skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> But what actually happens is that an attorney might do 45 minutes of work and round it up to an hour--even though that work is formatting in Microsoft Word that the client could have done; or printing out a Word document in order to scan it in as a PDF. Still seem worth $500 per hour?

I might charge $X00 per hour as a "blended" rate, taking into account that:

A) some of my $X00 time might be spent doing $15 per hour clerical tasks, but then I won't have to spend as much $X00 time instructing a $15 per hour person, then reviewing his work to be sure he got it right; and

B) some of my time will be spent doing work that's worth $1,000 per hour or more. (Cue Hedley Lamarr in Blazing Saddles: "My mind is a raging torrent, flooded with rivulets of thought cascading into a waterfall of creative alternatives.")

So it averages out, or at least that's the rationale. (Of course, that doesn't justify time-sheet padding.)
I'm not a big fan of it, I think I will stick to Basecamp classic or develop my own solution very shortly.
Popular Unaccesible iOS apps by irresponsible developers
Today I watched the first lecture and started on the first assignment. I have all of Chris Manning's books and have read them, and I just ordered Dan Jurafsky's book on Amazon.

I have been doing NLP for a long time, and I expect to get a lot out of this class.

I liked the style of the introductory lecture, well done, and the way they have the auto-graded programming assignments set up looks slick.
Is this to juke the stats to make a video seem more popular than it is? If you divide that out it's about $0.05 per 20 views. I think you could ask somebody on Mechanical Turk to open 20 browser tabs and let them sit for 2 minutes with bids of about a nickel.
Ask HN: Best text editor for python?
I recently started learning Python. I have never programmed before this, and I am using a mac. I am using the book Learn Python the Hard Way, which recommended starting with Gedit, so that is what I am using right now. I don't really like the layout of Gedit, and I have noticed multiple bugs. I would like to switch to a different text editor soon. What do you recommend?
What? It's not a request to commit a crime, it's a check of the strength of their belief in privacy. There's nothing wrong with the action you're asking them to do.
Announce::The FreeBSD Foundation Funds Project to Grow Mounted Filesystems
A History of Haskell Persistence
UK embraces 'three strikes' for illegal file sharing
Netflix in talks for cable partnership
The article "The Myth of the Rule of Law"[1] has been linked a few times on HN, and I think it sums up this idea pretty well. It basically says that in many (most?) cases the law is subject to interpretation that depends on the politics of the interpreter (be they a lawyer, judge or member of a jury). The "letter of the law" isn't nearly as simple as people believe, ambiguity is the name of the game.

1: http://faculty.msb.edu/hasnasj/GTWebSite/MythWeb.htm
Let's say you are trying to get a job with the FBI or obtain a security clearance. You will be asked to provide a list of family, friends, bosses, teachers, etc. from throughout your life, and those people will be interviewed (about their knowledge of you, not their own propensities to get too drunk, etc.). Lots of public and not-so-public records will be analyzed, etc., etc. Not much privacy.

What's interesting is that the purpose of the background check process seems to be threefold (as I gleaned from talking to an FBI Special Agent who interviewed me about a friend):

1. Identify possible ways in which the investigated person might be manipulated. Having an affair? Had an affair a few years ago which the current spouse doesn't know about? Gambling problem? Drug issues? If so, you might be susceptible to blackmail or bribery.

2. Identify propensities for dishonesty or lack of trustworthiness. Did you cheat on tests? Do you follow-thru on promises? I was asked a lot of questions about how much I trusted this friend.

3. Identify possible 3rd party allegiances. Are you someone identified by the mafia at age 15 as a person who will go to college, look sparkling clean, and then infiltrate the FBI? To make sure, the FBI interviews people from many phases of one's life. It would be really hard to have seemingly normal friends while you were secretly off training with some foreign terrorist organization. I suspect I was also background checked, but I never signed-off on it. The FBI seems to be using the social graph transitively to verify that you aren't hiding anything. No proof of this last statement though.

I've been told that, at least for normal governmental security clearances, the goal is not to determine if you are a good or bad person -- it's to determine if you are hiding something. If your wife knows about the affair you had five years ago, it will be hard to use that knowledge to blackmail you. However, if it remained a secret, you might do something not so good for the USA to save your marriage.

I was asked about the additional names (expressed only as initials due to space constraints) on my friend's condo deed. She had purchased the condo while in law school, and her parents co-signed on the loan. Only after the interview did I realize that the FBI was confirming she did not have a sugar daddy!
Apparently, recent changes hold that you can't go over on an L if you are a significant shareholder in either entity. Otherwise that would be a cheap loophole to get through the door.
And, just to be clear, lawyers' fees are reasonable because lawyers have a duty to report fraudulent billing practices. If they don't, they can be disbarred. That duty to report covers all of the rules (excluding Rule 1.6 and information gained by lawyers participating in approved lawyers' assistance programs), and the reasonableness of fees absolutely includes consideration for this duty.
Thats a hilarious post but it sounds like Steve would love PHP. He could use nouns (objects) when he wanted yet add global functions (verbs) with no attachment to objects. I personally think that's a great way to make a terrible mess, but perhaps he knows something that I don't.
As much text as might exist around the subject, it looks like the "blanket prohibitions" aren't working and everyone knows it. There's a small loophole in the rule you describe--what happens if a non-attorney learns of an attorney's misconduct? Nothing, that's what!

