skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Some advice: Get some clients before you do this. I tried to go contractor after my last job and didn't make any money as I spent most of my first month getting a client, and the second month finalizing the details and working on the project. Two months for $2500 isn't much if it's your only client.

The trouble I encountered was working as a web dev at a marketing agency before. They were strict about working for "potential clients", which meant anybody with money...

My advice: Get at least 5 projects lined up for the foreseeable future (next 3 or 4 months) and also save up about six months of money for bills and your normal expenditures minus savings.

This will help you invest in a business for at least, 8 to 12 months, working with 5 or 6 projects and tiding your other 6 months with savings will be the worst case scenario. Best case you find more clients and don't even get to touching that money.
If the places shown on the map are actually in those locations, then yes, I am very impressed.
Really? Thats odd, I cannot at all. Using Chrome 21 on OSX.
> In general: totally agree.
>
> Exception: when what's being taught is essntially visual.

"Visual" does not imply "video".

- I scan through a bunch of pictures quicker than I can watch a video.
I've found that if you charge a day rate and deliver the things you promise, clients will never worry about time. You still need to have the discipline to get things done, but it takes the pressure off making sure you are billable for a certain number of hours.
You're extremely grumpy. Blaming the victim is not some brave, heroic concept.

People can imagine what it looks like to be in physical danger, and instinct can help them avoid the situations to some degree. It's hard to imagine what it's like being in an unsafe situation on the internet.
Dude its a pun :-)
Lean Startup Machine is Emotionally Challenging
With Lean Startup Machine returning to Toronto October 19-21, I thought I’d write up a few posts to give people an overview of some of the not so obvious things you can expect from the weekend workshop.
Too little, too late. Their brand is tarnished forever and they'll never recover.
If Alice can prove it's her laptop, Bob has to give it back.
hold down the Super key for a list of available shortcuts.
The basic idea is that, in an optimal craft of this kind, there's a flexible bladder containing the expensive helium, surrounded by varying amounts of air. When you want to descend, you pump some helium into a metal container under high pressure, and the helium bladder decreases in size, allowing more air to enter. When you want to ascend, you release some helium into the bladder, which expands and displaces some air. All inside a semi-rigid enclosure.

> They mention that on the descent, they mix outside air with the remaining helium in the ballasts.

If that's true, I gave them too much credit for intelligence. :)

> Helium is expensive, and is only going to get more so in the coming decade or so.

Yes, true, and it's yet another example of something we could be paying attention to before it's too late. But we probably won't.

> Wouldn't it be easier to have a sealed bladder that inflates/deflates with pressure changes?

I have to confess that to me this seemed obvious, because it's more or less how a submarine works (the submarine doesn't have a flexible bladder, it just pushes water around with air, but it's the same basic idea).
I was somewhat hoping that the writer sent a real laptop, but deeply loaded with spyware so he could learn more about the scam operations. (Of course, such a tactic might just learn about a possibly-innocent later repurchaser.)
> The biggest kicker is trying to find a good prepaid with data SIM - in Australia you can walk into any 7-11 and buy a SIM card for $2 and then get on a $2/day unlimited phone/data prepaid plan (i.e. you just charge up and then every day you use it another $2 is taken off your tab). There is NOTHING like that here.

T-Mobile does a plan like this in the U.S., though data is "unlimited" with an asterisk, and you have to order the SIM online. $2 for 2G speeds data, $3 for a limited "4G" allowance. http://prepaid-phones.t-mobile.com/pay-by-the-day-cell-phone...
Very first paragraph of the Wikipedia page: "Nigerian scams (also called Nigerian 419 scams), are a type of advance fee fraud and one of the most common types of confidence frauds in which the victim is defrauded for monetary gain.".

