skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The real problem with billing by the hour is that you have an inherent conflict of interest: economically, you want to bill as many hours as you can without losing work from the client. Ethically (and, usually, mentally), you want to get work done at the optimal combination of quality and speed. The usual answer given is "raise your hourly rate then", but that presents other business challenges in terms of getting the contract and justifying it to beancounters squinting over every invoice.

I don't know enough about developers and per-hour billing, but in my view, consultants need to move away from this model to more transparent models that directly reflect what they can bring to the client.
Fairness/cheating: It violates reciprocal altruism with respect to the artist. The act of taking without compensation implies the work has no value.

Authority/subversion: Arguments that the compensation is indirect (and therefore excuses taking without payment) implies artists do not have the right of entering into contracts to support themselves. (This dimension is with respect to the law. Anyone arguing for piracy already values respect for the law less and may actually value subverting authority instead.) (Arguing for alternate payment models is arguing not for piracy but for a valid alternative that is not piracy.)

Your moral argument for piracy will likely rest on Liberty/oppression, implying the requirement to pay for something that has low/no marginal cost is oppression. That may or may not be true, but it is independent of fairness/cheating.

Loyalty/betrayal: This dimension speaks to self sacrifice. I don't think it comes into play here.

Sanctity/degradation: This speaks to whether altering content is moral or not. (Think about a your favorite song being rendered as elevator music ... very immoral. Or someone altering Star Wars so that Han Solo didn't shoot first.)

And I grabbed these dimensions straight from here: http://faculty.virginia.edu/haidtlab/mft/index.php
To elaborate on this: iTerm2 is much better than Terminal.app, and free. It seems to be the default thing that everybody recommends, and for good reason.

http://www.iterm2.com/
WebKit has an advantage with WebKit prefixes when the prefixes in question have no spec. As DarkShikari said when criticizing the VP8 spec, code is not a spec.
"Somebody used our ip addresses." - RIAA's argument when their computers were linked to piracy.
Iran cuts off Internet access to citizens
Count me squarely in the "I would buy this if it wasn't $10" camp. It's nifty, but that's about it.
Lots of double talk. Not interested in being a "product guy" in a product company? Seems like something that should have come up 5 years ago. His 3 points for leaving ('product is king' is risky, brand evolution, etc) sound like a reason for him to leave this company. The only reason to try and abstract it out is to save face.

I can't think of a single time in the last 40 years when building a brand was easy. Apparel generally is crazy competitive market, and you probably won't succeed in it. You'd have to be insane to do an apparel startup, and again, I can't fathom why this thought hadn't crossed his mind in the beginning.
George Kavassilas~Religion,Our Journey Home & Off World Super Soldiers
Just read your post - very detailed and informative, thanks so much for sharing.

I highly recommend "Moonwalking With Einstein" by Joshua Foer about his experiences training alongside memory championship competitors. Also, working memory tends to be domain-specific and there's little transfer as you mention, see K. Anders Ericsson: http://www.psy.fsu.edu/faculty/ericsson/ericsson.exp.perf.ht...

Really enjoyed your post though, shooting you an email now...
Casey way to go man! Huge fan of what you did. If you ever want to talk about growing a manufacturing business with an e-commerce component reach out to me. I have some experience from building dodocase.com, my email is patrick (at) dodocase.com.
It's not a civil issue at all (in the USA). It should be. But the IP industry has convinced government to do their policing and enforcement. One infringement is up to 5yrs and/or $250,000. It's, of course, up to judge to determine sentence. But, they should be prosecuted and forced to pay for defense just like all other IP industry victims.
C++ seems like a pretty obvious counterexample, even though it didn't call itself "C". Others: Fortran 90. Common Lisp. Visual Basic. [EDITED to add: Perl 5.]

ANSI C was quite a big change from K&R, even.
I don't think it's overstating things to say that Moore's influence changed the face of the comic industry forever (no pun intended). The man is a true visionary, pushing the boundary of whatever medium he chooses. I look forward to reading his novels.

