushing the edge" phases, risk is higher and so cost-plus gets used more; during the "mature and refine" phases, risk is lower and so fixed-price gets used more.
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This is a good thing. Anti-virus companies have gotten lazy, mostly to increase profits.

I have in-house knowledge of an anti-virus product (BitDefender) that could have been the best in the world. But instead the board of directors decided one day that the product is too good and that they should keep it down a notch, as it wasn't worth it to keep so many talented developers on the payroll. The product itself is still good, but is bloated (as normal users need to see a lot of background activity and red lights for the cost to be justified) and it's not what it should have been.

In general I feel bad when companies get bitten by Microsoft's anti-competitive behavior, but not this time.
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I am brainstorming ways to monetize a chrome extension/firefox plugin and a simple donate button came to mind. I would love to hear from the community about the best micropayment systems out there. Also, any advice on the best kind of for-profit organization (LLC?) to form for this situation. Thanks!
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I will put up 50 HN bucks that it was 999 set up by a Herman Cain fan.
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This is pretty depressing. It seems like the Chinese government, in creating new more powerful Internet censorship methods, is outpacing services to circumvent it.

People like those of us reading this site probably won't have much trouble finding ways around it, but it seems people (esp. Chinese) who would normally hop the Great Firewall with ease using VPNs/proxy will have to put in more effort/get more technical to do that successfully, and i'm afraid that they won't want to bother.
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If you think that's brilliant, you need to take Economics 101 again.
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No, survivorship bias doesn't say anything about probabilities or even the correctness of conclusion, it's a selection bias. It certainly doesn't imply probability "falling to ~0 at 2".

Anyway it doesn't really matter since this isn't a study or an attempt to prove something, I just think it's funny how well this article fits that definition so I pointed it out.
It means that money isn't a good point system. The simplest way to reason this is that many people around the world make tons of money for selling something that isn't useful/valuable. Scams are probably at the bottom of the 'point system' but pull in tons of money.

For money to be a good point system, everyone with a wallet would have to be sensible and make good market choices but unfortunately the case is, for the most part, the exact opposite.

On top of that I would argue that (for example) Khan Academy is much more valuable than most of the investment firms, but investment firms are worth more $$$ than Khan Academy will ever be.
Advertising this could be one of your biggest costs. Reduce the requirement for advertising by devising a traction plan, if you haven't already. You already have the right idea by targeting a small area first and then expanding.

There is a similar site to yours already launched in London, fairly well established called HouseBites.co.uk - have you studied their model? Mike from HouseBites gave a talk at YCombinator London about 1 or 2 months ago. Did you see this talk? There is a video floating around somewhere.

Some of the logistical issues were discussed which may give you some assistance on for Meal Mogul.

I am also working on a different yet related project EatSocial.net (see blog.EatSocial.net) - think meetups in restaurants. Would you be interested to meet for a chat? I am based in London and would like to hear more about Meal Mogul.
Not sure. He did it repeatedly. Of course to give it some more weight we should also look at some "non-survivors" but I'd want to see some that got to step 3 in his advice (monetize.)

There are some companies that monetized (more or less successfully) what they shared for free but I don't know enough of them to draw any conclusions.
A big mac would only keep the starving man alive for a few more hours. At least the man with the book could get some good entertainment before he starved to death.
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Move into mobile telephony. Customers get cheaper calls if they go over wifi, use a standard mobile connection if not. If you control the access points in homes and businesses, you can allow handsets of unrelated customers to access them.

Whether this makes sense obviously depends on whether you do control your customers' wifi routers and whether you can get the handsets cheap enough for your market.
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Tom, I'm working on a project similar to GrubWithUs (blog.eatsocial.net). We are a team of 3 and just started working every weekend on this about a month ago.

How many of you are working on this?
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Everybody I know there in Google confirms that MBAs are really crippling it. Recently I had a lengthy discussion with couple of them on that. They do have politics and chaos.

Self-taught and nontechnical are two different terms. In real world scenario, self-taught people often associate themselves with "technical".
You talk about (on topic of why you need 500 karma to downvote) understanding the community and not posting contentless posts 5 posts ago and now you post this. The irony levels are off the charts!
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Speaking of errors in computer forensics:

http://wordpress.bladeforensics.com/?p=357
> Chrome + AdBlock Plus by itself typically prevents repeat malware cleanups.

That's interesting because Chrome is installed as the user (and so writable by the user), not as admin (like everything else). Chrome should be easier to infect.

Got any numbers?
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Zuckerberg didn't get his "I'm CEO bitch" business card until he was rich, so why should I?

In all seriousness I'm 100% sure people care more about the product/idea of your startup more than the gold lettering on your business card. If you can prove me wrong than I'm going to get gold lettered business cards to get people to invest into my (fake) startup.
Have we considered, frankly, the cost of a AAA title these days? IMDB Estimates the budget of Skyrim at $100m (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1814884/). That isn't an unreasonable number – there have been a number of recent games which hit that as well. Grand Theft Auto IV had a budget estimated at $100m as well.

This points to the fact that the engine and the tools available are but a small part of what is needed. Granted, a big start would be getting publishers to donate their game engines to development teams for learning environments.

