skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
All of that evidence is easy to find. It's not what the media reports on because the average CNN viewer can't handle it.
How 'old' is internet itself? Not more than the mentioned 'few' years.

Really important (and great) things grow slowly and die slowly.
A question: Cormen, then Knuth? Or the other way around? Or does it not matter?
you're probably not going to get hired at google without some kind of degree in computer science.

maybe you should do a long-distance course in CS.

fern uni hagen has one that I considered.
Ask YC/HN: What are some reasonable rates to quote for technology consulting?
Hey everyone.

I'd like to gather the great HN community's opinion on technology consulting rates.

In the span of two days, I was approached by two people in my network, one to help with ad and site monetization and testing, one to help with making sure a new web-based start-up is built optimized, help with social media/networking marketing, search, etc.

I was asked about my rates, and I had none (since I've never consulted in this fashion, I'm just out of college after all).

What are some rates you've heard of or used for your consulting or work, both non-programming and programming?

Thanks
'nofollow' does not make outlinks useless. Some crawlers still follow them. Some users still click them (and thus toolbars/etc report the visits). Some secondary inlinks may be created by people who discovered an article via a nofollow outlink.

And even Google may count them for something -- I'm sure 'nofollow' is part of their analysis, but I doubt it's equivalent to 'the link wasn't even there'. That'd be throwing away information, and Google didn't get where they are by throwing away bits. (I would guess the 'nofollow' discount varies by site.)
Thousands Negotiate New Climate Treaty
There's a clear difference between a vibrator and this robot: one is meant purely for sexual stimulation, the other is a replacement for human companionship.
You are right and I stand corrected. I was somewhat puzzled that someone who has no technical background actually wanted to learn CS. That is unusual. Often people want to learn how to program and call it "CS", though CS has little to do with writing code. Thanks for correcting me.
I'm not so sure the applicants are that good. Usually the ones getting laid off are the ones from the bottom of the barrel.

Of course there might have been some jewels, those who got fired due to politics or some other BS reason, and not because of competence
The sheriff might even swing by himself for a taco ... and a job application.
It can cut two ways: defensive patent or a weapon to be used against Adobe AIR and MS Silverlight.

Patents are the new field where the paradigm of Mutally Assured Destruction rules supreme.
If you want to be a web programmer, start building web apps.

The obvious thing is to get good at ruby.

But I would say, have a look at haskell, and happstutorial.com.

hanging out in haskell cafe, a certain amount of CS is likely to just rub off on you.
If you look to the left side of the header image, those guys all have reddit bobblehead dolls.
Even those of us who don't much like C++ recognize that Stroustrup did about as well with the language design as anyone could, given the constraints within which he had to work. The flaws that could have been prevented only became obvious in retrospect after programmers started using the language to build large systems.
Web ad rates are plunging and may never recover.
If you build it, they might not come
Well, to start, if you really know these people, ask what their budget is and set something in that range that you think is fair. If you're not sure about the people, then you ought to consider things like rent, food, etc...

One great place to go is the http://freelanceswitch.com/rates/ calculator. It was designed to help answer questions like these. If this is your only source of income, this calculator is invaluable, but don't use it as the only determinant of your price, rather as a guide. You might break even at $50, but if the place you live in pays more in general, don't be afraid to ask for it.

One last thing, don't back down on a fair price. You would be amazed how easy it is (especially on your first jobs) for someone to talk you down below fair market for your work because you're afraid to lose the lead. Know what you're worth, and charge it.

Good luck!
It really depends on two factors. What level of value do you offer company that wants to work with you and what is your level of need for income?

The more value you can off and the less you need the work the more you can charge. Generally internet marketing consultants can charge between $50 and $200 per hour.

The more details you can provide the more specific I can be on what competitive rates might look like.
I apologize then for the accusation, but for the sake of submitting better comments an explanation (even what you just wrote) would be much better than just submitting a link with no further rationale for submission.
Have to disagree. The finance/economics comparison is quite apt. There are reams of data and high quality dispassionate financial analysis online. The climate stuff is nothing but press releases.