Here is another good and recent interview:

http://www.honestpublishing.com/news/honest-alan-moore-inter...
There are cheaper alternatives then Amazon for fulfilment.
I keep my time in Emacs org-mode files. Each client has a .org file, within the file are project plans. I clock in and out of tasks, and use summary clock tables to create invoices. The clock table lists the task name and total time. Works great for me.
Saw the design and went "o0o0o!" then saw the price and went "aww..."
>FTP upon us? BGP? 32-bit IP addresses?

Those are effectively entrenched de facto standards, but its not the fault of the creators, its the fault of the people unwilling to move with the times. I'm not cool enough to run an AS, but I know for the other two better alternatives are already here. As Vint Cerf has said, 32 bits was enough for an experiment, it just never ended.

IPv6 and SFTP are here and _in use_ by anyone who isn't clinging on to old tech like people clung to IE6.

>we need to think first, then code

Thinking first, implementing and then improving is how technology advances. Iteration is mandatory, otherwise you're stuck in a waterfall-type scenario. Without it, I sure hope you enjoy riding your horse down to the local Gutenburg press to pick up this week's HackerNews and read my comment there.
This is wonderful. I love it. Lots of SEO and Social Media Marketing articles. I hope they poach a lot of people from HN.

_(ssh, quiet...!)_
As mentioned below, BrainWorkshop(http://brainworkshop.sourceforge.net/) is an open source version of the software, and they offer usage statistics if anyone's interested:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AoDHizcNs2tWdDd...
The Performance Golden Rule
So it's not clear from the article if it's specifically running or any sort of spatial exercise like playing a sport or even swimming.
V was a product of government abuse from experimentation. After escaping, he decides to destroy the state in a cold calculated manner.

There's no people involved except for the token character, which the author uses for the reader to understand.
>I don't know enough about developers and per-hour billing, but in my view, consultants need to move away from this model to more transparent models that directly reflect what they can bring to the client.

Developers are often being paid to do things they've never done before and, as such, it's hard to do anything but bill hourly. Offering a fixed rate and having to eat hours to meet it isn't fun.
On windows, I use this program: http://hackertyper.net/132892717764
I think you missed the point here.

It's not that causality doesn't exist, or you shouldn't use the 5-whys, it's that we have a desire to focus on single causes instead of multiple ones, and understand systems and simple cases of cause-and-effect.

Systems are coded and tested for common paths. Extremely rare circumstances take systems down pathways engineers may have not planned for. When you layer systems, combinations of rare situations can cause "storms" that take everything down. There was a great article on AWS on HN a few months ago that made a point that bears repeating: they are doing something with PaaS at that scale that is quantitatively different than what's been done before.

But nobody is saying to give up causal analysis, only to recognize the limits of RCA when your causation tree can span into hundreds of nodes. The interesting thing here is that the human application of the analysis tool has it's own features that's just becoming apparent. Analysis tools have human environments they live in. Once you acknowledge that a a separate issue, there's no reason you can't continue to use those tools (and others) to work through the problems.
The first part "won't face charges" is right, but the second part to create criminal liability is wrong (in the USA).

(a) Criminal Infringement. —

(1) In general. — Any person who willfully infringes a copyright shall be punished as provided under section 2319 of title 18, if the infringement was committed —

(A) for purposes of commercial advantage or private financial gain;

(B) by the reproduction or distribution, including by electronic means, during any 180-day period, of 1 or more copies or phonorecords of 1 or more copyrighted works, which have a total retail value of more than $1,000; or

(C) by the distribution of a work being prepared for commercial distribution, by making it available on a computer network accessible to members of the public, if such person knew or should have known that the work was intended for commercial distribution.
I never understood why people want their terminal emulators to have tabs. Screen/tmux do it so much better...
I've thought about this before as well. My "hobby" has been computer gaming as long as I can remember. I'm not doing a startup right now, but when I have, the time demands required me to make a choice. It sounds silly, but in reality we all find it difficult to walk away from something that's a major part of your identity.

