skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Mercury is a modern logic language. It takes the statically typed approach

http://www.mercury.csse.unimelb.edu.au/
> every F-500 company has a "purchasing" department that exists almost entirely as a hazing ritual for outside vendors,

Lol, you just put several years of my life into a clear statement. Entirely the reason I don't do enterprise stuff as much unless I'm dealing with high enough decision makers who can clear the path for me (which is not often enough)
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What you're talking about isn't "hourly" versus "project", it's "time and materials" versus "project". You can bill in person/week increments on a time/materials basis, and in fact that's what you should do. You can write a consulting proposal that reads identically to a project-based contract, break out your pricing in person/weeks, and then write a time/materials SOW with a "additional time will be billed in person/day increments at the rate specified in this contract" clause.

Be careful; project risk and your billing increment are orthogonal concerns.
Which is why I don't understand the focus on IExplorer 6, as IE 7 is equally shitty and IE 8 is not that far behind.
India’s Low-Cost Aakash Tablet Pre-Orders Hit 1.4 Million
Vogue's having problems converting from CMYK to RGB
Makes you wonder, doesn't it? Throughout this thread I've seen derogatory comments about "overseas" talent, which is to be avoided like plague.

Are the developers in USA really 10x more effective than in Asia/poorer parts of Europe, to warrant the 10x higher salaries? To me the answer is obviously not (I live in Eastern Europe), but perhaps there is some magical quality one acquires upon moving to the US :-)

Once remote, does it really matter that much whether the other party lives on the same continent? http://37signals.com/svn/posts/3064-stop-whining-and-start-h...

EDIT: Obviously charge western rates if you can :) My point is it's hard to justify the imbalance of market value that you mention, in case of IT freelancing.
You can be critical of things without being irrational about it. As an example, note my edit your post:

"This isn't the first time. One or more people at HN do not like my posts and downvote them. I can only guess at why I'm downvoted, since often times the downvoters do not respond my posts."

It's concise, does not make any assumptions, avoids CAPS LOCK except where abbreviating, doesn't call anyone a chickenshit, and otherwise gets right to the point. I'm pretty sure that if your replies were more like that than "MYSTERIOUS SITE MODERATORS ARE CHICKENSHITS WHO ARE OUT TO GET ME" you would end up with less downvotes.

I'm with you - it can feel frustrating when you post something, and then lose karma without any rhetorical exchange about why. Sometimes you can ask for an explanation and actually get a response, but sometimes you're just left hanging. Don't sweat it, and keep moving.
Exactly the reason that the latest Firefox now treats add-ons as compatible by default, rather than assuming incompatibility with each new version unless explicitly marked compatible.

That said, refusing to upgrade from 3.6 or 4 still seems crazy.
Oh, quick sidenote: you'll find that people are arbitrarily consistent around particular price points. $720 is a bit weird for a day rate, so just bump it to $800, since you'll have exactly the same resistance to $800 as you would to $720. Oh, BTW, you'll have exactly the same resistance to $1,000 as you will to $800. (Not much, incidentally, from good clients.)

There, you just more than doubled your income and your customers will not perceive you as being more expensive. (I know I know I know trust me on this. If they were mental math experts then they would be programmers and you would have money.)
Well the obvious reason is mentioned in the article: most people already do have a facebook account, while G+ is still new for most of the internet.

If you are likely to be on facebook, you probably already are. I don't think it's surprising the growth is decreasing.

I would be (pleasantly) surprised if the growth was negative, but that's not going to happen :P
>> You honestly seem to be arguing that IE6 was a perfectly compatible browser and was the pinnacle of browser design. I think you'll find a lot of disagreement, even from Microsoft themselves. We know enough about security these days to know that not upgrading is a bad idea.

If I honestly seem to be arguing that, I apologize. It also means this discussion is fruitless, because counterarguments are based on a perception that no one here holds. If anything I view IE6 as an accessibility issue.

> You don't need exceptions to make sites render on IE6.
>> I disagree.