The data is NOT readily available. The papers cited in the press releases are not online for free. And even if they were, they're obfuscated such that anyone with a life needs some second hand analysis to form an understanding. You really don't see that sort of analysis.
well this doesnt look good, the american corn industry may have some huge competition ahead :D:D I know, perhaps americans should wage war on Netherlands!!
That will also give other people interested in the idea a way to contact you.
With any successful venture (re: Ticketstumbler) there come a host of imitators. If you're making money, someone will copy (and possibly improve upon) your idea. It'll be interesting to see if Ticketstumbler responds to this, and how.
This too:
some of your anxiety is caused by your desire for the benefits of each -- job and calling -- without the costs.

I think every young person, including myself, tries to have it all and we don't realize that something has to be sacrificed. For awhile I wasn't willing to fully dedicate myself to my startup because I knew that to do the best I could it would have to become my life. What killed me was that I had just graduated and felt that I would lose all my great new friends and lose my weekend social life. It took me a couple months to realize -- So what?

Unless it's your health or spouse/kids, pretty much anything is worth the perceived "sacrifice" when you're pursuing your own calling. Waking up each day with that enveloping purpose and drive is such an awesome feeling.
After all that hoola about open standards (not just open source), Google joins the big 3 of the RIA (Sun, MS and Adobe, in arbitrary order).
The factors to take into consideration are the expertise you bring to each of these projects, other folks that can do something similar, how quickly do you need to complete these projects, are these one-off's or is there a potential for on-going consulting, how badly do you need the money from these gigs, how much will you learn from these 2 gigs, can you use what you learn to market yourself for other similar gigs, etc.?

Since you are just out of college and you have probably not negotiated consulting rates, assign what you think is a fair hourly rate for each of these projects and then double it -- that should be the rate you could look at charging.

Once you gather enough expertise, and can showcase clients & portfolio, double your rates again.

good luck!
How To Calculate Two Sided Addressable Markets
Ask HN: Monetizing a Twitter bot?
I run http://usetrackthis.com (track your packages by Twitter direct message/email/SMS) and am looking for feedback on monetizing or improving it.

Right now all the action occurs through Twitter direct messages, so I don't have many pageviews to take advantage of. I've thought a couple strategies:

1. Deliver ads through Twitter once per user/per package/per update
(how much SMS spam will users tolerate?, any ad services I could use?)

2. Develop a webpage to login and manage/view packages
(Use AdSense?, make it a premium feature?, do I become yet another package tracker?)

3. Make the whole service freemium (limited number of free packages?)

Appreciate any feedback/ideas, thanks.
HAHAHAHA that is AMAZING. I'm in the middle of final exams now and I hate my life, and that article just made my week. Especially this line: "It started on electronic devices like Gameboys and iPods, but recently groups have taken on tougher challenges like light bulbs and puppies."
AWS is rather expensive in my opinion. Go with a shared host, get a sense of your traffic/revenue, then graduate to a dedicated server.
I used the same method but of course had different numbers to plug in: 4 gas stations (I am probably forgetting a few in parts of town I didn't frequent) in a town of roughly 10,000 people.

Maybe you'd get a better figure going by number of pumps per person and then <strike>making up</strike> coming up with an average number of pumps per station. For example, (I'm guessing that) the lone gas station in a 200 person down doesn't have a lot of pumps.
interestingly enough I didnt find a mention for their support for IE on that article.
Russian, Ukrainian and Polish recipes
or reducing the gene pool?
Ha, it was video footage by Lerone Wilson that gave him away.

If I may, I'll plug the "Aardvark'd: 12 Weeks With Geeks" documentary that Joel sells. It was much better than I expected.
Ask YC: Saving Inspiration
This idea is to save not just auto industry, but other industries too. I submitted this to change.gov, no I did not vote for Obama, but if the government is really going to listen to US NOW IS OUR SHOT!