The trick is to find a way to feed the part of your psyche that wants that activity / etc., maybe a substitute without the same drawbacks. Hiking instead of rock climbing, or chess instead of computer gaming. Virtual methadone...
Then talk to the opponent; unless there's de facto collusion, monopoly, etc?
Time to Overcome Our Fears and Kill Subscription Journals
Old VTs are cheap on eBay and are fun to play with.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/symmetricalism/6854396657/light...
Your insurance questionnaire being more detailed had nothing to do with who was the beneficiary of the policy (think about it - why would they care who gets the money), but the fact that the death benefit was probably larger than anything you would have applied for individually until now. The level of detail underwriters go into is almost always 100% dependent on the size of the cheque they have to write upon ones death.

If you took out the same size insurance policy individually from the same company, the questionnaire would not have been any different.
Based on that post - he could always take up Spelunking.
Earn money quickly - Best systems
Earn money quickly with real money making systems.
The thing about password entropy is that it doesn't matter how many special characters you have in your password, only that they are present because then the computer has more combinations to search through. For example, Foxtr0t! is just as secure as @e31z.P8, but much easier to remember. Helpful hint: long pass phrases are far more secure than random strings of letters and symbols, but easier to remember. thequickbrownfox would take around 5 million years to crack, compared to your example taking 87 years, which probably doesn't matter, but still a fun thought experiment
Backend as a Service Ecosystem Map (infographic)
The country is chock full of successful independent coffee roasters. Some of them have in the past 5 years gone national in scope. Yes, it takes outside financing to replace real coffee with pasteurized process coffee cups. So, don't do that.

And coffee is a good example. Because among those indies, there are coffee roasters that have taken outside funding and suffered as a result.
Are there any good guides on how to combat a DDOS? I'm curious how a team of good technical people without past experience in the area could react.
Native Client is built on Pepper, a proprietary Chrome technology. The NPAPI port for other browsers was abandoned.
Just wondering if you guys are setting the default language of the site based on the browser's location. The site opens up in Hindi as I'm accessing it from Bangalore.
This is an awesome comment, and thanks for writing it.

One thing I didn't have going into this thread that I have now is appreciation for how different this problem is in the mobile space than on the "desktop" web. It's easier to be frustrated with web standards in the desktop world, where Webkit seems like an unalloyed force for good. I can see how much trickier it is for your team given the fact that Gecko has been relegated to second class status by the market.
I've used the osx terminal for "real work" every day for about 6 years now...
no more autorun.inf detection processes are there? :(
Acquisitions aren't always a bad thing; Android probably ended up being a lot more successful because Google bought them before launch. YouTube is another company that got bought and didn't get shut down.

A lot of companies get bought, but in most cases, the innovative software they made doesn't go away. It just gets rolled into some other product.
(doh, wrote a long reply with thoughts a few hours ago from Hacker News Beta mobile app and it didn't post...fail)

sorry man, it was just the link I got. I'm all for first poster credit and respect, just sometimes same content can be generated from multiple links etc and stuff gets messed up. Annoying but you know how it goes.

On the time of posting thing...I know someone created a site to determine the optimal posting time for HN.... I have never used it tho! It's just naturally there'll be hotspots in the day based on simply where the majority of HN readers are from and the waves of social network activity.

Anyways, a good link indeed. A fun Friday afternoon share -- Great that the FlightAware guys are watching this and contributing too.
2011 API Trends
Apple Files New Patent Lawsuit Against Samsung In California
If you have a hobby like this, allow additional time and energy and get insurance quotes from several carriers. Something like snowboarding is (or used to be?) treated seriously by some insurances and not by others. I don't know how dangerous rock climbing is, but it seems kind of similar--the kind of things that some will use to increase premium and some might ignore.