Hackernews renders on IE6 and it doesn't need exceptions. You don't need exceptions to make sites render on IE6. You might need a work-around or two (for example: opting for padding, instead of margin). You can still both code to standards and have it render without exceptions on IE6.

>>implying that we should code for the blind because they did not choose their limitations.

I disagree. User choice or forced, disability or no: accessibility is for everyone. Wether people choose to turn off javascript or their browser forces them shouldn't make a difference. Choice is no pre-requisite for accessibility, unless you make that choice for your users.

>> THIS IS PROGRESS This is what progress does.

In your analogy, at least you still have access to the data on the floppies. And if our current progress destroys the initial ideas for progress from authorities like TBL, doesn't that give reason to pause and reconsider the way we are heading?
Here are CS researchers blogging partially anonymously.
http://blog.computationalcomplexity.org/2011/12/what-is-brea... . Similar nastiness can be found on Scott Aaronson's blog.

Is it strange that almost all of the nasty comments are anonymous?

As an honest researcher, you can't just delete the criticism, even if it's unproductive, hostile, and borderline trolling.

To be fair, there is some nastiness from people who post their real names. But I don't think that moderation is the solution.
Let me clarify: I didn't mean to say “this is directly part of the commons”. My main objection was to the idea that it was unambiguously not part of the commons (“as far from … as you can get”). I think that is incorrect because it is ambiguous: the physical world enforces more interference than you seem to imply.

I currently live in an area in which my window coverings are regulated to show an off-white color on the outside when closed, for what little that's worth. And almost all jurisdictions have some regulation on public clothing: public nudity is often punishable, for instance, thus excluding clothing with the color “invisibly transparent”. I neither directly support nor directly reject such laws, at the moment.

My best approximation of a “correct” solution might have involved upgrading everyone's perceptual filtering capability enough to obviate most commons regulations, but I've recently gone through a (possibly fake—I haven't stabilized the prionic meme filter yet) realization that humans are not at all what they seemed to me to be earlier on, and the inference propagation has not converged, so that shouldn't be treated as a stable opinion.
Is his final point (about overscan) still relevant? Years ago I used to hear HDTV enthusiasts urging everyone to check their TV settings, but in the last 2-3 years, I've only dealt with PCs hooked up to a few HDTVs (all with 1080p native resolution), and I haven't seen a single one that overscans a 1080p DVI or HDMI signal by default. The author acts like it's a certainty that your 1080p TV will by default overscan a 1080p signal.
Desktop OS Trends 2011
I'm pretty sure that's what RMS's reasoning was as well. You make it sound like RMS just arbitrarily chose to desire openness.
When good back-ends go bad
How I Moved My Everything To The Cloud
Why WebOS really failed (Not the NYTimes version)
Your interests are not aligned with your clients when you bill hourly. It is in your interests to work slowly, spreading the work over as many hours as possible. It is against your interests to invest in time-saving techniques and tools, because they will ultimately reduce your take-home pay.

What you do is, quote your client an estimated time to completion for your project in (in order of preference) weeks, days, (or only if required) hours. You have a minimum increment, which could be a week, or could be a day, but shouldn't be an hour.

Then you get the work done as quickly as possible and charge your client using that minimum increment.
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> "Congress has sat idly by as the TSA strip searches 85-year-old grandmothers in New York, pats down 3-year-olds in Chattanooga, and checks colostomy bags for explosives in Orlando. Enough is enough!" said the bill’s sponsor, Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) "The least we can do is end this impersonation, which is an insult to real cops."

I agree with this statement, but probably not in the way it was intended.
Work for an online fitness company. Made this for a sports host job. Is it lame?
Questions and comments welcome.. Even mean ones!
I've found with small customers to begin with a small, fixed price project. Show them the world and experience of their dreams.

Working with smaller customers does often mean a more limited budget so you can help them focus on getting the best bang for the buck. Help the customer grow and they'll have more money to spend with you.

