skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yeah. As codinghorror's userbase goes up, its relevance declines. I'm still waiting for a "Wiley Coyote and The Don't Repeat Yourself Rule" post or something equally nonsensical.

Zed Shaw actually wrote a blog post about how these two guys were at a conference and he called him out on his shit. You can't talk tell everyone something like "real software is written by people who's income is directly proportional to their user base" when you've spent your whole life as a consultant to in house IT departments.
HackerMethod: SelectPartialSolution; GOSUB DijkstraMethod; REPEAT AddCaseToSolution; GOSUB DijkstraMethod; UNTIL AllCasesCovered.
Netbooks: A Curse or a Blessing in an Imploding PC Market?
John Chow's blog is such a joke. It exists to scam newbies. Shouldn't you be busy making money online?
Marshall's description of the coming problem is an interesting read, though I think he's definitely painting the worst possible picture to support his thesis.

What's more troubling to me than the problem he describes is his solution, which basically boils down to giving $25k / year to every citizen of the US from a "central fund" that we fund through:

- advertising on everything from our money to our bridges

- taxes, taxes, and more taxes. we tax everything from email to carpool lanes to "excess" salaries and profits

My favorite had to be his diatribe about executive pay:

When an executive makes $20 million per year, the money does not materialize out of thin air. It comes from consumers in the form of higher prices that they pay for everything that they purchase.

For an executive to make $20 million per year, a company has to overcharge consumers for the products they purchase from the company. It is not as though the $20 million paid to the executive appears out of thin air -- it comes from consumers in the form of higher prices. An "extreme income" tax simply takes that excess compensation and returns it back to consumers, where the money originally came from.

What an ignorant and simplistic view of our economic system. To me, this is clearly a case of the cure being much worse than the disease.
"Forecasting" got us into this mess. By thinking we can predict the future by looking at the past we have taken way too much risk and are paying the price right now.

Now people look at past events to "forecast" where we will be in the future? Seems odd. Just because 3 curves show a similar correlation does not mean the 4th has to follow the same trend.
We need to learn from mistakes.
this was my first thought, too.
The more appropriate parallel would be "I made $2 million with a book".
He did not simply "own the name weblogs.com". Weblogs.com was the first service that could be pinged to say your weblog has been updated, which he implemented first in his company's environment, then in PHP (IIRC). It then showed a list of all updated weblogs. This worked pretty well before the spammers showed up.

It wasn't just a name sell, it was a service sell.

(That may not sound like a very difficult service, but there were scaling issues as time went on. And... at the time that it sold, $2 million wasn't much money, either.)
Wouldn't work for me because I shop at different places depending on when I have time to do the shopping: over lunch, after work, on the weekend, etc. Even then, "after work shopping" varies depending on if I go straight home, or have to pick up my son from after school daycare.

The store would have to offer pretty steep discount before I give up that flexibility.

What kind of "geek services" would a grocery store offer?
Used Theater Seat News
Having a home theater system is a great thing for your home in that you can get the same theater sound and video experience in your own home.
I have a mint license, but at the time I was trying to integrate it, it did not support download tracing very well - do you know if this has been improved? Thanks!
The point I got from this post was that you shouldn't expect to make money from a blog itself. Blogging can be a form of marketing for your real business, but if your business is "pure-play" blogging you are probably in trouble.
On a related note, how many of you still have value cards? In the MSP/Twin Cities area, they're unheard of from what I can see.
"They" is actually quite good in many cases, and apparently even Shakespeare used it. It's not supposed to be "grammatically correct", but frankly I think it works a lot better than putting in a random he or she when the sex of the person is unknown. For example:

"A child becomes an adult when they turn 18."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they
Studies which confirm intuitive truths can be valuable, especially when that truth is cultural or contradicted by other popular wisdom (i.e. "it is better to keep silent and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt;" or contrast this American study's results with the common idea of Japanese as valuing the humble, quiet type).
Which is pretty much my point. Python has morphed into "everything is an object".

