skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
After a bit more research on the subject I think it's fairly safe to call bullshit on that $200/hour figure. It's either a concerted PR stunt or the app developer is trying to push his market value.

While I didn't find much information about iphone app sales or revenue figures I did indeed find some sobering bits about regular web ad gigs.

A good example with published stats is one that we all know: Desktop Tower Defense. http://novelconcepts.wordpress.com/2008/03/11/happy-birthday...

This game has undoubtly spawned one of the biggest viral hypes of the recent years. Nonetheless and despite fairly reasonable advertising efforts under massive traffic it "only" managed to pull in 100k over 12 months, or roughly $11 per hour.

So yes, those hawaiian golf resorts must be paying one hell of a CPC/CPM rate. Wonder what they'd pay me for wearing a t-shirt with their URL. I think I'd do that for a measly $1/hour...
It really depends on the part of the country you're in (or interested in moving to). I grew up in North Carolina where lots of families move to raise kids. Growing up, I saw growth of epic proportions. Families would migrate in droves to the triangle area from places like Ohio, Massachusetts, and New Jersey (this is still going on and the whole region is having some pretty serious growth problems). From what I gathered back then, and looking back on it now, I would say that good schools, good climate, nice people, safe area, reasonable cost of living, good colleges in state, and a nice outdoor environment are all paramount. These are mostly the reasons that people move to areas like where I grew up ( Cary, North Carolina).
> Even with my noise-canceling headphones, I can never escape the feeling of movement and noise around me.

If you are anything like me, the root cause may not be the noise and movement. It may instead be the anticipation that the noise and movement is someone who is about to pull you out of your flow. Even if it doesn't happen that often, the psychological jolt that occurs every time it does is enough to make my mind resist concentrating when potential distractions are around. Noise-canceling headphones do nothing against a tap on the shoulder.
now i understand that it's very hard to develop good software (marketing software none-the-less), but could this kind of thing, in the long run, hurt the big advertisement companies?
It's amazing to see how quickly the transformation from free only to paid membership is taking place. In this economy, with the chances of buyouts being close to nil at the moment (let alone IPOs), it just makes sense. And for very small startups, founders should ask themselves why they would dedicate so much energy to something they can't expect to get paid for until they've built up a huge audience.

Conversely, and this is especially true for small startups, if you can build something for which a thousand or two people are willing to pay $20-40 / month, then that's a pretty attractive income. This could easily help you ride out the economy and be around when potential acquirers have more budget to spend, if that's your goal.

One other nice thing about this trend is it pushes focus away from marketing to the new-app-crack-babies that love to try every new thing for 5 minutes. They will give you some nice early feedback but don't really represent your target market, either in terms of demographics or loyalty.
Laid-off Microsofties in Seattle offered free office space, Linux servers
Additional rss feeds for { top newest active } may help users implement a diy solution. I think right now it's limited to just top.

Also I think the appropriate location to discuss this is http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=363
I think I'm awesome.
Wow, let's hear it for being judgmental!
Will Apple Sue Palm Over the Pre?
I think your pizza topping selector example is dead on. Because yes, that's your task as a programmer. You deliver a pizza-topping-selector-configurator that has all the flexibilities built in that the client needs and it will be easier to use than actually writing code.
Your job is also to extend said configurator when the client has new ideas (e.g. a new rebate system) but your job should not be to carve the forms for individual pizza's (which probably change by the season) into code. That's exactly where I would draw the line, thanks for providing this example.
> turning the decision making process itself (ie. policy) into a science, which is what Eisenhower was fearing there

Huh? Eisenhower didn't say anything about making decision making into a science, let alone warn about doing so. (Note that operations research and the like, that is science/math aided decision tools, were a huge part of Allied success in WWII, something that Eisenhower presumably knew something about.)

Instead, he warned about the "danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific technological elite." Elite is people and "scientific technological" tells describes them. In a later time, they were called "the best and the brightest".

Eisenhower is warning about "back off man, I'm a scientist" and more subtle versions. Scientists will lab-coat personal preferences.
Yes, those kinds of mornings are great too!
I understand the sentiment of not wanting to mold your children's interest by your own.

But, I think there is a difference between exposing your child to something you find interesting to see if it interests them too, and pushing your child to be interested in the things you find interesting. The vibe I got from grosales post is the former; expose him/her to Lisp, or some other computing topic, gauge their interest and go from there.
Will President Obama have a computer in the Oval Office?
so cool - already discovered new things about the apis i use. for example, i didnt know the feed api offered historical feed content. thats pretty cool!
I noticed the other day that www.sparkfun.com does custom 3D design and prototype, though this probably isn't the cheapest option as you'll be paying them to make the design:
http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/static.php?name=custom_encl...