The scam the blog author describes is not of this type. Nigerian scam refers specifically to the type of scam where people want your help "transfering large sums of money out of their country".
It looks like Microsoft product. Give MS's recent track record of UI innovation across a variety of devices, that's a good thing.
Bullshit. Go ask a twelve year old who's going to start creating their online persona this year what Myspace is. They won't know what you're talking about.
I can feel a lot of the same sentiment about working at home. I think its psychologically important to separate your work and personal life. Maybe consider creating room which you only go to work or joining shared office. it really works for me.
"too many ..."

Not if you write your own browser.
If they selected them in a properly random way and had an effect close to 40% then yes, that probably does count as a sample.
> in contrast to your parent's claim that non-rigid aircraft simply lose all control.

But that's exactly right. A large, slow craft like the Macon cannot be controlled in conditions of vertical air motion. Pilot skill is no longer an issue. It's equally true, by the way, for rigid lighter-than-air craft -- once they go outside their controllable envelope, they're in the hands of nature.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Macon_(ZRS-5)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Macon_(ZRS-5)#Disaster
Need to build a multi-lingual website? Edicy is the perfect solution.
Personally being a Texan I wish they would go somewhere else. They come here and try and pass the same damn laws that have strapped California, more government programs, more government oversight, all very annoying. They all act like it was some panacea, if that were the case they wouldn't have need to go someplace else.
The nice thing is, there will be plenty of commercial realestate for new quantum/nano companies to move into once RIM folds up.
The use of horizontal scroll in the video is probably some way from fully refined too - there was no obvious chrome to facilitate the panning, which doesn't often work well outside of touch devices.
So you're suggesting that they replace the perception of a bug (data showing up when it shouldn't) with an actual bug (data not showing up when it should)?
I imagine it takes some time to learn to properly estimate how much to charge for a project. Until then, billing by the hour is a way to build heuristics.
It's complicated. On the one hand, Google's lack of control over their monopoly is good for the consumer, because it means they cannot do all the awful shit that monopolies do, such as market manipulation and locking out new entrants. But it's bad for the consumer as well because one of the symptoms of lack of control is that the user experience is inconsistent. For example, having to root one's phone to end up with a decently usable device is awful for the average user.

We definitely live in interesting times. My professional opinion is that there's room for one or more players in the smartphone OS market. Windows 8 phone could be one, if it catches on. But seems the real demand is for a mobile operating system that has consistent, smooth user experience and a ton of content like iOS, and customizability and open-endedness like Android. Seems unlikely at this point, but with technology, you never know.
waterlesscloud is correct. It's a crime (tax evasion) for you to not pay your state's use taxes. Much more serious than lying to an employer; at least that's legal.
Audio pinterest, sweet!
'Cuz all those other countries that got it better, did so with a pure, laissez-faire market, free of any government intervention.
SciRuby Releases NMatrix 0.0.2
Visual learners, like myself, can look at pictures. It's still more convenient than watching a video IMO.
soon it will have retro caché
But if a small piece of software was installed on your machine it wouldn't be "in the cloud". We know that makes everything better. Ok well not application performance ... or cost ... or usability ... but still, "the cloud".
Looks like BofA rolled out a new web site based on the UI changes from last month when I last used it. In addition to the new Random Accounts feature, it broke the ability to make mortgage payments "Error in mort-review-pmt-module-hemi-mpw-skin".
Software Component as a Service
The GigaOM post on cloud service curation inspired me to write a post from developers point of view!
> I am tempted to find out who this person making $1M and find the dinosaur drawings in the dinosaur lesson plan, and then find who paid the illustrator to draw these things and let them know they are someone is making $1M on their back.

It's also possible that particular plan author is doing everything by the book. There are plans that I've seen that are using properly licensed materials or that use original artwork. My wife is putting together some plans that contain her original materials and illustrations created specifically for the plan by another teacher as an example.

The reason for my comment at the top of this thread is largely due to the number of plans that appear to be not compliant with copyright law and continuing press about how much money some (very few) individuals have made on the site. I have no opinion on any suits resulting from use of the site being winnable for either side.
> Metonymy!