The thing you can do with small businesses is pick the winning horses and bet on them. Find the owners that 'get it' while small and help them grow. This might be 1 in every 7-15 customers.

I have a customer I did at $5K project for a complete workflow management. It was a favor to a ex-vp of a company who had opened up his own business. Originally they wanted me to fix PHP bugs for that much but I just rewrote the thing in a few weeks. At the end I realized it was easily 3 or 4 times the cost and I made sure they knew this was it. I resumed my normal billing rate (they had no problems with it) after a problemless launch. They had been trying to build the same system for almost 2 years with someone else and were pretty happy.

4 years later they don't have a budget for me: as in, they spend whatever they want because they've at least added 20,000 sales/customers to their system. While this didn't happen because of my software alone, (they had an excellent manual paper system), helping automate their systemization sure helped them take off.

Do this kind of work not as your primary but maybe 20-30% of your time. It can really be enjoyable to help a good small company grow.
Google: Blog Campaign For Browser A Mistake
There are some things my discretion says should not be made publicly specific.

While everyone is entitled to have different sensibilities, I don't understand why you would refuse to discuss this in the abstract.

I'm not sure what you actually read, but at the end there is a link to this google doc which appears to be the closest thing to publicly available data. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?pli=1&key=0AkkhS...

I have never been through an incubator, but I have been involved in the process of successfully raising venture capital half a dozen times. Further, I have become friends with many other founders and investors. I have friends who have been through different incubators and I always make it a point to get involved with entrepreneurial events and activities whenever I can. Of incubators I have personally observed, some are on that list and some are not.

I have no affinity for any incubator, but there are public numbers and if you want to take the position that on paper right now YC doesn't overshadow everyone else, I'd really like to hear the arguments.

Honestly, I'm not upset so much as underwhelmed and disappointed. It doesn't impact my life or business directly, I just don't like to see good people wasting time and that includes people running these incubators.

If you care to make questions or comments on any point beyond ad hominem commentary, I would do my best to answer in earnest.
>anybody for whom the solution set includes "Or we could get this done cheaply abroad" is likely to be a terrible customer.

Most, if not all customers are in the software business somehow and don't know the first thing about managing software as you said.

I have a recent customer wanting me to babysit a developer in house for him. I told him I don't run daycares and he's free to setup a full development team in-house which I'll completely help with transitioning and then relieve myself.

He didn't write back.
>The new release model is bullshit, since it carries no information.

You're talking about the versioning scheme, which I agree wasn't the best idea. However, the version number by itself never carries information. It's not an argument, it's nit-picking on trivial, completely unimportant details.

The release model itself (four channels, six weeks life cycle for release) is extremely good (there's a reason they copied it from Chrome, as much as I dislike the browser) and needed for a project such as Firefox. Longer release cycles just can't keep up with the development of the web in the long run, and provide much less direct feedback for the developers. Just calling it bullshit for no reason whatsoever is exactly the problem I was talking about.
I have a one-year-old Samsung LED-backlit LCD and it overscans from a unibody Mac Mini via HDMI into the TV's PC-specific HDMI port. I have to fix it manually with the overscan slider in OSX's display preference pane.
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The Short Second Life of Post Secret
Nope, unfortunately that's what I'm running into as well. A blissful start of the project with no schemas to tie it down or hold it back. Now that it's starting to require migrations, join-like behavior, and complicated queries, I really just wish I had my trusty old PostgreSQL back. I swear, if I have to write one more set of map/reduce functions just to do anything non-trivial with this database I'm going to end up hurting a small animal.
Relevant: Viewers are awful too.

Study: 18% of people can't tell if they're watching true HDTV content or not

http://techcrunch.com/2008/11/24/study-18-of-people-cant-tel...
It was Windows XP that led to this, and the failed Vista OS launch that took 5 years and noone upgraded. Now in Windows Update Microsoft will force an upgrade silently in the next few months to IE9/10. http://windowsteamblog.com/ie/b/ie/archive/2011/12/15/ie-to-...
Asia's Coal Use Grew 500% Since 1980 China accounts for 73% of that
Question for everyone....