There are lots of premade 'enclosures' that you could hack apart to get what you want as well:
http://www.boxenclosures.com/category/category.html

However, I would recommend something like the online services mentioned here that send you prototypes. Don't be intimidated.. just go through the tutorials and you'll be surprised at how easy it is.
Can you recommend any sources for learning CAD modeling?
People in the know kept all of their phone calls to 2 minutes and 1 second, minimum.

I'm hoping that was a purely hypothetical example, or else the signal to noise ratio must have been absurd.
how fast does the information get transmitted? Is it instant or at the speed of light?
I was thinking of doing something similar.

I think it will be more popular if you don't make people login. For example, threefeeds.com/erlang takes you to the erlang feeds page and then just have a normal rss link at the bottom.
Ask HN: HN blocked today by a major .gov; your thoughts?
Reportedly, a large US government institution blocked the access to news.ycombinator.com today.

Apparently, the HN site was identified as either a security threat or inappropriate for the government.

Does anyone know anything about it? What are your thoughts?

Is this as trivial as someone being confused by the word 'Hacker' in the page title?

FWIW, other sites such as slashdot, reddit, digg are accessible.
It's unfortunate McNealy failed to immediately raise the obvious benefit of transparency. Open source allows the government and its citizens to more easily verify that mechanisms follow policy and law. This is particularly important for things like voting, surveying, validation and compliance testing where even small faults can cause serious problems and/or compromise the security of the system (e.g. http://www.mail-archive.com/hydro@topica.com/msg00406.html )

David A. Wheeler has a good collection of other reasons here as well: http://www.dwheeler.com/oss_fs_why.html
Google's Profit Falls For The First Time
I've tried it a few times. Submitted an article I thought would be interesting to people (along the lines of "check out this small program and talk about its virtues/problems"), especially compared to the steady stream of "I'm said ... this is why ... boo hoo" articles that had become prevalent.

I'd say don't get discouraged when the articles you submit gets no upvotes and Google Analytics tells you that nobody even clicked the link. I wish I could follow that advice.

But there's probably no problem with submitting your own stuff.
Maybe its just me, but I swear I read the exact same thing year after year. Only thing different each year is the author(s). Makes you wonder how long it takes for giants to die.
Nice concept and good implementation. My only suggestion is get rid of the ads. Paid lists will be a huge revenue generator, no need to scare people off with ads.

I'd suggest checking out Google Hot Trends (http://www.google.com/trends/hottrends) and finding available domain names against that.

I had a site like this years ago and it did quite well. Looks like you found the right business model as well, domain squatters pay big money for these lists.

The only reason I stopped doing it was because I felt uneasy contributing to the domain name squatting problem.
Too late for deep thoughts, but two small annoyances:

- <enter> doesn't trigger the Add button in the search field

- when I hit refresh, everything I just added is gone. It would be nice if it were remembered (in a cookie?)

Oh, and tell me what I get for registering.
And in 2006 someone hacked the displays in Toronto commuter trains to show "Stephen Harper eats babies."

http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/20060502...
I hated the Crouching Tiger DVD. Since I didn't see the movie in theater, getting the DVD to play involved going through a few menus showing very critical development moments in the movie. Lame.

In case you want to read my mock Preamble and commiserate, I'll go ahead and be vain: http://poetry.herokugarden.com/poems/38
I didn't say that Facebook took up more bandwidth than Myspace. I have no clue what its numbers are, and in fact that is beside the point.

Facebook is experiencing the most growth OUTSIDE the United States (although it will probably overtake Myspace this year in the US). This is a huge problem. Not only is bandwidth more expensive in other countries, but users are harder to target.

So basically you have users flocking to the site who don't pay and cost more. That's not exactly a great business model.

I want my karma point back.
How To Create A Colorful Sitemap With jQuery
I love your question, it's wonderfully circular...
I'm with cstejerean on this issue.
Remember the premise of the original article was an idealistic one, it basically said: "Which kind of programmer should you hire when you have a choice".

Given the goal is to make money I know which kind of team I would prefer. I'd definately prefer the one that automates everything out of the way as soon as possible because in an IT-heavy operation that really is one of the most basic dogmas in order to maintain momentum in the long term. If your goal is to cash out fast and close shop in 2 years then fine, spit and glue may be just right for your project. If your goal is to build to last then you'd damn sure better hire people who know what they're doing.
actually the idea was that refresh was a way of starting over... it was by design, so that any thing you add becomes part of the current topic you were watching...

granted a clearer way to clear it would have been a "Start over" button...
actually login is completely optional...

logging in is only if you would like to subscribe to your aggregated set of topics... up until the point of subscribing or sharing (or embedding it as a widget on a blog) logging is not necessary...

so ideally one could go her and simply enter the topic and get a synopsis of what is going on without a login :D
Submissions can be downmodded. This ability is limited to senior members of the community, as measured by karma score. When you are logged in, your karma score is in parentheses next to your user name, upper right corner of the screen.
I get the impression that in a corrupt country like that, government officials say no to everything by default, in order to make you bribe them to say yes.
also the other thing i forgot mention was that, the real value comes in when you can customise the feeds (eg remove twitter but leave google and my own particular blogs in)... this is why we have put a login constraint..

but that is a good idea for unmodified topic watches... so that a search for "android" without any changes will be at the one location...

thanks for that one
>> no need to scare people off with ads.