Perfect word. It's not an exaggeration to say that most of our conversations about (a given topic) "A" aren't about "A" at all, but its symbolic or metaphysical version.
Wirefy | EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO CREATE FUNCTIONAL WIREFRAMES
Are you saying that you actually do 11 hours of coding per day plus a few more hours of other work?

It sounds insane to me. Do you work on week-ends too?
As someone who works from home a lot, his advice about working in blocks of time is the most useful to me, as I've started exactly the same thing to keep productivity up. Being able to take breaks and tackle some life chores during the day is an awesome perk of working from home, but you can easily get carried away and miss out on doing any actual paying work.
If this was billed as "FooBar: Justin Timberlake's new music social network" I would have signed up for an invite instantly. However, "sign up for an invite to MySpace" seems uncompelling. It'll be just as hard for them turn around the name MySpace as it would be for a night club that has become passe.

(Maybe it's just me... I also signed up for an invite to WireDoo.)
Have you any source for that? I have no reason to suspect that China has more laws than other countries. The legal system of China is mostly based on various European civil law systems. And since their legal system is more recent it should logically have fewer laws.

According to lawinfochina.com there seem to be 307 active laws (484 if we include decisions on the relevant legal issues). No idea though if that is much compared to other countries but it does not sound that much to me.

http://www.lawinfochina.com/search/SearchLaw.aspx

EDIT: After thinking some more on it 307 sounds like incredibly few laws. About the number you would want in a lean government.
By default, Firefox has an Amazon search listed in the search engine list. Unity lens seem pretty similar.

At present, the Amazon results are only present if you do use the shopping lens or perform an open search. As long as there is an easy way to disable the Amazon results, I don't have a problem with it.
Unity Shopping Lens: Privacy, Security and FUD
Cellphone plans for geeks
To make things clear, Ypander doesn't alter the HN visual design in any way. It just provides a faster way to use it.
Sure, I get that. But most of the people I know in bands use something else - bandcamp,soundcloud, whatever. Those who listen are using spotify, grooveshark, rdio, whatever. Photographers use flickr, instagram, designers use dribbble, etc etc. My friends all chat on facebook, twitter or g+ - the list goes on.

It's great that they're trying - I used to love MySpace! But I can't see why anyone would choose to go back when other services are doing it better and your friends, family, colleagues and celebrities (and where appropriate fans and audiences) are there already.

I hate being negative about it, and I really look forward to trying it - they just have a long road ahead.
I agree! And the mixes feature looks cool. They're definitely plugging a gap in the music market.
Mobilicity's network is even smaller geographically, but both are excellent options for those covered.
Can't believe they spent all this time on a desktop redesign. Should have done mobile-first.
Artist go where the fans are ... Last checked, they aren't on myspace, And most likely this redesign will not change that fact. Also, when was the last time you heard a artist give out the myspace page during and interview?
Scrypt is far-and-away superior to either bcrypt or PBKDF2 on simple financial basis alone... the shit that really counts.

This is why I'm currently porting tarsnap's scrypt as a standalone "libscrypt" with a cleaner-than-chromiumos fork.

Any good hash algorithm should require a minimum of effort and resources (time, storage, $, electricity, etc.) during both hash computation and rekeying events such that attacking to discover the secret would be much too expensive in the required secrecy lifetime (the most basic core of security).
Rockfish Interactive made a mobile app for (and used by) the Mitt Romney campaign. I'm not even sure what "Romney's Agency" means in the title here, but it sounds a bit oversold...
Good stuff. Also, HN is a great source of clients, but you have to be willing to advertise yourself correctly. Many freelancers here write me-too ads that fail to get them noticed. I do attention grabbing ads and them alone have made my practice grow about 500%.
This honestly makes me glad I regained access to my Myspace account and I'm looking forward to trying it out with my bands' pages. I can't think of anyone (bands included) actively touting their Myspace pages but it looks like JT's influence in the company may pay off afterall.
> (I make this observation based on the fact that every post had "12 Connects", "3 Comments" and "2 Shares". Surely if you put this much effort into production of a video you would change these numbers?)