It's not ridiculous for me to want to represent my company without having taken the bar exam--you're using a legal fiction to argue that even though I pay my company's taxes, I should not be allowed to represent its interests in court if I so choose. But even if I didn't pay my company's taxes, I would still want that option because the fictitious entity you describe is a creation of my capital and my labor and in every other respect its Board of Directors has the ability to guide its direction.
What application did you use to make these fonts in the first instance?
I would quite like to have a go at making my own font icons. Could be quite useful in replacement of spritesheets.
Brilliant! And they used Kennedy's kung-fu song. It's so good I wonder if it is actually real.
As an iOS developer I can say that I've never tested my apps using VoiceOver. Not because I didn't want to spend the time or figured it was such a small part of the market that it wasn't economically viable. The thought literally never entered into my mind. I never thought someone who couldn't see the screen would ever interact with it.

This has made me think of other minority groups that I may have been discriminating against. The colorblind, the deaf.

"I didn't know" is almost never a valid excuse and it most certainly isn't in this scenario.
I'm sure this speaks to a fairly large segment of the potential audience.

For some people (I might even say most - especially newbies), it's much more thrilling to dive right in to a project. Even if the content was the same as a class with a more "classical" name, at least these names would put an idea of what can be done in to the students mind.
The same is true of most programming languages. Simple things like layout improve readibility, and thus productivity, immeasurably.
> So what motivation does Google really have, to throw resources at the problems facing paid-app economics?

The 30% cut they get of each app sale: https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/bin/...
You really cannot be serious.
There are other benefits as well.

Youtube promotes trending videos, so if you get a lot of views very quickly, particularly among a common demographic, then the video will be more heavily promoted, and is more likely to go viral.

Similarly, videos with lots of view tend to appear higher in search results.

I imagine that people at youtube are very aware of this, and put an effort into distinguishing ``real'' view (consistent demographic/trusted referer) and ``fake'' (spammy/ black hat SEO) views.
>It's against Facebook's Terms of Service. //

That would be my initial objection too. There's no real point in going beyond that. If the FB ToS have any legal weight then it would be most likely unlawful for me to share my FB login details with anyone.

An employer who attempted to do that and then sacked you would be performing constructive dismissal and probably be in breach of the [letter of the] Computer Misuse Act for attempting to gain access to a computer system without proper authorisation.

A company that followed through and consulted your FB would then be holding private information on your friends and there are all sorts of regulations that they're supposed to comply with then. Presumably they'd also be in breach of the European Convention of Human Rights @ Art.8 (at least).

TBH it sound quite fun. One could create a FB profile as a honey-trap - access would provide the evidence for a willing barrister to take a large company to the cleaners ... or that's how it seems.

IANAL needless to say.
I'm afraid none of these explanations work for me. All of these analogies have the same fatal flaw, regardless of what you try to use to describe how distance between points expands you still have a material in a container. With a balloon, the container is the air around it. If you inflate a balloon, sure the two points you've drawn onto the balloon get further apart, but dammit the VOLUME of the balloon is increasing too. If space is like a balloon, what does it's "volume" consist of? When it expands (a balloon), it is displacing something (air), what does space displace as it expands?

Now we're right back at the "fundamental misunderstanding of the space expansion theorem" again...

So what about if I pose the same question in a different thought experiment.

Go back to the origin, the big bang. Everything is in this super condensed super hot state (from wikipedia). Lets say you are this tiny rebellious particle and you decide you've had enough, you're not gonna wait around for this "inflation" event to occur that every one is all excited and talking about. You take off, at an infinite speed away from wherever you currently are.

PBBU TRP
(#) .

So, if the Pre-Big Bang Universe is on the left, and the Theoretical Rebellious Particle is on the right, what is TRP in NOW?
I like the $ syntax. It's powerful.

Can somebody explain the slash syntax in the example given?

label:matches(:hover, :focus) /for/ input {
That reminded me of the 2 shotgun no-brainers I recommend to anyone wanting to beef up their computer: SSD and ridiculous amounts of RAM.
How TED Makes Ideas Smaller
It's definitely real, they've apparently raised $1M:

http://techcrunch.com/2012/03/06/dollar-shave-club/
The most important piece of advice is the last line of the article.

In my experience, ignoring the above combined with a refinement only approach generates some amazingly horrible 'solutions'.