To see how C++ has moved towards objects-for-everything, I have just one word - boost!

RE your second point - I don't know of any studies that show OOPS makes programmers more productive. As a matter of fact, some anecdotal evidence (cough pg cough), points to the opposite!
I don't write the policies, nor may I speak in an official capacity about them. One of our MVPs addresses it as best as an outsider can in an FAQ here: http://forums.xna.com/forums/t/12661.aspx

He also describes how students can get one year free through the DreamSpark program: https://www.dreamspark.com/
Palm OS is dead
I think to many of us in the software world this concept isn't surprising at all. So many products we build, market and support are designed to help increase productivity. Although we might not like to think about it at time, our work helps eliminate the number of employees companies need - either by making jobs redundant now or by helping them slow down the rate at which they hire new employees.
Let's be clear: Anyone who has a domain name like weblogs.com to sell, even with zero content, is going to make quite a bit of money. They are scarce commodities, and that has nothing to do with blogging. I hardly see how it's fair to include that in the total. If I registered movies.com years ago, and had a blog about movies today, it would be a bit silly to attribute the millions I would get from selling movies.com to my blog.
I can only second that, and add that it's good to see some competent forecasting. Far too often the media simply extend existing data into the future and call it a trend.
I had the same issue which I think is, you don't want to waste time standing in line shopping. I found this (shopping for food) was a huge waste of time in my cooking workflow, so I hired someone to cook for me (won't spam it here, it was on hacker news before when I blogged about it - much to my happiness and genuine surprise)

One thing I have been wondering about is a grocery delivery service, and make it very specific - Costco groceries only, on a certain day a week, and perhaps say no especially bulky items (case by case basis). It seems to me if I could get maybe 5-10 people interested, it would be worth someone's while with a truck (and a couple friends) to go do our shopping while they are shopping anyway.

In my mind, shopping takes time as follows: Driving + Physically walking around store to get items + waiting in line + Payment + load car + Drive home

If one person did all the shopping for multiple people and had a close by rendezvous point (for the clients to pay/pick up their food), both driving times and time waiting remain constant. Walking around the store will increase slightly, as would payment and load time (since more items must be rung up and loaded)

It seems to me though that this increase in time required may be on the order of 10-15 minutes per client. If I am willing to pay 5-10 bucks for this service, you could make an easy 20-100 bucks an hour, or probably ~50ish on average.
Compare and contrast:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=477384
whether or not it is obvious is irrelevant. statistical studies with control samples show the degree to which it is true.
A far more relevant Linux security flaw about how easy it is to set up a malicious mirror: http://www.cs.arizona.edu/people/justin/packagemanagersecuri...

The "virus" in this article is a bit trivial, as other users have pointed out.
AbstractSpoon's ToDoList is what I use.

http://www.abstractspoon.com/tdl_resources.html
How Credit Default Swaps Spread Financial Rot : NPR
Yeah, he said that. He hypothesized that KaZaA was running on someone's publicly accessible DVR box. Some people use Linux boxes as DVRs.
They'd stand just as good a chance taking sheet music and lyrics and iterating and iterating and iterating until it's good enough to disrupt Warner Music Group.
Absolutely. I'd like to see them repeat the experiment in Japan or China. I'd hypothesize the results won't be the same.
Why The eBook Industry Needs More Piracy
Hotmail rolls out POP3
Copyright Filtering in the Stimulus Bill
Great question, hopefully our Hackers in Japan can give us some insight. It'll be interesting to see if the US will begin to parallel this change.
If you're using curl to poke around headers, as the author suggests, use the -I flag instead of the -i flag. -I gives you the headers only.
Study Shows Why Sleep is Needed to Form Memories
Posterous (YC S08) launches private, password-protected blogs by email
5 points in <1 minute ;) i can tell you guys roll deep on YC hah
The way these guys pump out features, I don't see how any other blogging service can keep up. If other services try to add more engineers it will only slow down their process. Goes to show there's no better way to build a product than with a small group of awesome, dedicated coders.
I don't trust macroeconomic forecasts at all, however I think this article contains an interesting and valuable hypothesis.
I'm curious is Posterous thinks tumblr is a competitor?

