skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I charge $250 an hour for interaction design and general consulting (e.g. pure advice), and my husband charges the same for his expertise in JavaScript.

But I'm booked solid so that must mean it's time to raise rates.

Lots of good people undercharge because they know how much they don't know. Consequently, lots of bad people overcharge, because they are overconfident (or simply shysters). The trick is in knowing which you are.

I follow 2 key pricing rules:

1. Tell the potential client your hourly rate, then slap them in the face. If they're not more shocked by the rate than the slap, you're not charging enough. (Figuratively. Haven't slapped a client yet. Although some have deserved it.)

2. Remember it's about value and not about cost, just like those tire pumps at gas stations charge you a buck or more for air -- the air compressor doesn't cost anything like that much to run and maintain, but boy is it economical when you consider the wear it saves you on your $150-a-pop tires. Does an hour of your time only generate $50 of value going forward? Well, there you go.

FWIW I am in the midst of writing a short ebook filled with advice on consulting aimed at designers & developers, that I've developed over the past 11 years of consulting. Watch this space, kinda thing. Or if you'd like to "beta test" it for me, email me at amy@slash7.com.
Cut-and-paste comes to the iPhone: This time for sure
I wouldn't say it's the best but recently I've been listening to http://www.tangerinedream.com and the chill selections at http://new.icebergradio.com
Why you should let Google host jQuery for you
Really new in Labs this time: SMS Text Messaging for chat
No one really knows what it means, it's fairly open ended to be honest.

Also, checked out your startup. 2 thumbs up :)
Good writing, but the mutual animosity between France and Britain is itself funny, if not a bit childish. No flame, but my impression is that both countries lost their past influence and glory, but none of them would admit that. ;-)
Practical JavaScript — three code snippets to get you thinking
My all time favorite"

"When a management team with a reputation for brilliance tackles a business with a reputation for bad economics, it is the reputation of the business that remains intact."
What's the Talinn scene like? What are the main meetup groups & events to go to for a visitor to meet local devs & startups?
This makes it awkward when clients or people in my training classes ask me about big Catalyst sites. "Uh, YouPorn..." "What's that?" "Uh..."
I think definitely these so called "conferences" are almost a waste of time.. no one is really that interested in the keynotes any more because most of the interesting people blog it all anyway.. right?

It's all about networking now: and the guys right - why not do it in a Sauna whilst getting drunk!

Your right we lost it... 30 years ago it would have been like that but now.. meh :(
If you like trance, try these:

http://87.230.84.182:9000
http://87.98.129.202:9000
http://77.221.139.178:8000
No Java and Flash for iPhone this Christmas
The key is to not let your kids know they are smart. Challenge them, and encourage failure. Get them outside their comfort zone. Everyone's a "moron" at something.

It's those people that have high IQs and think that's enough that I know that have the problems with substances. A gift is useless sitting in the closet.

How many "gifted" people you know that are kicking ass every day are substance abusers? None that I know!
This is so true :)

I love french people personally (sorta). But to admit to it in the UK is still a hangable offence you know!

And us brits wonder why people dont get our humor "lets be really rude to them! good joke yes?? haw haw" ;) :D
For his sparky wit, his flawless prose, and his unabashed geekiness, I think Stephen Fry should be given the title of honorary hacker.
actually shame is not such a dumb reason... combine that with uncertainty of the future...

if an open standard fails then people wont get too much flak for following it as it was an "open" standard..

starting following or adopting a proprietary and how are you going to explain (to who ever you have to explain) your choice of the chosen standard, when (a) open standards do take over or (b) a different proprietary standard wins the war?

dont get me wrong.. i never said smart people dont do Ajax. On the contrary you have to have lots of patience and brains to want to play around with the inconsistencies with a billion browsers. Lack of said brain cells made me take the easy way out ...
Mozilla Security Chief Quits | TechJaws
Don't listen to music. Actually it's bad for concentration, and working at 2 AM won't help too.
Seems fairly obvious that you'd not mention it unless you're prepared to explain what exactly it is. Especially considering you have "students" inquiring about it.
Tom Paxton (country music star) on the last auto bailout:

I am changing my name to Chrysler;
I am going down to Washington D.C.;
I will tell some power broker;
What they did for Iacocca;
Will be perfectly acceptable to me
The Best of Frenemies: 12 Tech-Industry Relationships That Are Really, Really Complicated
Chase Credit Card Services
An informative and detailed review of Chase Credit Card Services
9 ways to use network-side scripting
Someone should organize something somewhere.
For a country with Beer better then it's food, that makes sense ;)
Whenever there is a weird bug in my software, I wish I had logged more.

To prevent this from happening, I just put the request, state, and response objects into my object database now. It doesn't really take up all that much space, and it is nice to have a big picture of what is going on with the app.

The next step is to start logging data flow at key points.

(BTW, this data all "dies"... but it is nice to have when something is obviously failing. You can always process data you have; you can't process data you don't have. Log now, ask questions later.)
I went to a private (school equivalent to) high-school myself..in Norway, and the same holds here. It was about three times better than any public school I'd been to thus far.
With $1-6 CPM on a video that has been seen over 1-100 million times--not very long. I'm excited that YouTube is finally effectively monetizing. This is the future. Specially now that content can be uploaded in 1280x720 HD, there is no limits to what YouTube can do. I can't wait to see where we are in 4 years, or even 1.
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Tastes vary (as the mix of comments here will attest), but having sampled a variety of development and analysis tools, I have settled on MATLAB as my tool of choice. Part of my reasoning can be found in the Nov-08-2006 posting to my Weblog, "Why MATLAB for Data Mining?":

http://matlabdatamining.blogspot.com/2006/11/why-matlab-for-...
We use it extensively in what we do and its also incredibly fast (which is why we started using it)
Tahitian Noni
Well, I just found Flash Develop today, which at first glance seems to be a decent IDE for Flex and AS.

http://www.flashdevelop.org/community/viewforum.php?f=11
All those can be stopped or made difficult enough that most people will not be able to do them. Circumventing the system could also be criminalised.

Blocking DNS (apart from the ISP's own server), blocking known foreign proxies, etc.
Installing ubuntu-system-panel (USP) On Ubuntu 8.10
touché :o)
1 reason why not to: loss of control.

Perhaps I'm being paranoid, but I do not want to rely on ANY external providers - not even when it's Google.
I said they may have found a bound. I didn't say it was; it said there may be a limit. Re-read the ancestor.
And extension of this theory is hosting your static content on Google App Engine. (aka cheap CDN for initial stage of a startup!)
I have good memories of most of the people I worked with there (in fact engineer no. 2 now works for me). The 2 people at the top I have zero respect for.
I agree with your sentiment that there is money to be made from quality, but you're underestimating the unrealized potential of the pornographic industry. The porn industry can't compete with amateurs if it keeps doing what it's always been doing. But that's just because the amateurs make an equivalent product at a lower price.

Most porn sucks (and blows), but one day pornography will be recognized as a proper art form and attract people who actually care about exploring the genre. Yes; porn is used exclusively for masturbation. But it's better to masturbate to a better product.

90% of mainstream pornography consists of dicks going really fast in and out of vaginas, punctuated by some guy blowing his load in the girl's face. It's hard to think of something involving sex that is less exciting and creative than this. The real fun comes from subtle emotional interactions, power play, fantasy and a million other things I haven't thought of. High budgets and production values are worthless if you're only recording cumshots, but there are no reasons deeper than inertia and lack of imagination that this money and power isn't put to better use.

Assuming that parts of the HN crowd, in fact, watches porn: have any of you, for instance, ever seen a believable reenactment of a sexual fantasy? I sure as hell haven't. There is so much that could be done here. Sex is one of our deepest drives. Pornography has the potential to be one of the most profound art forms we have.

