skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
All you managed to demonstrate is that you are not the only racist in the world. I'm also relieved you didn't question the rest of the assessment, and agree your comment
was deeply rude, ignorant and arrogant. That's a start.

I never said the release was warranted, fair, right or anything close to that. In fact, I did not even manifest an opinion about it. I only pointed out your message was not up to our standards (http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) and that it was full of telling misconceptions.
Android has an active hacker community because you can grab the code from git and build a working Android system.

This is exactly what the CyanogenMod team does; Steve Kondik has even started referring to CM as an Android distribution ala Debian as opposed to a simple set of mods or patches.

As much as I love WebOS, that just plain isn't possible with that platform.

(this was posted from WebOS on a Touchpad that also has Android installed as dual boot. Care to show me the Android devices that have been hacked to run WebOS?)
Good. I hope they do it, not only to ruin the political careers of those supporting SOPA now, but also to put such a scare into all politicians when they receive all the millions of calls redirected from those sites, that they'll never try something like this again, or at least not for the next 10 years or so.

In the meantime we can work on pushing a Constitution Amendment or two that clearly define you can't mess with the Internet, and that it needs to stay free and open, because apparently the 1st Amendment is not enough to deter these companies and politicians supporting SOPA and PIPA.
For those, like me, who were confused about the censorship that clearly didn't happen, here is a relevant piece of info from wikipedia.

"Title V of the 1996 Act is the Communications Decency Act, aimed at regulating Internet indecency and obscenity, but was ruled unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court for violating the First Amendment. Portions of Title V remain, including the Good Samaritan Act, which protects ISPs from liability for third party content on their services, and legal definitions of the Internet."

And the wikipedia link in general for the act:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecommunications_Act_of_1996

I believe this was the court case that resulted in the relevant portion of the act being struck down by all nine supreme court justices.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reno_v._ACLU
Happy to see that they're addressing the bootloader problem.

Less happy to read that GPS is beyond fixing. I don't particularly care about that, to be honest, so I might end up buying one anyway (once they're available in the UK, damn), but still, it's one of those where you wonder how the hell could make it through QA (and if they missed that, what else did they miss...?)
They come with rather neutered implementations of lending that might as well not be there at all since IIRC publishers can and do simply disable the feature in the permissions for their books. Ditto for the feature on the Kindle that reads a book aloud (which was never put into the Nook since the publishers had realized they hated the feature by the time the Nook came out).
Voltaic systems has a nice solar charger laptop bag. I'm not sure if this would work for you: http://www.voltaicsystems.com/generator.shtml
Bluetooth Low Energy might end up being a big thing once there are phones out which have a radio for it.

The spec is intended for devices which send small amounts of data with minimal power consumption, so it's well suited to things like environmental sensors and ambient displays which have historically been underutilized outside of research settings.
Are there any plans to hire a product team in the future? I'm very excited about the mission of Khan, but I'm no longer a dev.
My sample size is too small for an average to make sense. Smallest contract was 1.5 hours. Biggest contract is 350 hours so far, with 500+ to go.
When you look in my profile and click on the link for 'saved stories' you'll find all the articles I up-voted on HN. I want to aggregate all of those articles into an RSS feed.
A better way to deal with RSI is much simpler: just change your keyboard every 6 months. It doesn't have to be Dvorak, just use a different keyboard than you normally do.
+Go to sleep by 10pm, wake up at 6am (third year attempt)
Thanks :)

One way to put it is (and how I explained it to a client once): if you do fixed price and estimate 100, but end up having 120 of work, then you'd need to quote 140 (40 padding) to the next project estimated at 100, just to make up for your previous loss. In the end the uncertainty costs everyone.

For people willing to find how to do better estimate, I can warmly recommend following Mike Cohn training:

http://www.mountaingoatsoftware.com/agile-estimating-plannin...

(and related books), as well as acunote which I use to estimate, plan and manage my projects:

http://www.acunote.com
Is it Possible to Have a Two-Way Conversation With a Severed Head?
I wonder if this is a bigger deal for Node because it's single-threaded? Just one malicious POST request could slow down the entire server, whereas other languages that spawn a process for each request could easily kill a process that's using 100% CPU, right?
Whenever I try that position, I quickly feel muscle fatigue in my arms from having them suspended in the air for an extended period of time. I think that is why most people don't type in that position mostly.

I might be doing it wrong somehow, but how do you deal with arm fatigue?
I definitely recommend learning about the humanities and other fields outside of technology. For most people, we already know enough about programming, and learning another language or framework is a marginal investment.