A while back I did some research on prize economics, and in general there is a 100x advantage to using a prize economic model on BIG PROBLEMS.

Right now the auto industry is facing a crisis because cars are expensive to manufacture, there are delays in manufacture and credit approval, and gas really put the pinch on us this summer.

My recommendation is that the car manufactures put out MASSIVE prizes for improvements that we value as a country. Heck we could even vote for what we as a country want to give prizes away for.

One example might be a prize of $1 billion dollars to the 1st car company that can travel cross country in 40 hours on 40 gallons of gas. The prize money would be dolled out over time, and at each stage require the car company to pass certain mile stones.

When Netflix started the Netflix prize they were unsure of who would participate, the goal was to get 10% better recommendations than Netflix did in house and the prize was 1 million dollars or 8 full time software engineers for 1 year. The result is that there are thousands of people competing for the prize and glory of wining. WIthin the 1st month they were 5.5% better than Netflix, but today people are only 8.8% better than Netflix's algorithm 3 years ago. With thousands of people working on it across the globe, we have all learned a few interesting things.

Darpa did the same for self driving robotic cars. They put up $1 million in the 1st year and had about 20 teams compete each spending about $100k-$1.5 million to win, no one one, but in the second year, Darpa vowed to add $1 million to the prize each year until someone won. In year two 12 companies completed the course and 1 group from Stanford took home the prize and a government contract. When the head of Darpa was questioned, he thought it was a bargain, because a government contract would have cost over $200 million dollars to accomplish the same thing.

Today we are faced with big problems that need to be solved in the auto industry.

Accident and death rates are so high, that for people in their 20's and 30's car accidents put people at the greatest change for injury.

US cars have low MPG ratings when the technology exists to have cars in the 50+ MPG range and getting to 100+ MPG should be viable in 1 or two years.

We have other industries that could use a boost from prizes, like health care with cancer, aids, heart disease, and diabetes.

These problems are so big that capitol markets have had problems solving them because engineering teams need to 1st think about budgets and business models before they think about solutions. Prize economics makes it noble and profitable to give the technology away to win the prize.

Instead of giving away charity, lets inspire people with a prize worth awarding, and lets get a gift worth sharing.

Justin

please pass this on.
maybe you could sell/license your feature to another package tracker that does make money?
Can't gauge if this comment is sarcastic or not..
I was in the #iphonedev irc room last night, and before they told me to leave and buy a book because I was asking too many dumb questions, they were talking about pricing strategies. They seemed to think that anything above .99 is all the same so you might as well charge 4.99. This guy even provided "evidence": http://bang2d.com/?p=47
We use jython in our project (thats python implemented in java). For us it has the advantage that it easily coexists with java.

To put it bluntly: it is a mess.
Indentation breaks, if you use different editors. It is terrible not to have a compiler, because we discover so many bugs during runtime. Not to speak of typelessness...

Loop performance of jython is a factor of 50 behind java. If the use of jython taught me one thing it is this: Never use a scripting language for a serious project!!! It is alright for interactive debugging (although its better to write unit tests right from the start).

And - breaking backward compatibility is a serious step towards extinction. Its alright for hackers, but not for projects that build on top of a large and growing codebase.
Agreed. Perhaps I should have written it for him :)

Still not sure why it is getting voted down to -1 though, now that an explanation is under it.
Yahoo Layoffs: Jerry Yang's incompetent layoff memo
I thought the term 0-day was meant to indicate a exploit conceived of and executed before even a full day had passed from the release of the software being attacked. It seemed to come from the game/software cracking scene where the sooner you crack it the more credential you get. It seems to be getting used to mean "new" or "previously unknown to anti-virus writers" or something relatively mundane. Certainly nothing to do with a "0th day" anything, unless I missed something in the link.
Tell me about it. GoogleUpdate.exe keeps coming back no matter what I do.
Yahoo's secret layoff doublespeak
The best: better than a dog anyhow.
I would take more chances if I wasn't in the legal field. I did take more chances before. But saying "your app won't be done on schedule" isn't the same as saying "you're going to jail because we didn't file your appeal on time."