Do you agree with the assertion (that most incubators are ghettoes) or is the problem simply one of supply and demand? In other words, are there too many incubators?

When you look at the economics of incubators, successful incubators rely on successful startups. If there are too many incubators, companies that don't normally deserve funding (or incubation) will end up getting shepherded through the process....
Ask HN: Varnish cache performance on cloud servers
I'm looking for real life Varnish cache server performance data when Varnish runs on cloud servers (EC2, Rackspace Cloud, Storm on Demand, Linode, etc.) How well does it do with static content (web pages less than 1MB)?
It's not unusual for DVI input to be underscanned by default, but the HDMI spec says that 1080p should be overscanned. Disabling that requires your TV to advertise its feature set correctly (there must be a VCDB in the EDID, and it has to indicate that it supports underscanning of CE video modes) and your output device needs to send a type 2 infoframe with a request that the mode be underscanned. I really don't know how common it is for all of this to work without manual intervention - most of what I end up playing with is whatever's sitting in hotel rooms, and that's not necessarily a good representation of the current market.
Totally agree.

I work almost 95% remotely for multiple clients across North America charging on the higher end of this poll. I get my work through referrals for the most part, but have learnt the art of closing a lead on twitter.
Yeah, well, I can sympathize with the sentiment, but here's the problem:

> I want less code, not more

If been coding web apps since the mid-90's, and I've pretty much had it with either re-inventing the wheel or scouring the internet for bits and pieces of libraries. Big fat frameworks allow me to focus on the code I need to do something new.

I have no time to fuck about trying to compensate for all the bits and pieces those lightweight frameworks conveniently left out in order to be lightweight. The end result is inevitably just more code to maintain instead of less.

I get my punk rock kicks from writing shell scripts and the odd quick & dirty hacks, not complex web applications.
Which makes sense; I spent my spare time becoming a better programmer, not becoming a better marketer.

Good. You need to be a problem solver, not a programmer. You need to listen to your customers and find solutions. That's how you show up the value you make.
I have a Panasonic VT30 plasma display that was released May 2011 and I had to explicitly disable overscan when I plugged in my PC via HDMI.
I think you may have misunderstood either who ASUS's customers are, or what those customers want.

You are not a normal ASUS customer. If you were, you wouldn't be here discussing this. "Normal" customers want Netflix, Hulu+, Kindle, and the like, not hackable boot roms.

Open source boxes that are not locked down generally do not get to have an official Netflix client, Hulu+ client, etc. Users won't buy things that don't have the content they want, and Hollywood won't let things have that content if users can easily compromise the digital path.

Btw, it's not ASUS's issue, it's that users want movies and Netflix has them. It's not Netflix's issue, it's in their contracts with DRM providers and studios, contracts they have to sign to have the movies users want. To carry the movies, lock things down. Users want movies, ergo, things are locked down.

For all the Apple hate, Jobs stared down the record labels, and unlocked music. To solve the "open" business, Google should put money behind open business models for movies, enough money that Hollywood capitulates and all these contracts up the chain can get redone in the consumer's interest.
RMS would disagree. Noonespecial is making an "open-source" argument: that open software is better than closed software, where 'better' is some combination of less buggy, better designed, more secure, etc. RMS specifically disagrees with this principle, right down to the semantics (preferring the term 'free software' to 'open source'). "Free software" is better because it promotes freedom, i.e. it cannot be used by the designer to oppress others.

In RMS's worldview, software freedom is an inherent good, not a derivative good. "Many eyes make all bug shallow" is nice, but for him it's a side-benefit.

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-for-freedom.html
Or, learn both! Mercury will teach you different things than Prolog.