But... what makes these games incredible is the millions of dollars that goes into voice acting, motion capture (as I recall much of the model rendering is informed via mocap. Look at things like the woodcutting animations in Skyrim to see where this benefits), model rendering, textures, etc.

What's needed is to figure out how to reduce the cost of these things, or get collaboration from professional teams/publishers willing to donate time and/or resources to projects.

Otherwise, you'll end up with a bunch of learning environments using the same game engine as skyrim but with none of the magic.
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> A basic problem: Perl allows them to hack away all day and write hideous code that ensures they will never get fired. Due to their laziness the script will be undocumented, lack basic error checking, will have myriads of bugs and often fail, but no one except them will be able to fix it in a reasonable time frame.

Can you provide me with a link to any non-toy programming language for which this isn't the case? I've seen beautiful code in a lot of languages, and I've seen god-awful ugly code in a lot more. I don't think I've ever found a language that doesn't have some ugly code written in it, though.

> This is where you will be upset and think i am really unjust and a troll: I'm stating that Perl supports this behavior like no other language. (except maybe brainfuck ;) )

Well, when you offer up a statement that applies to essentially every programming language in existence, and then suggest that it only really applies to Perl, I can see where they might get that impression. A programming language is just a programming language. It's programmers that write it, and a poor programming can, and will, write piss-poor code in any language.

> My basic statement about Perl: It is possible to write readable, tested and maintainable code in Perl. BUT it is hard if not impossible with just the base language. It is by far easier to get it wrong then to get it right in Perl for the newcomer or average programmer.

No offense, but that's just flat out silly. First of, it's not at all hard to write readable, tested, and maintainable Perl in the "base" language.

Beyond that however, saying "just the base" language is very misleading and shows either ignorance or malice. Perl, by design, maintains a moderate "core". It doesn't ship with every module included. That doesn't make it hard to access additional functionality (such as Moose, Test::More, and thousands of others). That's a simple design decision, and isn't good or bad, it's simply a matter of trace-offs.

By your logic then, C is a horrible language, because it's almost impossible to write "readable, tested and maintainable" code with the base language, right? I mean, it has no object oriented functionality, no testing framework, and a very minimal standard library. What were they thinking? How is anyone supposed to get work done with C?

Oh, right. They get the libraries they need, and get stuff done. Just like in Perl. Only, in C you don't get CPAN to take 99% of the effort of finding and installing libraries out of the equation.
The original RepRap design (Darwin) moved the print head in X and Y, and moved the build surface in Z only (downward as the print progresses).

The Ultimaker machine is based off the Darwin design, and works similarly. Ultimaker has a very lightweight printhead, so they can print incredibly fast.

I haven't seen a moving-head deposition robot that moves only the head. I think this is because the simplest way to make a 3-axis robot involves two tools/surfaces, each moving in at least 1 axis. A tool/surface that moves in all 3 axes needs to be very stiff to avoid juddering around as the machine starts and stops line segments. It's much simpler to make a 2-axis robot and a 1-axis robot, than a 3-axis robot. :)
I've been in China recently and noticed I was having trouble establishing VPN connections after just a few hours. I would have to find new VPN servers to connect to every 3 or 4 days.

I have not noticed any drop off in connectivity when using my company's VPN, but I'm sure this is because this is an authorized VPN.

The most notable blow here is that people using solutions like FreeGate are getting heavily affected by this. Most Shanghainese people use this to connect to the outside world.
It's probably the HN load. I'm getting a "A server error occurred. Please contact the administrator." message for the calc app.
I think that's George Crow. SJ addresses him by name at one point in that video.
Readers of HN must be completely miserable people to downvote comments like this.

If you would consider downvoting the above comment, look at your own life first and ask yourself why you're so unhappy.
Step 1) Go to Craigslist.

Step 2) Type in "ios developer" in the jobs section.

Step 3) Repeat process on variety of jobs sites/locations/keywords until curiosity satisfied.
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Can you give me some concrete examples of this? I have a lecturer at university who constantly harps on about "canada doing it right" with broadband access and I've always had the feeling that he has no idea what he's talking about. I'd love to go head-to-head with him next year over the topic.

This guy:
http://www.politicalscience.com.au/
http://www.politicalscience.com.au/p/my-media.html
You can't really fix things like software publicly. That'd never fly in a typical company, startups excluded of course. The only thing you can do is do it secretly and there are practically two ways to accomplish that.

The first way is hard to do if there's a large group of programmers working on the project but it's very suitable for older projects that is still under development but with lower staffing.

If possible, do things efficiently locally (use source control, use python/jython, generate code, do automated builds, do automated testing, reuse, and only deliver what you must) but leave your advantageous practices unadvertised. Then, slowly abuse your edge to steal maintenance and refactoring time from actual to-be-done tasks and features. Eventually you can ease your own future work and you'll get more time to work on the system instead of the features which become easier to add.

The second way is to employ a targeted attack against a whole malfunctional group or team at once: skunkworks projects. Do the damn thing from the scratch and do it right, then replace the old steaming pile of junk with it before anyone gets to say no, and weasel your way back to the surface by toting things were just changed a bit, and never replaced.