Given the circumstances, no doubt you (OP) made the right call, given the timing of the deal. But you could still might be able to find and switch to a more permissive/equally-good insurance policy down the line at some point. Might take a couple years to get this done, of course.
Ask HN: How do you deal with destroying other people's happiness?
A lot of us deal with disruptive technologies that attack and in some cases, destroy the status quo. The thing is, there is a lot of people out there who actually like the status quo. They are happy about it and they enjoy it. It's their life and their dream.

How do you guys deal with the realization that by making this disruptive technology, you'll be destroying their happiness?
Agreed, that would be awesome.. though just the fact that the angle of the reflection changes as you move the window around was the 'shut up and take my money' moment for me.
I've found charging a fixed fee for an agreed upon deliverable to be so utterly BS-free, that it's worth dealing with the smaller problems. The clients love it, because it takes a lot of the risk and possibility that they might be getting shafted out of the equation. I love it because I don't have to justify how I spend the time.

I've found the best solution on my end is simply to first try to estimate a little pessimistically, and then to charge enough that I'll feel fine even if the project takes me a couple days longer than I thought. If a totally unexpected pitfall appears, a reasonable client will be open to renegotiating.

It's so worth it just to avoid the not-so-goodwill that seems to accompany hourly billing so often.
Boehm controls malloc; it knows where the heap is. In general, yes, the more memory you have allocated, the slower BoehmGC will be.

It checks both stack and heap.
Let's see if we can't tell the difference between -webkit-transform-style, a fiddly CSS property that to be useful has to be documented enough for web developers to employ it, and the interpolation filter embedded in the guts of a black box video codec.
ah, the 'tool' for optimal HN Pickup. Still interesting when you look at it. http://hnpickup.appspot.com/

Also, re: titles -- yeah, descriptive titles always -- I try to do that, since I appreciate it when others do
Ask HN: How to report hours as a contractor?
I just got my first "real" job as a contractor. They are pretty flexible about working from home, but if I do that I'll have to report my hours.

How do you do that? Apps? Techniques? Mistakes to avoid? Obvious things that everyone knows(except me)?
You think about all the other people whose happiness you are improving.

If you are not, on balance, creating more happiness than you're destroying, perhaps you should rethink what you're doing.
Fast 10/100M Ethernet Media Converter 
Ingellen is leading ethernet media converter company manufacturing Fast Ethernet Media Converter 10 100M , China Fast Ethernet Media Converter 10 100m and etc
Donald Knuth: Calculus via O notation (2008)
Whenever I hear statements like that (that the musical/movie industry is growing thanks to piracy, etc), the only logical question for me is - why are they fighting it so hard then?

I mean, they are fighting the various P2P sites and users for years, spending large amounts of money on various legal fights and lobbyists. The wouldn't do this if it really didn't hurt their sales.

People can say "they are doing it because they are stupid". Well, maybe they are, but they also have far better statistics than we have. They know far better what is hurting their sales.

I am not really arguing for copyright industry here, but I am just saying - if it didn't hurt them, they wouldn't be fighting it so hard.
Here's a presentation I gave a couple of years ago about research I performed to demonstrate exactly this:

http://www.slideshare.net/bleidl/net-neutrality-and-internet...
LED Clock with CSS3
LG Optimus Vu Specifications And Features Revealed
This thing makes my GPU hot.
I'll give up anything except my health, relationships, and sanity. If I don't make it, there's always Zen meditation to soothe my mind :)
As others have said, what Microsoft did was arguably worse, but I generally agree: Apple and Google are industry darlings, and because of this are getting away with things people would be crying bloody murder over if Microsoft did them.

I get the distinct sense that a lot of people don’t really care about web standards so much as they care about their favourite company controlling standards. If it were Microsoft who was forging ahead with new features, would the MacBook-wielding, Gmail-using technorati be so enthusiastic?