I don't think it says that all. The last thing I do when designing a page is hook it up to a data source.

Nothing in this video looks that difficult to implement. Difficult to make cross-browser compatible, most likely.
Right, but no-one actually programs like that anymore. You expect an exception to be raised in the event of failure. When did you actually write, or even see (no pun intended) code where every function call was followed by an if statement on its return code?

And I say this as an old-skool C guy who does do this in critical sections of code... But for everything else I'm in a language like OCaml that behaves sanely, using a DB like Oracle that behaves sanely.
It's sent in the clear in PPTP and RADIUS. I haven't looked at WPA2 personally, but my understanding is that it is in deployments without properly-authenticated certificates.
I've heard that for many scams it's actually the opposite: They intentionally throw in huge warning flags so that the people who initially "bite" are less likely to have second thoughts later on, and thus the scammer wastes less time chasing false leads. They're basically prequalifying you as a good mark. (There is a good lesson about marketing here too — theoretically "perfect" copy or design may not be ideal for your market, so test and see what provides the best ROI.)
Political war on a Harvard forum
If Adobe were really interested improving the web typography either Myriad Pro would be in the free set (it isn't) or they would change the default font in their creative suites to one of the free fonts (they haven't)
One of my suggestions: sub-contract with one or more web development "house". I've been consulting for 15 years -- and it is one of my favorite ways to work. They do all the work of collecting requirements, billing the client, etc. -- and I get a checklist of items that I sit down and work against, often with a distributed team. Do good work and these places will keep you busy, especially when they are overloaded with work for their in-house teams.
A browser benchmark that has your back: Robohornet
The site looks fine IMHO. If a couple of the buttons were changed from btn-primary (bootstrap blue) you would barely be able to tell.
Set your Instagram Marketing on Fire
I agree, it's wrong for the poster to call it a "Nigerian scam". It doesn't fit the definition of a 419 scam, and it just seems unnecessary as well as likely to encourage people in racism and stereotyping.
I'm really confused by this post. It seems like "linkbait." The author doesn't like gittip because it doesn't pay out well enough, then turns around and dislikes it because people are getting paid. I doubt many gittip users right now think that they are helping to provide a living wage for the artist, or that their tip awakens some dormant passion for the project.
And the other side of that coin, if you just want the articles without comments and fluff, http://skimfeed.com.
This excites me. I would love to see some serious heat in the social networking space, some competition might break the innovation logjam.

We can stop competing on how many people can fit in one vid chat and start actually adding some value again.

Here's hoping there is an app eco-system with serious social channels for mobile.
Yes.

NIST has also specified several other truncated hash functions such as SHA-2-512/256.
Sure. If there is really a multi-million dollar market opportunity, why not build it themselves instead of buying a start-up. The publishers already have the relationships with the schools.
I zoomed in on the area around the author's location and I'm seeing a fair amount of detail surfacing, as well as most of the same locations that are visible on the iOS 6 map. Is it possible that Apple is showing more detail farther away whereas Google requires a tighter zoom?

http://goo.gl/maps/ZQSzI
I'm sorry, I don't understand - I was talking about the gas in the tank on motorcycles (which also ignites from a match and it's pretty damn explosive). Also, hydrogen does not ignite without air, just like gasoline.
How do you find these web development "houses"? Seems like a really sweet gig, all the fun stuff without the chasing dead beats for money hassle.
I read a theory (probably on this site) that using obviously terrible scams helps them select for the most gullible people - e.g. the kind who would wire $500 of their own money back to Nigeria when the laptop arrived and "didn't work", plus a few hundred to cover expenses.
Learning. Applying. Tech.
In a desktop browser? I can believe it. It's the Pinterest interface except horizontal. I see gradients, html5 video, opacity, position fixed. The only unbelievable thing about this video is the lack of loading time to load any content.
Love the "subliminal" soundtrack of the preview "[...] If you break my heart a 2nd time ..."
We actually got a great looking design all ready to go, we just have to find the time to get around and actually code it up! Figured we'd add the functionality to the core product first before sprucing up our site/marketing side of things
Where it says "Paris" on the photo album, its actually a photo from Berlin.
Even if you bill by the day, that is still a certain number of hours to you.