But delving into another totally different subject like healthcare, or insurance, or psychology opens you up to a whole set of new problems and ideas. Whereas just learning technology helps you with the implementation side of things, not the high-level problem solving.
Why is it that a bootloader needs to be locked in order for rentals to be available? Hasn't iTunes movie rentals/purchases proven that a relatively open OS + DRM is adequate for content protection?

It's shit like this combined with a distinct lack of upgrades from the Android manufacturers that keep me using an iPad or (far more open) laptop for my computing needs... for tablet computing, Apple will always have an advantage if things like CM9 aren't allowed, since Apple builds both iOS and the hardware.
seems kind of simple, the answer would always be NO!
Marriage makes you money (via economies of scale and tax breaks).
No it doesn't depend. This is the same mentality that charges customers in "picodollars".

How many hours a day you work has nothing to do with how many "hours a day" (ugh) you bill.

You, in particular, and an impossible consultant to find on the general market. For even the best-capitalized companies in the world, people like you do not exist. They are hiring PCI consultants from body shops to validate new cryptographic protocols. I know this, because I read the reports they give their clients before demolishing those same protocols.

I know a couple other people with the same portfolio of talent. They, too, want to work in sub-day increments. And they do. But they bill project rates, because they can.

You are billing yourself out like a graphic designer. Stop doing that. Or don't, but don't pretend like you're being clever about things for undercharging.
I don't think this question has an answer, because there is no way to precisely define "knowing how to code." Here are several reasonable definitions:

1 You know how to code if you can get a simple application to run. (No requirements as to maintainability, performance, security, etc.)

2. You know how to code if you can pick the right tools for the job, foresee and avoid future maintenance problems, avoid introducing well-known security holes, and achieve an appropriate balance between performance, cost, and programming effort.

3. You know how to code if you understand your specialty inside and out, to the point where you could write a book, teach advanced classes, testify as an expert in court, and maintain a leading blog about your specialty.

#1 can probably be attained in a month. #2 will take most people several years of sustained effort. Many programmers don't reach #3, and those who do have usually been in the game for many years and have held multiple programming jobs.

So what does it mean to learn to code? What's a good enough level of expertise to code for you own business?
"tocomment" - what do you mean?
there's no paywall.
Actually, if the positive is true, then the contrapositive is also true: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contrapositive
It doesn't seem to take all that much to drive a respected venture capitalist to open piracy:

http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2011/02/anatomy-of-a-pirate.html
But you don't need to fork your own distribution from source to change everything about WebOS. New kernels and new environments are common, even before it became open source. The only thing closed source was the Luna desktop environment.

I fail to see how your last point proves anything, all points considered.
I think he's using a logical implication notation "|=".
as in:
A => B
logically implies that:
~B => ~A

He just decided to use "/=" rather than "|="...so it looks weird...
As with HP and Yahoo, RIM's board may be the real problem
What I read in the GP's comment: "I'll only pay you your asking rate if you deliver well in a previous project for less than your rate".
You aren't alone, at least myself and three other Canadians I know have bought that or a similar package in the last two years and received refunds after finding out how useless the packages were.

We travel a lot for business and would like to watch games whenever we can, either live or tape-delayed. The restrictions, not just at home in Ontario, but elsewhere have meant the packages are close to useless. A horrible way to drive away fans looking to spend on what could be a quality product. The damn strike/lock-out hasn't help either.

I know the volume may not currently be there for it to be hugely profitable, but if the leagues keep playing wack-a-mole with the p2p feeds, the volume and habit may never develop for there to be a new alternative distribution model for what could be a very profitable distribution channel for the sports leagues.
WebOS was open source except for Luna, and the devices were okay midrange phones at launch. After the market snubbed them, Palm didn't have enough money to keep creating newer and better phones.
R4 dsi card
R4 DSi card offers different types of interesting features for the gamers such as it can offer more than simple gaming where user can store their personal data and getting entertainment pleasure.
Cool! If anyone likes these they should check out http://projecteuler.net/ as well.
This is an interesting assertion. Do you have a reference?
Deploying C# / Mono on Heroku
Understood.

But what's the reasoning behind giving weekly prices, why does it result in better rates? I'm sincerely curious about this.
In short: your tone really sucks.
New way of 'Thinking': Smart, focused, practical
Lots of clients want to pay per-project.

If a client demands per-hour when you've delivered a per-week quote, tell them "I don't work in hourly increments; if I spent an hour on your project in a day, I can't effectively work for any other client that day, so my minimum billable increment is a person-day". You can do that with weeks, too: "sorry, the tempo of my work is in multi-week projects, and if I work only part of a week for you, I've ruined that week for any other client".