Consider what the advertising industry (clothing, underwear, perfume) is doing. They usually get blamed for destroying the woman's role, setting unrealistic expectations for people's looks, etc. But some of the things these guys/gals make actually has some emotional impact, on a sexual level deeper than what I see in most erotica and pornography. Although a randy ad never conveys any meaning or realism, the writing and acting is so much better. Fine art nudes are rarely effective at getting its viewers horny...advertising is. The highbrow crowd is obviously doing something wrong. Shouldn't artists put their effort where the impact is largest?

The porn industry will, happily, never get bailout money from the government. I'm hopeful that some competition will set the commercial porn studios thinking, or at least drag them down far enough that they can be attacked by teams with less financial clout. YouPorn is good for us, because of its equalizing potential.
Evernote + Eye-Fi = Instant Photographic Memory
Apple: iPhone Copy and Paste Now Working Between Safari and Mail
Indian court urged to 'ban Google Earth'
Turn this on its head: if people with higher IQs drink more, people who drink more have higher IQs. While correlation doesn't imply causation, the hypothesis that drinking alcohol makes you clever cannot automatically be ruled out.
"The article is actually more than a year old", and has been submitted before:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=75206
I don't abuse substances, but I'm definitely addicted to the internet.
Google Finally Fixes Gmail SMS Text Message Tool
And where's the danger you talked about?
The implications behind this research are benign, I swear.

The one company I see coming out of this is Brazzers. They seem to have partnered up with YP and a lot of clones to generate traffic and more leads through short "review" videos. And there the only real brand that has been embracing the new shift, including the social aspects.
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I don't mean to take away from the discussion here, but any one know of any good books/resources that cover this topic. At my current project we have been having an on-going tussle between logging too much and too little and I am hoping to find anything that helps. Thanks!
Seth's Blog: You're not going to win a Pulitzer Prize
I must not be down with the Facebook culture. I get that it's cool with you, but you can't help but to realize that stuff like this is nothing but bad press, not to be too serious. A little privacy goes a long way.
IronPython 2.0 is released
If you're really that paranoid, monitor and verify. If there are issues, you can change hosting optins. You don't mitigate risk by doing everything yourself.
Couple of notes:

1) Some anthropologists see intoxication as the natural state of man since fermentation was invented until just recently.(No, I don't have a link, although there was a Scientific American article about this within the last few years)

2) I have family (an uncle) who are active in AA. They tell me that this is well known in the AA community. Instead of a lot of bums and ex-cons (which there are), the most interesting observation is the number of doctors, lawyers, professors, etc -- professions that usually require a high degree of intelligence.

3) Freud was of the opinion that depressed/addicted people simply were better at understanding how crappy life was than other people. Of course, Freud was a coke-head, so take that with a grain of salt.

4) I've been toying with the idea that the junkie mentality produces more creative and intelligent works than the sober one. Take, for instance, all of the famous authors who are addicted. Or comedians. It seems like there is some hunger, some desperate reaching out that comes with addiction that translates well into creative efforts. It might sound bad, but I don't think Stevie King is as good now as when he used to be a junkie. Sames goes for Robin Williams. It's just a working hypothesis. I wouldn't use any of these observations to justify addictive behavior.
The auto industry spends "a shitload of money" on lobbyists -- http://cabalamat.wordpress.com/2008/12/10/if-car-adverts-wer...
There's an even stronger streak with regard to Canada. Jon Stewart the other day said that Canada's chief national export is "jokes that they are the butt of."
The cool idea in this is that universal libraries like jquery basically become locally cached...no download needed even if it is the first time they hit your site.
They are getting it on the cheap. They've got many teams of top-notch folks working on building an algorithm tailored for their data-set and problem definition. For what they're getting out of this, $1m is a stupidly low price. If they've incorporated the stuff that's come out so far, they've already boosted their sales by several million based on the results of the contest.
Except that there is no plan to "keep breaking the language", it is a one-time now or never thing.
This bit's good too:

Day one's keynote firesider was Paulo Coelho — the favourite author of that girl you met on the first day of university who spent her gap year in Thailand and like totally found herself. "Everyone has something interesting to say," Coelho said at one point, clearly showing that he's never had a conversation with one of his fans.
When people think about web scraping in Python, they usually think BeautifulSoup.