I’m not even entirely against the new -webkit- stuff, I just hate the hypocrisy from people who claim to be all for web standards, except for when there’s a shiny new feature that only works in Safari, Chrome, and iOS. Microsoft has arguably been doing the best job of respecting web standards since IE9, and they get very little credit for it.
I'd go further than that. I think the era of the technology standard as a formally specified, committee-managed, cross-platform entity is coming to an end. What we're seeing instead is the emergence of open-source implementations that are themselves the de-facto standard. This is particularly true of languages. Look how Apple has managed to run circles around the C++ committee in their single stewardship of Obj-C. Or think how ridiculous it sounds to think of a "standard" definition of Python or Ruby.
I don't get the different with the native Chrome API sendRequest/OnRequest. I've created extension for Chrome and I don't see what problem it is actually solving. You don't need to get a hold of the background page from your injected script, just send messages.
This. Clicking? No. Alt+Shift+Number? No. Good old-fashioned Ctrl-a ".
That's high for a large body airliner, but some smaller business jets can go higher because they have better aerodynamics and engines. Service ceiling figures from wikipedia:

Gulfstream 550 and Dassault Falcon 7x: 51k

F14, F18, B52, and B-2: 50k
F15, F16, F35, B-1B, Su-47: 60k
F22, Typhoon, and PAK FA: 65k
U-2: 70k
SR71: 85k

A380, A350: 43k
A340, A330: 41k
A320: 39k

Boeing 787, 777: 43k
Boeing 757, 727: 42k
Boeing 747-400: 41k
Boeing 737: 35k
Rock climbing will always give you a rating (bigger premium) if you do it with any kind of frequency. Snowboarding, while somewhat dangerous, is not as deadly and the underwriting has adjusted.
Email is often a crappy medium for doing business anyway – pick up the phone and call the busy person’s office if you aren’t able to get ahold of them via email

People seem to be one way or the other on this. Personally, I hate blocking communication like phone calls and visits, especially when busy. I think a busy person's time is most respected with non-blocking queries.
If they're willing to establish this as a precedent, sounds good to me.
My invoices are somewhat less detailed than the "BAD" category. And you know what? It really doesn't matter -- my clients trust me. If they didn't, they wouldn't have hired me in the first place.

Know what your clients expect.
I can quote fatality figures at you, but I'm afraid I can't transform that into useful statistics. For the most part, you have a lot of control over your level of acceptable risk in climbing. If you want to top-rope in the gym with a sober partner, you experience a much greater hazard driving to the gym than actually climbing. Free-soloing El Cap in the nude is another story. The estimates I've seen find the risk of serious injury to be far less than that of playing high school football.

In most of the insurance policies I've seen, payout is typically refused for fatalities over 6000m or 7000m. While I haven't purchased key person insurance, I've never had a problem with buying a hazardous activity rider.

Are you sure you did enough shopping around?

Edit: For any climbers in the audience, I'd like to encourage you to join the American Alpine Club. (http://www.americanalpineclub.org/benefits/)
I'm speculating that the difference between the rock climbing and your partner smoking is that lung cancer doesn't usually kill people without warning. It can take months or even years (there are exceptions, of course).

That would give the company plenty of time to find another key man (and the insurance company plenty of time to cancel the key man insurance). Rock climbing deaths tend to be of a more sudden nature.
How is Akka compared to Hazelcast in term of distributed processing?
I think they'd still post here, because of the "street cred" or something.

I am also sick of SEO and Teach Me Programming! links.
> where the alleged perpetrator claims (as here) that the incident was inadvertent

This incident is similar to cases where people are accused of Copyright Infringement by the labels, because their Wifi was unsecured. So, if I leave my Wifi open, and someone pirates <insert popular song here>, that's illegal, but if VEVO leaves their computer open, (which in my opinion is worse than leaving your Wifi open, but this is just opinion) and someone streams the Superbowl (popular sports event), that's fine?
Not as concise as the explanation given by irahul (which actually made me get the concept), but your article is very interesting and well written, and it is absolutely worth sharing to a couple friends of mine who would probably not get it with the wikipedia article.
I rather someone lean more towards the latter.

Knowing lots of algorithm, but not producing anything of value is akin to having lots of basketball talent, but being a flop in the real games.