Of course, this comes with the assumption that the evil is in the system and your colleagues aren't actively demolishing everything you build.
It's a great pity that education hasn't actually changed a bit in the intervening time.

I wonder how much of Steve Jobs' visions about the future turned out wrong (didn't happen) but in the end it didn't matter.
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Clearly define what your aim is (not "grow the twitter followers by 50%") in a business context. "I am going to build a relationship with 50 bloggers pertinent to our product"

Your community is likely to be very nascent, and so you'll need to complete grok the space your in, really take the time to understand what the "continual conversations" are between the community (there's always one. Think Python vs Ruby on HN)make sure you understand it, the key players who takes which view...

Once you've fully groked the environment, use being the "twiter dude" as a way to meet people for coffee's and beers, then scale to being a biz dev.

Simples.

Remember, you there to make money not have a natter. :)
People mean a lot of things when they say "micropayment." You might mean $0.05 or $5.00. If you mean $5.00, the best solution is Paypal (or Stripe if you live in the US). If you mean $0.05, stop now.

Tips:

1) Don't call anything a donation if you're not a registered 501c tax exempt charity. (You won't be.) Instead, let people buy a supporter button on your home page or a "registered" version of the software with whatever trivial difference you want. (e.g. displays "registered" or "Thank you!" in the about screen.) This is a preventative inoculation against lots of trouble down the line with your credit card processor.

2) If you don't have a specific reason for forming the LLC, skip it and take money as an individual. Many devs have an inchoate fear that this is somehow illegal. That is the opposite of the truth: sole proprietorship is overwhelmingly the most common form of business operation in the US.

3) Do not encourage people to pick their donation amount. Instead, pre-pick three, which you can assign three levels of status to (bronze, silver, gold, whatever -- you and I know it is meaningless, but the customer won't perceive it that way) and price them at modest, generous, and high. e.g. If you are thinking $5 right now, I would suggest $10, $20, $30 or $10, $25, $50. You'll get most of your transactions at silver and make most of your money on gold.
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Don't forget that most people on this planet reportedly are a) poor and b) not having English as their mother tongue (probably not even speaking it).
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Lack of clean water can cause large amounts of chaos very quickly[1]. Water infrastructure should be something that Governments want to protect.

Given that, and given weird laws about "providing help to terrorists"[2] I'm amazed that someone putting a 3 character password on something so important, and then letting it face the Internet, is not going to see jail time.

[1] See, for example, flooding in Gloucestershire, England, a few years ago. That was troublesome, but only got really bad when a local water treatment plant was flooded.

[2] At least, in the UK.
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Ι just add my comment here with the hope that your question gets with some luck to the front page.

It is a very interesting question but it is really so uncommon that somebody (even)here owns an ISP company that people may think that you could be just asking that for fun.

Good luck
Nope, you're not wrong at all in wishing that.

I was one of the folks in charge of defining and building the Windows Phone 7 application platform. I pushed extremely hard to ensure that when WP7 shipped the app sandbox was tight, tight, tight. So much so that I pissed enumerable people off because we refused to open it up to anything but managed code. I always argued that the product would be better off in the long term with a real reputation for being solid & secure.

It was hard to do, but we were able to do it because WP7 was basically a v1 product and we had no backwards compatibility requirements (or existing customers <g>).

For Big Windows, it's a lot harder. A LOT HARDER. But I have read that Win8 will have a sandbox for new apps. That should help a lot, but it really is just a start. AV software will still be a necessity for most users.

Note that I find it highly ironic that Android failed to keep their sandbox tight early on and as a result that platform is suffering significant malware problems. Timely: http://techcrunch.com/2011/11/20/mcafee-nearly-all-new-mobil...
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I may be mistaken, but it appears that noahc's point is about ‘keeping score to two decimal points’. There's no way we can detect some true absolute value in things or deeds, but we can at least have unambiguity.

Let's be constructive: what would be a better point system?
This is so pathetic, why do the Chinese government think they can tell users what they should and shouldn't be looking at. I agree that this type of measure should come into play if there was a guaranteed way of stopping people looking at child pornography or something like that but it almost always appear to be political.

I have not been on the Tor network before and I do not plan to but it should be the persons choice of whether they access it or not.

China are like the dick head IT manager who turns off javascript at network group policy level, just because he can.
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I hate the word "automagically"...
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Just signed up and the user interface isn't clear to me. The jumping left bar is terrible, I don't understand how to use this (and I really wanted to for some reason).

Put in more effort to make clear to your users how you want them to use your site. I wasn't able with the starting version to make something appear on the right side and the annoying left menu kept on jumping.

As it is now, I'm really not going to use this (even the free version).
The name is also a strategical attack on the newspeak of "software/audio/video piracy". The negative associations with the term works great for the RIAA/MPAA/GEMA/... lobby. (At least in europe) pirates are now a political stance, instead of just another word for criminals.

The german pirate party wiki has a page about their newspeak counters. For example, instead of "intellectual property" talk about "monopoly rights". Instead of "hacker tools" say "security software".

http://wiki.piratenpartei.de/Liste_der_Unwörter