An example of one such 'solution' I was forced to implement by a manager and 'senior developer'. To make matters worse I was expected to be the one to supervise/troubleshoot the use of this 'solution' every week. Here goes:

Output data on a unix server, ftp it to a Windows server, ftp to a Windows PC (yes, it was FTP'ed twice on the same LAN), manually change in Access and export, ftp back onto the server, process again, FTPx2 back to the Windows PC, email to an off-site processor, wait 2-5 hours for a response, ftp back to the Server, process, ftp back to Windows, put it into Access again and export, and then ftp it to the clients mainframe (and manually remember to add some archaic FTP settings). On average it took 1.5 hours of dedicated work time to complete, not including the wait time or reattempts. It was extremely error prone due to the number of manual steps. Changing the settings in ftp also caused problems with other clients when people forgot to take off the archaic mainframe ftp settings.

For my own sanity I assumed responsibility of the task being done each week and replaced it with a script that did everything in half a minute including sending it off for offsite processing - the results of which I never used. I was eventually found out when the client requested the data early and I provided it to them several hours before the offsite processing was done. I got in trouble because of the thank-you email.
Invalid techniques of proof
This is the standard public/private mechanism for most all pastebin sites. Private gists are private by the virtue of the fact that the URL is more or less unguessable. It's not actually authentication-restricted.

For example, pastie does this. Here's a public paste:

http://pastie.org/3537377

And I can see the public paste made before mine by decrementing the URL:

http://pastie.org/3537375

But I can make a private paste:

http://pastie.org/private/sd1fh4m2zesdn6nzkpcfa

And the URL is a value that's likely some sort of ID + salt digest, and has enough entropy that I couldn't effectively guess any other private URL.

Pastebin sites (Gist included) are specifically for the purpose of sharing code with other people. It's not intended to be used as a private clipboard for you to save snippets for later reference, though that's certainly a valid use of it, as long as you're aware that they aren't actually authentication-restricted.
"The example above highlights an INPUT element when its LABEL is focused or hovered-over; the association is made by the for attribute of the label. As you can probably tell, the id is implied by the LABEL element's for attribute."
Vim. It is challenging at first, but learning it will make you a better programmer.
Lanyrd leverages Twitter to show you which SXSWi panels you should attend
While I don't have a facebook account, I would never give an employer ANY account credentials to ANY external service that was not theirs.
I used Illustrator to make the vectors, copied directly into Fontographer, saved as TTF, then converted to webfont with Fontsquirrel.com.
Great program! Couple of suggestions:

* Can you add a free python reference like this one: http://www.diveintopython.net/

* Syntax highlighting!

* Dropbox support - a very simple module to save .py or txt files into a dropbox folder and sync - this would be great!
Apple TV: Growing from Appliance to Television
I am no physicist, but I still feel as though this is an immensely misleading subject.

The idea of an infinite universe conjures up images an infinite number of worlds out there, infinitely many of which must be similar to our own. And somehow, all that infinite matter/energy must have been compressed infinitely densely at the beginning.

But isn't it the case that we have only measured the flatness of space to within about half of one percent. If so, it seems much more likely that the universe is locally very flat but still finite, though very large, due to initial inflation (the event, not the process). So the universe might be 10^100 light years across, but still finite, yet definitely flat to well within half of one percent.

But let's suppose that the universe is infinite (since we have not, and may never rule it out). What does this actually mean? Does it mean an infinite number of galaxies out there somewhere at this moment in time? Somehow I doubt it.

What does it even mean for a galaxy to be out there at some point at this time? Do we mean time relative to the local reference frame of that galaxy (stationary in that frame), say with respect to the big bang or time relative to our own reference frame, which we agree is moving rapidly with respect to the other?

Even distance measurements vary between the two frames of reference.

So my guess is that to even have a concept of what this all means, we need to be expert at understanding space-time manifolds, which we are famously hopeless at.

Another obvious point: it isn't possible for an observer to travel off in one direction and return to the same point, even if the universe is curved (as I suspect it is). The reason is simply that you couldn't make that journey. There are points in the universe which lie out of causal contact with us, which means that there is no means of getting there, even theoretically. We can't even observe those points, let alone go there and see them. So we can never make the full journey in one direction and return from the other. Doing so would imply travelling beyond our cosmic horizon.
AWS has updated their prices again. Excel no good for cost estimating
Hey guys,<p>AWS has updated their prices again! We are working fast to update their prices on ShopForCloud.com, but we have discovered a bug in AWS pricing and have let them know. They are now fixing the issue. Check out:<p>http://blog.shopforcloud.com/2012/03/were-updating-over-2000-prices-from-aws.html<p>Hassan
> programmer productivity is also linked to happiness given one's own tools

so i certainly agree with this, but in my experience, as the problems get harder, my happiness isn't determined by syntax.

the things that make me mad are "i have to fix this defect but this code is a fragile mess which i'm afraid to touch, so i bandaid on more hacks to have the minimum possible area of impact so i know for certain that i can give this to the client and it won't make things worse". that makes me fucking furious, man, the artist in me dies a little bit every time I do it. We have this issue in our large javascript codebase. CoffeeScript would probably help a little bit, but a speculative 2x improvement in "fucking furious" is still furious.