When I think about web scraping in Python, I think Mechanize. BeautifulSoup is great for parsing already downloaded HTML files, but it doesn't have the same web-navigating features Mechanize does such as stateful web browsing and easy form filling (unless I'm missing something).
If I think up some pretentious-sounding buzzwords, can I invent Web 4.0?
A 40-year-old computer demo that still amazes
Chinese team mistakenly released unpatched IE7 exploit
Five PC power myths debunked
Adobe AIR soars to loftier heights
lol

# "python rocks" Says:

5y ago I switched from Java to C and Python, I’ve never regretted the decision.”

# "Jason" Says:

Congrats… 5y from now you will still be jobless.
So it's true. Focussing on growth rather than on a business plan is a good idea.
Somebody that clueless would probably confuse telnetting into a Unix box and checking their email with PINE (common in colleges before webmail) with "trying Linux" in college.
I'm not totally sure that the talent set to win a Nobel Prize is the same as the talent set for being Secretary of Energy. I hope he's had some economics training.
AskHN: I'm inspired by the existence of organizations like the EFF, FSF, and SFLC. Do any HN readers or their acquaintances practice law in this field? Is it possible to make a decent living working in favor of "ethically sound" organizations like the above?
Israel’s tough new anti-spam law
The Innocent Victims of Spam Filters
I appreciate the site showing the black-and-white treatments of the logos, rather then their color variants. Color can be nice, but great logos read well without it.
I don't want to provide user stats for my site to Google for free.

Granted, if the user has the library already cached, I suppose Google sees nothing, but still.

Maybe HTML should be extended so that together with <link> tags you can state a hash of the content, so that the browser could recognize identical files. (Would be a bit dangerous, though).
ho ho ho, I will be happy to introduce them to service providers who are more appropriate to their needs.

So polite, the Japanese ;-)
add me a nice "port to iPhone/Android" button and i'm sold.

seriously i would pay hard cash for it
Please read this important update: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=393988
"A war with France is traditional, but with Paris, unthinkable" -- Jane Austen (IIRC)
I lived in China for a while. Inventing and entrepreneurship is harder there to get going because of current social trends, but if you make it, you make it huge. One U.S. dollar is equal to 6.8 Chinese RMB right now, and the purchasing power of 1 RMB is about the same as 1 USD, or at least was when I was there a few years ago. That means if you build something with wide appeal that can sell in markets with stronger currency (or even just HK/Shanghai/Beijing), you make it bigtime. Riskier? Yes. But the potential quality of life you can build in a short time is ridiculously wonderful if you make some breakthroughs.
Do you provide your own internet bandwidth? You have to rely on external providers at some point and in all likelihood Google is better at keeping the lights on than you are.
In Tipping Point the author said that in a study they found that cool people smoked. They weren't cool because they smoked, but the ones who did smoked tended to be "cooler" than those that did not.
For folks interested in his #2 benefit (using multiple domains causes static assets to be loaded in parallel, speeding up observed speeding page load times) -- you can capture it without involving Google in the slightest. It requires a perhaps two-line tweak to your web server configuration files to make it answer requests on domains other than www.example.com

For example, my main domain is www.bingocardcreator.com . There are some honking images which load on the front page that used to block the (more valuable to my conversion pathway) images on the sidebar from popping up. I reconfigured my webserver to accept images1 through images4 as acceptable host names, and (lazily) manually split the static assets over the 5 hosts.