Point taken.

>> I'd suggest checking out Google Hot Trends

Many of the "hot picks" come from there.

>> contributing to the domain name squatting problem

Trademark violations are a big problem. I can pretend to ignore the issue in the same way the gun makers say "We're not the ones pulling the trigger." But the difference is that many domain buyers are NOT really all that educated on UDRP and trademarks. I think I'll investigate automatically removing domains that appear to contain trademarks, or at least flagging them -- not sure how hard that will be.
I am most productive after feeding my damm cat's. After gorging themselves on diet cat food one falls asleep on my lap, and the other just to the left of my laptop, usually on top of my phone, which is always set to vibrate.

That gives me a few hours of productivity, then when they wake up begging for more food way before dinner so I kick them outside for a couple hours so they realize that life isn't all that easy, and sometimes it's a bit tough, because I'm busting my ass to keep them living what appears to me to be the perfect life. (except for the fact that they have no balls)
There still seems to be a bit of an argument about this, but the prevaling view appears to be that no actual information is being transmitted as such, so the question is nonsensical. (you cannot influence or predict to which state the wavefunction will collapse without changing the wavefunction) But to answer what you meant to ask, the wavefunction collapse is believed to be instantaneous in the entangled systems.

See also:

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

I know the article mentions that entanglement of atoms will allow transfer of quantum information, but I'm ashamed to say that despite my physics degree I can't figure out how they're going to transfer, say, the result of a quantum computation onto an already-entangled atom without breaking the entanglement link. (university was the last time I looked at any QM though, so I'm a bit rusty on the specifics) Maybe they mean doing so during the entanglement process, in which case the benefit is that you now have two particles holding the wave function of the result (or rather a related one holding the same information), and being atoms, they could represent the quantum equivalent of mass storage. I think it's safe to say they're well over a decade away from that, though.
The First Windows Review Ever
why the #link directly to the comments? I don't care much for scrolling
ActionScript Reference for Rich Internet Application Development
Adobe has released a free e-book entitled: The Adobe Flash Platform ActionScript Reference for Rich Internet Application Development. This ActionScript reference for rich Internet application development provides an alphabetical reference for all native ActionScript APIs for the Adobe Flash platform runtimes...
It's similar to Ning ID
Maybe you just think Detroit. But I think with Microsoft it is a special case, because they are "evil".
In my oppinion Google has similar problem, but the are not evil. So nobody wishes them away.
Bizchat Case Study
Microsoft sparks New Zealand start-ups
Someone mentioned Websense just blocked HN, presumably based on the name:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=444958

Maybe they're using their filter.

(Incidentally, I just passively used the new Webmynd search to find that link. I searched Google to find out about Websense. Then I decided I'd better include the link to the HN post in this comment. I was about to search for it, but it was already sitting there as the top HN result for the search I'd just done on Google.)
Take a break, sit back, relax, watch bacon fry
I code my best between 6 and 8 AM.

The world is asleep, the morning starts to pop up, I am totally relaxed and restored after a good night sleep.

Full brain speed, no distractions: greatest time.

The rest of the day is to run tests, write documentation and polish something here and there. [And to sleep: I usually take a nap between 8 and 9 AM, before getting out of home].
To tell you the truth, I learned CAD while designing cases for the electronic products in my previous startup, and it took literally weeks; not more than a month. To get started, I went through several steps of the SolidWorks tutorial, then started over on things I wanted to make. The easiest package for me was SolidWorks, although the latest versions of AutoCAD are just as easy. While SketchUp is easy, it's awkward to to CAD-y things like draw a line and simultaneously specify its length (at least, that was the case when I tried it a year ago).
I can't update my earlier comment, but it looks like they are at least looking into it:

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13505_3-10147920-16.html
euroclydon --
I wrote a blog post about how I did the shadows:
http://buildingonmud.blogspot.com/

thomasmallen --
A shortcut for run is a good idea... you should add it as a suggestion to my issue tracker:
http://code.google.com/p/google-ajax-examples/issues/list

Also, don't forget my code is all open source:
http://code.google.com/p/google-ajax-examples/source/browse/...
You can pull it down from SVN and run your own local copy w/ app engine dev server in 10 minutes.
Ask HN: Resume Video
I'll be attending a corperate event in a few weeks and I have been asked to make a 2-3 minute video about myself. Does anyone have any experience with this? What works and what doesn't? If you were looking for employees, what would you like to see in a video about a canidate? Would you film the video someplace interesting, or just keep it standard and professional?