[PS: is it just me, or are there no theme options at all with Posterous?]
Interesting. I'm exploring revenue sharing models for iPhone applications, so I'd like to know more.

When you say 50% of the net profits, do you take into account any salary at all, or is everyone paid only after there are profits?

You say everyone receives 50% of the net profits, and you set aside 15% for expenses. That's 65%. What happens to the rest? Thanks.
Turning NFL Games Into Televised Entertainment
they are more like a showcase places, then real stores. In SF, the sony metreon gets a lot of traffic, and most tourists in the area at some point end up there. You can kill time, playing some playstation, or something, but I don't see many people buying there. (prices are not cheap). It just serves more as marking and branding than for real sales purposes.

Just like a lot of stores in 5th avenue in NYC loose money, as the rent is so expensive, but the companies believe it is worth it, as it is crucial for a luxury goods company to have their wares displayed at luxury road.

It is all about perception and marketing. With the economy going down though, that might change.
Tesla to unveil Model S on March 26, hopes for DOE money by summer
The most important feature in a blogging platform is the content that's already on it, and in that sense, Posterous still has a lot of catching up to do. More content drives organic growth through links and other SEO mechanisms, which in turn drives more users to sign up.
The average car needs ~25HP to maintain highway speeds. So 1hp could be ~4% of the car's energy needs. It takes a lot of energy and HP to accelerate quickly but you don't spend a lot of time accelerating like that. At lower speeds over bumpy roads I guess 10% might be possible.
I can't edit my post anymore, sorry for the typos. BTW, s/progress/effort/
Writing About Twitter Every Day Is Stupid - It Reports On Itself 
Redundancy.
Palm OS is dead Long live Web OS
Shock absorbers prevent you from lifting the full weight of the car for each bump. So replace your 2000kg with the un sprung weight of the car say ~200kg. (Your tires also act as mini shock absorbers so you might need to subtract 1mm from the size of each of those bumps.)
Let me be your first counterexample. I can't care less about the number attached to my account. You want to up mine? Be my guest.

Aside of this though, it is easy to get a high Karma/posts ratio. How to do it? If you know damn well what you're talking about every time you post, you will accrue lots of Karma from being informative. There are a few gurus here and they're easy to spot. They will have high Karma, whether they care or not.

Some, like me, who aren't biological data troves, are happy to expose their ignorance and ask stupid questions, and deal with occasional (and mysterious) downmods.
I think this is fantastic. I would way rather get charged a reasonable amount for a useful service than have to wonder if it will be around in the future or how they're making money off me.
Prototyping helps you in understanding it.
Already posted: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=455001
Often, the best approach is a blend of the two, I find.

Identify the aspects of the problem that you don't understand fully, and which aspects are likely to change. There's usually some part of the problem that you do understand.

Then spend a day thinking up an elegant framework that allows you to experiment without making a mess. Small classes that can be swapped out or added and removed as needed. Modules that can be customized and moved around. A strategy pattern that lets you tweak your algorithms as you get more data. Whatever makes sense for your application.

"Hacker style" is no excuse for sloppiness; nor is "Djikstra style" any excuse for slowness.
Who established the term "weblog" as the standard term for that kind of website? The term "weblog" had to be the expected name for the phenomenon before the domain name weblogs.com would have much value. Does anyone own the domain name onlinediary.com or linkcommentary.com or some other possible descriptive name for what we call a weblog?
Already posted: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=477497
The definitive site for discussing math is