An even bigger question is if it worked for you. Goes getting over the hump turn the job into something fulfilling and enjoyable, or does it just make it easier to get over the next hump.
Your argument needs updating. It's no longer IPCC consensus vs. internet loudmouth crackpots. It's IPCC consensus vs. the consensus of a large and growing number of scientists, armed with some peer-reviewed papers themselves. "Shut up, the IPCC knows what it's doing and nobody disagrees with it" has lost what validity it may have had.
I love this: Related News - Linux Developer Gets Laid
Yeah those are likely the stories I enjoy. Especially when nytimes breaks the story and has it first.
The next blog post will be about how you can do almost everything without "being evil". There are other ways to get the information or behaviors you seek without requiring external logins. Twitter clients are entirely different animals as the credentials are stored individually in many different places (phones and pc's). Hackers look for large, easy targets, like a web site's database or server logs that contain lots of info, they don't do individual hacks by and large because the ROI is just not high enough. Not saying that its not a risk, just that the risk is MUCH smaller.
The first question my Google phone interviewer asked me was "So...tell me about yourself." One phone interview, 4 in-person interviews, about 2 dozen emails back-and-forth with my recruiter, one hiring committee, several VPs, and a couple days held up on Larry Page's desk later, I was hired.

It's a conversation starter. It gives them a baseline to open things up. Your answers after that, once you've gotten into the swing of things, determine whether you'll be hired.

Also, an interviewer will almost never ask you "Can you do this job?" or "What does this job entail?" How do they know you're being truthful, or even if you are, how do they know that you're not just wrong? It's your responsibility to show the answer to these, through the questions you ask your interviewers. Nearly all interviewers will ask "Do you have any questions for me?" - that's your chance to show that you're interested in the meat of the job itself.
Indeed it is. This shows global CO2 and temperature data from the last 400,000 years (several ice ages and interglacials):

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/archive/6/63/200611...

Most would agree that they appear to be correlated.

This shows a close up of the increase in CO2 since the industrial revolution (time axis reversed from other plot):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Carbon_Dioxide_400kyr.png

The sudden CO2 increase is consistent with the quantity of CO2 output from human sources.

It is not hard to understand what is happening. I work for the British Antarctic Survey and my girlfriend is an atmospheric chemist. Many of my friends are climate change or environmental scientists. Let me tell you there is as near to complete agreement about what is happening as it is possible to have in science.

Of course it is possible to find some people who disagree. It would be unhealthy if you couldn't. Science works because of debate.

The post is pretty awful, but what really got me was the claim that because 650 is a bigger number than 52 more people are sceptical than support the IPCC. That is laughable:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intergovernmental_Panel_on_Clim...
Anybody else sick of these sites that live solely on posting "lists"? I mean, all this is is an aggregate of what you can find on jQuery.org or a google search, and the sites are usually loaded with ads.
In hacking circles I believe it means an exploit for a bug that a patch does not currently exist for, or maybe the bug isn't even publicly known.
BTW, Slicehost/Linode/etc is VPS, not shared hosting.
The way I read it she had to use the command line when she was in college, and thinks the GUI is "stolen" from Windows. (Hence the concern about legality)
> Most would agree that they appear to be correlated.

Everyone agrees they're correlated. Not everyone notices the warming precedes the increases.