This opinion is probably along the lines of those who think CoffeeScript is a toy. List comprehensions don't fix our problem; we (my team) just don't care. investing in education, growing the teams ability to craft well factored code and stable code, that will have exponential payoff.

Now you can get meta here and say a language like ClojureScript which brings Clojure's strong opinions about managing complexity and crafting good abstractions - you get better just by using it, its sort of self-educating. ClojureScript has my attention.
I don't understand your first point. Nothing precludes a non-lawyer from reporting an attorney's misconduct. However, the fact that they cannot be compelled to by statute irrefutably proves my point: that the practice of law must be (self-)regulated.

Regarding your second, the fact that you pay your company's taxes is irrelevant. "You" can be substituted by any other shareholder or partner; the shareholders/partners are not the corporation. The corporation is its own, independent legal entity. Because it's fictitious, it cannot make decisions, which means (as a matter of law) it's incompetent to stand trial.

Some jurisdictions may have rules deviating from this to allow corporate pro se representation by 100% shareholders in small claims matters, but they would be the exception.
Is a comment in the stylesheet where the font is defined OK? That's what I usually do when the license requires attribution.
So, are fonts the way to get scalable graphics on websites?
I recently discovered the Spyder ide/debugger development environment. It is quite powerful and well featured.

Before that, Eric4.
On the one hand if you can argue that someone can guess the unique gist ID, you could also argue they can guess your Github session ID, in which case authentication is moot*

On the other hand, because the Gist ID is in the URL, it is more prone to leaking.

One example: I uploaded a PDF (classification: public) to a web server and sent the link to a few people. It was not published anywhere, not communicated outside our group, there were no external links to it, so it could not be spidered. Couple of days later Google had managed to index it, and it was getting downloads. How did Google know it existed? Maybe someone used GMail, maybe they had Google toolbar installed which submits URLs to Google for indexing, who knows? I noticed Github has blocked Google et al from indexing all the Gists with robots.txt, which helps.

Either way, probably best to be careful how you handle the "private" Gist URLs, or just don't use them for super secret information.

*yes session ID is longer, and should have a finite life span, so it may be harder, but the same kind of issue.
Show HN: Treat your pet to a monthly subscription from BestFriendBox.
Font Awesome or Fort Awesome... I'm confused.
And KissMetrics and their customers caught heat from it: http://www.extremetech.com/internet/91966-aol-spotify-gigaom...
Interesting. Just because it's standard, doesn't necessarily make it perfect? I guess I'm just looking for a versioned script repository that's authenticated and has an easy API to roll credentials. Is it too much to ask!? :)
is it possible to do something like this for pageviews for websites? If it is id love to hear about it,

thanks
$1B of TSA Nude Body Scanners Made Worthless By Blog
Give credit where its due: Fox News broke this story. The Guardian report appears to be based solely on the earlier Fox story and public documents.
This situation is nothing new, its very similar to what happened during the dotcom bubble in the late '90s: back then small startups used a sizable chunk of their funding to run banner ads on popular portals like Yahoo. Some times they received that funding after gaining some notoriety after running some small ads, which prompted them to run even more ads. Because the business plans of most of these startups was a joke there were no revenues and soon they ran out of money. As it turns out it was all a closed-loop, the major dotcom companies like Yahoo received far more money from these startups' ads than from other companies/products, so as soon as the startups died the revenue of major portals took a nosedive and the markets went crazy.

Today there's a huge number of social media companies, some founded by ex-ad industry guys and others by wantrepreneurs, and they make a lot of money "creating" viral videos for their customers. This is very similar to the dotcom scenario: company A pays social media startup B to make a series of viral videos. Because the results of this campaign are measured mostly in terms of views B uses part of the money to inflate the number of views.

The problem as I been saying some colleagues at marketing for years, is that corporate clients are realizing this for the simple fact that viral numbers don't translate in sales or user engagement/loyalty, case in point only 1% of FB users who "Like" a company's page return at some point in the future.

Now that this little fact has made its way to the mainstream media it's only a matter of time until the idea that viral marketing its completely useless becomes ingrained in the public's mind.

Once that happens there's no way back.
Obvious Corp. (Former Twitter Founders) Announce New Project
While the viewing stats would be really interesting to see, it would seem to indicate that you could potentially just use Facebook's ads yourself to do this cheaper. However, I've had little success myself getting 5 cent clicks on Facebook.