A client that demands a statement of work broken out into hours may be pathological (bear in mind that lots of F-500 companies have idiotic time-tracking software that bills their internal people by hour, and bear in mind that every F-500 company has a "purchasing" department that exists almost entirely as a hazing ritual for outside vendors, and you probably shouldn't blame your actual customer for their purchasing department --- just don't change your terms for them.)
What I read was that pay becomes less of a concern the more his expectations are exceeded.
Regardless of whether you're a freelancer, contractor, or consultant please do yourself a favour and have a lawyer created contract together. If you don't have a rock solid contract you're leaving money on the table, and making yourself extremely vulnerable.

Also highly relevant - Fuck you, pay me: http://vimeo.com/22053820?utm_source=swissmiss
If it looks like a nail and feels like a nail, don't use
a sledgehammer.

We should all be pushing for "the right tool for the right job"; a concept that is both language and framework agnostic. When you start your next project, take a moment to think about all of the core components and modules that will be necessary to complete said project.

Many of us (including me, at times) have forgotten our primary role as an application architect. We need to take a giant step back to look at the project from a bird's eye view to gain some insight into how to solve the problem(s) in an efficient and timely manner.
There's a very finite amount of stuff you need to pick up and this is common to JRuby, groovy, scala too. Remember you can ask questions on Stackoverflow, IRC (freenode #clojure, google group, folks are supportive. Re: JVM for non-java programmers:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4741626/what-parts-of-the...

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4230746/does-being-a-comp...

http://marxsoftware.blogspot.com/search/label/Java%20%28Gene...

(Bytecode for dummies, the Hotspot switches post are terrific)

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5721496/learning-java-so-...
I think your definition is the more standard one. I think the parent post meant to say "deposit". Retainer is usually "$2000/month for up to 20 hours of work".
+1

I'd like to see some community effort to build a collection of similar "better than the standard" libs.

Which, at some point, could replace the standard libs. Or be the de facto standard, a pip install call away...
IE6 Usage Falls to Under 1% in U.S.
256 attempts is the upper bound. The expected value of attempts should be 128.
A little late on the thread but I wanted to add this for anyone reading in the future. My sister purchased an iPad 2 about a month before Christmas; I talked her out of a Galaxy Tab.

She has since returned the iPad 2 and gotten a Kindle Fire. Her main reason was that the iPad was too big for her to carry around constantly and the Fire fits in all of her purses. Since she would use the device while waiting or at random times, it was more important to have the device with her than sitting at home.
Always fun to see more people doing things like this!

See also Project Euler for LOTS of inspiration: http://projecteuler.net/

I see these puzzles as part of grand tradition that includes sangaku (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sangaku) and Martin Gardner, among others.
If it's awesome, it's not useless.
Depends entirely upon the person buying the work.

Penny pinchers = lowest rate, but only as a discount when buying an hour block in advance. Rates are double for afterhours/emergency work.

Waffles = Project based billing so they have to describe clearly what they want. Then changes are additional, or rolled into the next project.

Rich/Busy/Business types = Hourly rates billed monthly net 30. These will generally just cut a check so long as 'X' problem goes away, and you're not a problem to deal with yourself. Best customer type to have. Just make sure you include the scope of what you've handled with the bill. Even better if you figure out what their approval limits are and stay under that.
I learned Dvorak in my teens, and can touch-type fluently in it.

But I've found it doesn't provide a lot of speed improvement, and for programming (with all its punctuation) I still use QWERTY. Since programming isn't primarily normal English language text, Dvorak really doesn't help, plus you have to touch-type.

What I use Dvorak for is for proper, sit-down, full-screen writing. I'm not sure it's much faster, but it's far more comfortable to type. QWERTY always "gets in the way" physically a bit when I write, but Dvorak lets my hands basically disappear as a barrier between brain and page. It just makes writing feel effortless.

Also -- Dvorak is useful for English only. When I write in Portuguese, it's not nearly as useful.
APIs in 2012: Predictions From the Experts
You're only competing with offshore talent if you use similar price points, customer acquisition methods, and target customers as offshore firms. I wouldn't suggest that - anybody for whom the solution set includes "Or we could get this done cheaply abroad" is likely to be a terrible customer. (They'll undervalue your contribution, because they think that houses the expensive option, and they'll disproportionately be clueless about managing software development because if they were clueful they'd run screaming.)
And a nicer-to-read HTML version:

https://projects.eff.org/~barlow/Declaration-Final.html
While much of the anger makes sense, why do folks keep harping on Google for using 3rd parties for their marketing? I know of no media or marketing company of any reasonable size that doesn't outsource some part of their marketing to another agency or marketing services company. Yes, even agencies outsource some of the work to promote themselves... to an agency.