> I work for the British Antarctic Survey and my girlfriend is an atmospheric chemist. Many of my friends are climate change or environmental scientists. Let me tell you

You have to admit you and your associates have certain interests at stake...
I think these sites are almost a direct result of social news sites which thrive on this type of empty content.
Or he might turn them down hoping for a better deal down the road...
Jerry Yang's Layoff Memo (YHOO)
It'd be great if some of the college kids that were going to be in finance became teachers instead. Problem is we don't quite have the right incentives set up here in the US.
The comments on that blog post are something else. "I would buy Starcraft on the iPhone for $9.99 in a heartbeat." Yeah I would too but it will never happen because starcraft for the computer is still over 10 dollars.
Shuttle Flying Piggyback on 747 to Florida
You can know the name of a bird in all the languages of the world, but when you're finished, you'll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird... So let's look at the bird and see what it's doing -- that's what counts. I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.
Richard Feynman

---
in my case, it's fish & plant (started an aquarium ~ 3 years ago)

it reinvigorated my interests in chemistry (made my own PMDD fertilizer) ... soon i found myself browing wikipedias for KNO3, pH, nitrification, etc

it's about harmonius ecosystem ... focus on plant -> it improves water quality for fish which in turn feed the plant with waste

simplicity too (i abandon pump+filter+lighting+fert to soil+plant+sun+mulm) ... yes at the end i abandon my chemistry and my knowledge (nature always amazes me ... how little i know)

watching the fish and plant grow is like letting nature writing history for you ... unparallel to any books written by human

so i dunno about u ... maybe pick a hobby (preferrably ones that actionable, no theory -> see Feynman) and if u can make a business / startup out of it, even better
I'd argue that a good idea, and smart people to execute on it matter more than the language. You can write the same web-app using Cake/PHP, Seam/J2EE, or RoR, and if it's a language/framework you know and like, it'll probably go about the same.

My big issue with language wars is everyone who jumps in pretty much brings their own experience and past projects to the table. It's all anecdotal. It's like asking all your friends what kind of car you should buy.

Even your hardcore gear-head friends will have non-rationally based biases. Audi and BMW makes pretty similar cars in most respects, but you almost always find die-hard Audi fans or die-hard BMW fans who will happily tell you at length why brand A is the best and brand B sucks, when the reality is brands A and B are both pretty good.

My day job is, and has been for 10 years, working with the commercial ATG E-Commerce framework built on J2EE. It's typically implemented by Fortune 500 type companies. There's no equivalent personalization, B2C/B2B commerce, marketing, reporting, etc... framework with the same maturity and proven scalability available in Ruby or Perl or Python or PHP. Does that mean Java is better than Ruby? No, not at all. It means for a certain type of site for a certain type of customer I'd whole heartedly recommend a Java based solution.

Because my day job is spent with Java, I tend to gravitate toward other Java based work in my spare time (I really like the Seam framework from JBoss). I learn things that are applicable back and forth all the time. For me, Java is my preferred language. It doesn't mean it's better or worse than any other language for you or for Tim or whoever. It also doesn't mean it's better or worse for project X, without knowing what project X is.

I haven't seen a language war that wasn't 99% really strong polar opinion based almost exclusively on individual anecdotal experience.
"Can you do this job?"

"Yes, that's why I applied for the job."
Y!Hacking is serious business, friends.
I think the real meat of the article is this:

========================

Figure out the absolute least you need to do to implement the idea, do just that, and then polish the hell out of the experience. Configuration is kept to a minimum but everything essential is there. It even launches fast. Via email, Bondo told me:

" When I compare the various iPhone chess apps (I bought them all), Deep Green offers pretty much the same functionality as the rest, and sometimes more, but with a fraction of the UI. Achieving this is why I’m 4 months later than the rest."

It takes more time and more effort to make software with a simpler UI, but it’s worth it.

============================
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lars_and_the_Real_Girl
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charlie brown is my favorite
scooby-doo is freakin awsome
You could even find better plugins at jQuery.org. The top plugin in this list is a contact form that slides. Holy bat shit!
By the way, Richard Gabriel (one of the early Lisp experts) had some good ideas for an alternative academic program.
http://www.dreamsongs.com/MFASoftware.html