What he is talking about is how difficult it is to work enough "hours" when you are contracting. If you work for a company they pay you to be at your desk 9-5, sure. But in that environment 10 minutes talking to a co-worker as you get a coffee, 15 minutes trying to get the damn printer to work, 5 minutes dashing up to the next floor because the toilet on this one is busted... doesn't matter that much.

When you work as a contractor targets are much more immediate - and if you don't get a days work done on a project that starts to pile up. It's crazy how little things can stack up; I didn't get "enough" done today, really, because the coffee machine in my kitchen was playing silly buggers first thing, and I got distracted fixing it (I know...). That took half an hour off my day and meant I had to try and make it up this evening... but with one thing and another...
Fantastic read! I like how old discoveries can become relevant again. Applications of lateral thinking really make a good read.
well played sir.
> It’s clear that had I gone through with this payment it would have come out of WATSON’s account and not mine.

No it's not clear. You're just looking at some HTML on the screen, it may have come out of some stale cache and have nothing to do with the session's current permissions. You might try to do the transfer and find that the internal state of your session is so hosed that you can't do anything.
The Final Pivot: A Funeral for Failed Startups
That's still something I recall from the days immediately following 9/11.

No airplanes overhead.

Occasional fighter overflights excepted. But where normally every 60 seconds or so a commercial transport (or two) would be heard ... nothing.

This actually impacted weather patterns too -- cloud cover notably diminished as was reported at the time (subsequent studies dispute some of the findings):

http://www.nature.com/news/2002/020808/full/news020805-7.htm...
I agree - I really don't like the language Facebook uses for this. We need the ability to save photos back into your facebook, which facebook considers to be a "Post". We explicitly turn off notifying your friends, so we don't spam the world whenever you save a photo, but facebook still considers this a post and requires the corresponding permissions
#19thcenturyworldproblems
We need a million more social networks.
Im in! would someone please create a kickstarter project like that?

Goal: $400 for mediocre laptop and shipping cost to Nigeria.

$1: you get a photoshots in 5 sec intervals from the moment laptop comes online.

$10: you get a life video-feed from the moment the laptop comes online.
That's how I am... I'm only missing the internet at the grocery store.
I'd still think paying $100 more than the asking price (with no explanation as to why) would be a strong clue something is amiss in this case.

But you're probably right that the use of English and the FBI enforcement letter are obvious only to a subset of people who grew up in a Western, Anglophone culture.
>> "Book Clients Playing With House Money"

This is good advice. I've found that this and working with solo people paying out-of-pocket works fine (providing you get some assurance of payment - I usually get 50% up front). The worst clients I've experienced tend to be people who run a business with 5-10 employees but still have enough time to work with you directly. I work with these types of businesses least but in 3 years of freelance work I've had 3 screw me over.

Here's why I think it happens.

People 'playing with house money' will pay whatever it takes to get the job done because they are removed from the money - it isn't theirs.

Solo people who want work done (usually a website or app idea) want a completed product after paying you half up front. They don't want to bail because they want something to show for their money. They probably can't afford to lose the 50% and get someone else.

The small businesses I mentioned can afford to lose the 50% they pay up front (unlike the solo people). So if what you are doing doesn't meet their exact (constantly evolving) standards they are happy to kill the project. I've found these people constantly make changes to what they want and add extra features (which of course, they say 'just add to the bill'). I try my best to avoid these clients now.