artofproblemsolving.com

for discussion of contest-style problems.
Ask HN: Good math forums?
Hi all,

Any one know some good math forums? For exampmle, to discuss stuff related to Discrete Maths, Linear Algebra, Number Theory, Algorithms & Complexity and etc. I'm aware of usenet groups but if you know of any good forums please let me know. Thank you.
This is, however, exactly how millions of Windows machines have wound up in botnets. It's a serious attack vector.
Ask HN: If you're an independent contractor, how do you charge clients?
I'm still a student and while I'm not professionally employed I do a lot of work as an independent contractor/freelancer. The work is pretty straight-forward; Photoshop this, clean up this page, make this form work, layout this like that etc. I'm on to my third client-project (I've managed to complete a project per month) and am at a complete loss in how to reassure that I'm amply getting compensated for the work I do. Most of the time the client will want a quote up-front, which is fine, but I feel like most of the work I do happens about mid-way through the project once they've decided upon a layout and I manage to get their layout working in a browser. This is when they nit-pick away and I spend more time in Thunderbird than in my editor. If I were to write up a formal-contract for the type of work I do what is the best way to go about this?
> "Originally posted by monkeyfish at Hacker News: "

Should be mechanical_fish I think.
How is this different from a friends-only Livejournal?
Surviving the Drama of the Twitter Awards
Sounds like you should charge per hour rather than on a fixed-bid basis.
I guess I deleted the previous thread. Sorry. This was one of the comments in the deleted thread.
----
1 point by tokenadult 6 minutes ago | link | parent | on: Ask HN: Good math forums?

The definitive site for discussing math is

artofproblemsolving.com

for discussion of contest-style problems.
That works, however some sites return different headers depending on whether they get a HEAD or GET request. -I sends a HEAD request, while -i sends a GET request.
ahh snap, so close, we'll get'em next time.
IIRC, it was full of recently-recorded TV shows. I hypothesized someone was running some DVR software that also shared the shows on the Kazaa network.
They're image/experience stores, which are not all that far from Apple stores. It gives the brand an enlarged presence and a stage to flaunt the company's style, culture, and wealth.
Quite, and this is further evidence of how very far from prime-time Linux is, when you have to just pray that users "know" not to open innocent-looking attachments sent from familiar addresses. Anyone who sneers "but I use pine!" has completely missed the point of this article.
This is a neat idea, but there is at least one subtlety: you need to make sure that it is not possible to cut-and-paste HMAC'd prices from one web page into another. Otherwise the user could ask for a page for an item with a price of $1, receive an HMAC on "$1", and paste that into a page for a different item.

Two possible ways to do this:

1) Use a different HMAC key for each page you generate.
2) HMAC the pair (price,nonce) where nonce never repeats from one page to another. The server has to keep the nonce, as well, i.e. is not obtained from the web page.
Posterous does "roll deep" on HN, but I'm also really excited about this feature.

The general blog semantic of visible/invisible is simple but underpowered: there are a lot of things I want to show to one group of people that would just be noise to another group. This sort of feature lets me segregate my output.
Three hospital worm infection dubbed 'substantive failure'
While this is a feature you can add to other blogs - I think it has a twitter-like appeal - ease of use, adaptable.

Best of luck.
Huge flaw here: employment. Job supply is way too high, and bringing that many people in that soon would create wage depression, deflation, etc.
Reminds me of that story about perl & love. The things that will last - things that are really important - are those that have people working on them. It's unavoidable so long as we're a civilization of humans.
How You Become Us?
I would think it depends on the project. If it's estimated to be above $1,000.00 I would typically require a contract and a fixed fee. Otherwise, it's probably best to do things by the hour.
Why Facebook's Future is Mobile
Keep track of which open technologies are safe to use in real browsers
I'll expand my comment that was haphazardly deleted with the duplicate post.

The definitive site for discussing math is

artofproblemsolving.com

for discussion of contest-style problems.

Some of the other online forums are restricted to persons in particular professional associations; Art of Problem Solving is open to anyone, and well moderated.
Right of which I was considering, so opposed to quoting a price quote an amount of time at an hourly rate. . .while most of the work is pretty easy ussually in Photoshop, CSS, XHTML, PHP, or Javascript. . .could you suggest how much a Senior in college should be charging for these services on an hourly basis?