Cheers,

Tim
The Importance of Following Through
Does anyone believe that they're really going to stop? How about that that it didn't start during the Clinton administration (if the capability existed)?
Wufoo Doubled this guy's number of RFP(Request For Proposal)s
Ya, I think that's what I fear as well. I get into a sort of tunnel vision when I'm focused. Some of my colleagues have mentioned that they have stood at my side for a minute or so(I have a slight reputation ;) ) and I don't feel that there is anybody there. When they finally do tap, it's all the more jarring.
It's interesting to see those viewpoints shift noticeably in the other direction.
"The mere possibility of being interrupted deters hackers from starting hard projects. This is why they tend to work late at night, and why it's next to impossible to write great software in a cubicle (except late at night)."

From, you guessed it, Paul Graham... (Specifically, footnote #1 of chapter 6 of Hackers and Painters, aka "How to Make Wealth" http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html#f1n)
Oh... silly me :-).
No information is transmitted. It's like this with every article about entanglement.

If I have a red chip and a black chip and I mail one to you and one to your friend in New York then as soon you open your envelope and see a red chip the information "the envelope in New York contains a black chip" will be "teleported" from New York to your brain. Or not.
Yeah, I feel you. I think I know what happened. Some "journalist" took poetic licence interpreting what the developer probably said:

Dev: It took me 5 hours to build and I made $1000.

Reporter: Developer makes $200/hr building iPhone apps.

We've all done this kind of math before (revenue / work time), but I think somewhere the context was lost on this one. Unless somewhere we can find the developer actually saying "I make $200/hr even when I am sleeping."
I'd say it's still a couple rungs above spam: you're still making something people want. I don't think anyone actually wants to be defrauded. (you could bring up honey pots by law enforcement, but I don't think they're the inteded market for scammers) In fact, if the outcome was desired by all involved parties, you couldn't call it fraud.
What karma point? You specifically said that you thought their bandwidth was through the roof. I said that I thought chances were they were taking less bandwidth and making more on ads. (MySpace has a significant foreign userbase; I wouldn't presume that Facebook is any more globally skewed. If anything, quite the reverse.)
Amazing resource
urban legend
Tice said the NSA analyzed metadata to determine which communication would be collected.

The analysis of metadata -- signals intelligence -- is NOT covered under the consitution. Likewise node analysis or lots of other forms of mathematical intelligence gathering.

If the NSA can string seven communications nodes together to hone in on an accurate communications channel for terrorists to their sponsors/members/operatives, then they are doing their job. This critical work should not be lumped in with everything else.

Now the actual recording of calls and data of communications, as opposed to metadata -- that's another animal entirely.

Instead of grandstanding (and I'm a liberarian, so it's really hard not to grandstand on this one), we should try to take the concept of foreign intelligence into the world of IM, SMS, E-mail, and all the other new forms of data which live all over the world (including on U.S. servers)

I'm not making apologies for NSA. I'm simply pointing out that they are charged with doing an important job. They might be screwing it up, but that doesn't make the job go away. The last thing we want is another 1970s where Congress so crippled the intelligence agencies based on previous bad behavior that we were mostly blind in terms on HUMINT up until 9-11. Politicians and media outlets have a tendency to try to make audiences as emotional as possible -- which is exactly not what we want to do with something as important as this.
Yeah. I've always thought they'll "die" the way IBM did; still significant, still profitable, still a force to be reckoned with, just not dominating the industry anymore. Arguably, that's already come to pass, or we're very close to it. It gets easier every year to build large companies that simply ignore them. (It's always been possible, but it continues to get easier.)

While predicting their Imminent Demise™ does get old after a while, I would point out that for years, people have been pointing out that they make all their money on Windows and Office and have failed to penetrate any other market. This has remained true. People further point out that sooner or later, those markets aren't going to be as lucrative as they once were. I think we're only now beginning to see that, but I also think it'll snowball once "I have a Linux-based system" is no more weird than "I have a Mac". (Linux and Mac both legitimize each other.) The arguments that Microsoft are going to "die" (their dominance if not the actual company) are well-founded in structural arguments about how they get to their bottom-line, not merely GPL-hippie wish-fulfillment fantasies. Without a lucrative third-front, Microsoft can not continue as the force they are today. That the argument is old doesn't mean it's not true, it simply didn't happen as quickly as some people anticipated(/wanted).

(I'd actually characterize the XBox as doing better than the article does, but it's still nowhere near profitable enough to build the company around, nor does it seem to have prospect of doing so. I can't think of anything else that could support them, either.)
IAnesthesia, Case log tracking for iPhone
Boxee adds ABC programming to its cool media center software