This actually resulted in improving the loading of my sidebar by upwards of a second. That is worth, oh, probably $100 a month or so. (If you do not know how I can possibly say this, you owe it to yourself to try CrazyEgg right now.)

Not bad for an hour's work that never has to get repeated.

Credit given where credit is due: I found this tip out through using Yahoo's YSlow plugin for Firefox, and following their "Best Practices for Speeding Up Your Website". This document is one of the best practical "Here, do this, it will make you money" sources I have ever found on the Internet.

http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html
If I could have added more points, I would have.

I'm trying to work my way out of a life of feeling dread every Sunday evening. Several solutions that look right for me:
1. start my own business
2. get back into a small company, possibly a small non-profit, and have lower pay but greater creative input
3. go into teaching
4. some combination of the above

I thought about going to graduate school and trying to get into academics. The thought of researching and teaching is appealing. However, I'm not encouraged by what I've read recently about the costs involved with it.

As an aside a colleague of mine is to the point of waking in cold sweats because he hates the job so much. I'm not that bad......yet.
Ask YC: Is the R & D for startup development tax deductible?
I'm curious as to whether new startups can deduct the development hours as R & D. If so, how do new companies formally track, quantify and price them?
Apple's Netbook Silent Treatment Can't Last for Long
You had better clearly state your country as tax rules tend to vary as you go around the world.
True, Google is probably better at keeping their servers up... but I prefer to reduce my external dependencies anyway.

Right now, I only have to rely on my hosting partner - which means I'm dependent on just ONE party. If something goes wrong, I call 'em and kick their lazy asses :) Chances are that things are up and running in no time.

Remember when Amazon's cloud storage went offline last July? This meant all kinds of websites relying on that service were offline as well. No-one knew what was happening, why it was happening, and when it would be back online. I don't need that - seriously :)
I've never really understood that argument. Assuming that your site is totally down when your server goes down and that you rely on jquery so heavily that loosing it essentially renders your site unusable it doesn't seem to matter how much better google is at delivering content than you are. If you can manage an uptime greater than 50% the likelihood is that your server and google will be down at different times so the downtime is additive.
Pretty sure Mark meant China's manufacturing/industrial sectors has the potential to put the Western ones out of business.

Which might well happen, but the Western world isn't going quietly - the West has already started strategically introducing McDonald's, Pepsi, and reality TV into China in an attempt to stem off growth.
that is quite a large blanket of things to be deductible. i doubt it.

/not an expert
Presumably because the government is ensuring that Chinese entrepreneurs have access to capital and cheap labor. If businesses developed more organically with a balance between capital and labor, the Chinese middle class would grow and China would achieve wage parity with the West and would compete on similar terms. The arrangement he described would give the advantage to Chinese business owners and the Chinese government, at the expense of western businesses and the Chinese people.
Obama’s ‘Secretary of Food’?
It's not like you don't already use Google Analytics, right?
Now THAT is a review.
> Things are better now than ever.

You can't possible believe this, can you? The notion that history is a steady, near-constant ascent for humanity is flawed.
Hey, wasn't some Titanium thing supposed to be killing AIR?

Oh well, I guess it's yet another killer rumour that's been just a little exaggerated....
Vivid and others do have a valid point that Youporn could eventually get into a LOT of legal trouble because of age issues.
Your amazing brain: Top 10 articles from 2008
Football and the Unconscious
Wow, he looks frighteningly like Vin Diesel.
On a somewhat related note, I 'called' the Yahoo/Microsoft deal years before it was even discussed (I still think it will happen)

Can I have a CNN Tech article now please?

Predictions mean nothing, what you do about those predictions is what matters. Out of all of these people, who profited or did something to take advantage or help people?
Keep in mind we're all pretty young here at HN and are years from retirement (and if you're like me also pretty broke). If you were older and heavily invested in the market/your home and 2-5 years away from retirement, you'd be pretty scared about how you're going to support yourself as you get older and your health fails.