Should Google have more oversight into what they are paying for? Sure, just like everyone who hires a 3rd party to do stuff under their name and aegis. But just because Google have built the technology to run video ads, do we naturally believe that they also have the creative, marketing ops, and other pieces/talent/staff necessary to build, manage, measure, and improve the campaign? Perhaps, but from a resource and efficiency POV, they may find it cheaper to just outsource that to an agency and keep fewer resource in-house for marketing vs., say, engineering.

It's ok for companies to purchase services from other companies. Not keeping a close eye on what you've bought, however, is another matter.
The irony (from his own follow-up comment):
"Guys, no more offtopic comments, even if you're only replying to existing offtopic comments. Thanks for understanding."
> To get double your bill rate, double your bill rate.

this is Zen
New developer social network.
I'm surprised at some of the low points on here... The general rule is to take your desired annual income and divide by 1000 to get your hourly rate. So if you want to make $120,000 year, your hourly rate would be $120.

I think a lot of "freelancers" must end up going through headhunters instead of finding clients directly? You might want to ask what your headhunter is making if that's the case -- I know of one body shop that only offers $50/hr to its contractors, while the client company is paying the headhunter $150/hour.

You can't even get a desktop support person out around here for less than $75/hour...
I agree... to each his own, but I find running very boring. If you're into the Paleo movement, it's recommended you focus more on slow movement such as walking, hiking, biking as well as full body exercises: squats, pushups, etc. Running for prolonged periods of time regularly can do our bodies more harm, especially if we're unfit in the 1st place. So it's just not a sustainable form of exercise. Better find an activity that's less stressful and more fun.
You rant would have had a lot more credibility if, here in a discussion in no small part about pseudonymity, you weren't speaking under cover of a pseudonym.
While this looks like a good basic article for programmers learning R I recommend moving onto The R Inferno: http://www.burns-stat.com/pages/Tutor/R_inferno.pdf
The R Inferno touches on do's and don't within R programming. The burns-stat.com website is also a good reference for R tutorials as well.
I don't understand why working remotely equates to competing with offshore talent? Is it because of where you are finding your work?

Have you tried raising your rates?
Why We’re Trying Another Infomercial
A $1 discount is 1% of a $100/hr bill rate.

A $1 discount is ~0.1% of an $800/day bill rate.

A $1 discount is ~0.025% of a $4000/week bill rate.

A $1 discount is ~0.001% of an $8000 project.

In what increment do you want to negotiate your rate? In full percentage points, or in hundredths of a percent?

And what figures do you want to be negotiating in: amounts that are low enough that your client can immediately get their heads around, like $100 vs. $150, or the real amounts their company will pay in the end, like $8000 vs. $7900, where an individual person at the company is less likely to feel like they should have a strong opinion?

Remember this: your clients are not paying you with their own money. It is monopoly money to them. It comes out of a budget, not their own pockets.

(To say nothing of the fact that when you bill hourly, you give your clients tacit permission to ask for your time in hourly increments).
In short, HN has a chicken shit MOD that routinely attacks my posts but makes no comments. This is PERSONAL and is CRAP.

And the situation and the attacks really SUCK, much more than anything I've written.
I wonder how this compares to the average salary for Ruby or node.js devs?
Android provably can be made to work on phones which weren't even made with that in mind. This apparently didn't happen with webOS, which counters "you don't really need the source"—though hackers have a healthy disdain for that attitude even if it had been true.
I'm not a runner, but I do enjoy a brief walk when I'm stuck on something, feel uninspired or just feel like my brain is slogging. The break away from the screen is really welcome.

At the moment I usually walk up, across and down a few floors in my building.
Dijual Rumah 2 lantai dalam kompleks di Bintaro, Bagus, Baru Renov, Murah
Rumah Bagus, Tingkat, baru renovasi tahun 2011, listrik 1300w, air jetpam, bebas banjir, air bagus untuk minum apalagi cuci, keamanan 24 jam, sistem satu pintu masuk, fasilitas dalam kompleks lengkap mulai dari kolam renang, minimarket, masjid, apotek, sampai dengan playgroup. lokasi kompleks strategis dekat dengan berbagai sekolah (an-nisa, al-azhar, british international school, al-aulia, bpk penabur, dll), dekat dengan CBD Bintaro (Giant, Carefour, Hari-Hari, Lotte Mart), 10 menit ke pintu tol, 15 menit ke stasiun.
They do this because it prices out the uncertainty.

If you don't know whether you'll be in court for 3 hours or all day, you need to charge for a full day. Otherwise, if you estimated 3 hours in court and then back to the office to bill someone else for the next 5, but instead you're stuck waiting for the judge for 6 hours, someone has to make up the difference.

Simplest solution is to just always charge for the full day.