I'm guessing somewhere in between $10-$30/hr
As the cost of labor drops the costs of providing free services will also drop. I can see the world of 2100 having a 95% unemployment rate and zero social unrest. A 10% flat tax could easily support a standard of living well in excess of what we are used to today and the few people that are employed could have access to the new inventions well before the rest of the population.

Put another way, I would rather do most things with 10 million today than 50 million (inflation adjusted) in 1900. You could get more manpower back in 1900, but I would rather have 1 guy using a backed loader than 10 people using shovels.
US lawmaker injects ISP throttle into Obama rescue package
I wonder what's the current usage breakup of 3 major webmail providers - Yahoo, GMail and Hotmail! But having used all 3, Hotmail is the crappiest of all. And this news about POP3 doesn't belong to this century. If they made this announcement in late 90's it would have made sense.
Hotmail survival is the same story as IE being the most popular browser - the MS factor! Success of both proves that the smart people are way outnumbered by stupid people on earth!
I think there is a more positive side to this in software than in other forms of automation because software has massively lower capital costs than robotically automating a manufacturing plant. Simplistically, when it requires a large amount of capital to increase productivity, the gains will go to the source of the capital not to employees. GM employees would be hard pressed to start a new car company, and Canfor employees are going to find it tough to start a new mill. But we've seen how software improvements have dropped the costs of running some businesses so low that many more people can run a business than before. If you can't get a job at a company because of software making things efficient, you can probably find a couple of people and compete with them, or do something completely new.
I never ever upvote witty statements; I think that was the first time. Far too well done.
The Shoulder to Cry On: Handling Layoffs
In Silicon Valley, the pace of layoffs seems to be increasing dramatically. Grab lunch in San Jose or coffee in Sunnyvale, and you’ll notice that all conversation around you will be about layoffs...
If you're going to do an up-front quote, it's important to have an agreed-upon task list with your client. You don't have to go overboard on it, but if you don't have anything written down it's too easy for the client to sneak work onto your plate.

The case you mentioned where the client nitpicks the design once it's built is pretty common. It's a natural thing to do when there are no constraints on the project.

I find it helpful to have an agreed-upon maximum period of time that will be spent on a design review, to be conducted at the end of the project. If the client asks for too many tweaks and you go over that agreed-upon chunk of time, you start billing hourly.
Ask HN: Good businesses for entrepreneurs to start in a recession?
Hi,

I've never posted here before but I've read Hacker News for quite a while and think it's full of great people.

I think it would be interesting to have a discussion on good ideas for starting a new business for people out of work.

I've been racking my brains for a while now, and I have a few different ideas I'm going to explore further and maybe venture into if they look profitable.

Anyway, I'll post one of them here and ask what you guys think, and maybe that will get the ball rolling and you can contribute your own ideas.
Right, but the main hindrance to micropayments seems to be the immense effort funding your account directly from a bank account. This is caused by the KYC laws instituted by the government to prevent laundering.
You charge "what the market will bear". Definitely towards the higher end of that range, maybe more depending on where you live.
Marshall is considering an distant future economy where, essentially, only executives get paid; all low-wage jobs have been automated away.

For such an economy to function, you'd need an "extreme income tax" to redistribute wealth. Otherwise, the executives would be making ultra-cheap products that no average person could buy, because he wouldn't have a salary to afford it.
Portland Ten launching new incubator program, charges entrepreneurs $1500
Portland 10 is new program in PDX aimed at lifting the local startup scene. It claims to be like Y Combinator, yet charges entrepreneurs (it does list this as the single caveat of being non Y Combinator like on the about page), and has a $100 quit your day job challenge. Seems different in many other ways in practice and in spirit. It's fine to start a consulting business, but is it ok to market themselves this way? Should they be cut some slack?
My apologies. I inadvertently deleted the thread.
My pick would be the Flash plugin.