(I've read about Mercury, but never really used it. I'm most interested in constraint programming, which doesn't seem to be part of it.)
He was - he pirated because there was no other way to get the content he had paid for. In some cases, there is no other way, period. When X condition is "Getting something I paid for", I have respect. Look at what happened here - a rather well known person openly admitted to pirating. You are saying you would rather he just said "I wanted it for free?"
Not only is it an insult to real cops, it also degrades the populations respect for authority. If we grow used to idiocy and low standards with "People with badges" from the TSA, it may result in us, likewise, treating real police officers the same way.

Either (A) Require Professional training for TSA Employees (Never going to happen, would quadruple the cost of the TSA, they are basically minimum wage screeners) or (B) Put the correct uniform on them so people can tell the difference between police officers and screeners.
If you are a gamer, TVs are now also awful for playing games, due to the built in lag between the TV receiving a signal and displaying it. On a CRT it was instantaneous, as game console data streams were sent basically straight to the electron gun -- nowadays there's a massive amount of processing before the signal is on screen.

This manifests primarily in a feel of poor controls, or a game not doing what you tried to do.

Good HDTVs will give you 100ms of lag or so, bad ones can be in excess of 400ms. With most games nowadays running at 30fps, that's between 3 and 13 game frames of lag.

It's pretty absurd the difference this makes, and as a game developer I have to fight with it constantly and it is infuriating.
Wouldn't any shoe with no heel cushioning be a way to get there?
I totally agree that children are different from adults. Sorry about my comment re 'insults'.

I guess I just get a bit defensive since tantrums are a natural part of growing up.

:)
seems like an USB DAQ board would work for this, right? maybe labjack or a board/card from national instruments?
I do something similar, in the middle of a fixed price and a best guess estimate (I can go back for an increase of hours).

The key to either is being accurate at estimating, which in turn means being able to find the number and size of potential unknowns/gotchas in an estimate.

Get good at that and it's a lot easier, especially on projects you have built from scratch, which lend themselves a lot better to fixed-price quotes.
A fair block on Internet piracy
I think that's exactly what your parent meant (or at least my interpretation of it). Some people might not (want to) believe it but there's actually a whole lot of very valid reasoning behind what RMS is advocating. We shouldn't desire open systems because RMS said so, we should do it because of what he said.
San Francisco (remote possible)

HotelTonight is just over a year old company now. We have great funding (plus a solid business model and increasing revenues & growth every month), and a wide range of interesting projects in mobile (iOS, Android, web/HTML5/JS), Rails, devops, etc. We are always hiring at this point.

I truly love the company and team we've built. The culture is outstanding, and one of the best parts is that every developer has a direct impact on product. We're continuing to innovate in our mobile apps, but also doing some very intriguing work on the back end.

Our main office is in San Francisco, but remote is possible too - US or Canada only. No contracting firms or recruiters please.

Our main jobs page: http://hoteltonight.com/jobs
Ruby/Rails jobs: http://www.hoteltonight.com/jobs/rails_developer
Android: http://www.hoteltonight.com/jobs/android_developer
iOS: http://www.hoteltonight.com/jobs/ios_developer
mobile web (CoffeeScript, HTML5, etc.): http://www.hoteltonight.com/jobs/mobile_developer
This is a similar drawback I see to microframeworks. You end up having to either roll the bits you didn't get from the framework or build a more complete framework out of other components. This can create dependency hell if you're not careful/make the wrong choices as well.

Choosing simple tools for complex jobs can get you in just as bad of a place as choosing complex tools for simple jobs.
Hand gesture controlled DIY arduino lamp
You Don't Know Jack about Shared Variables or Memory Models: Data races are evil
Prediction: those who want a notification won't upvote this link. Those who don't care about WWDC, but care about idealistic "equal opportunity", might upvote.
Design decisions behind vox.io's mobile app
"media queries" is a new CSS feature with which you can now have "progressive enhancements" (otherwise you would have to drop to Javascript), the advice being that you should start first designing for mobiles, then gradually evolving it into a full wide desktop view.

No buzzwords. It's actually pretty neat.