skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
True, NPR can't compete in the internet for information, because the internet itself is the source of much of the news they synthesize.

I can also add that what I value most about NPR is hard to translate to a la carte online format. You see, NPR fits into my daily schedule: I'm doing a certain thing when Morning Edition is on, another thing when Diane Rehm or Kojo Namdi is on, yet another thing when it's time for Market Place or Wait Wait Don't Tell Me, or This American Life or All Things Considered.

During those times I'm probably driving, at the office, or doing household chores. NPR on the radio allows me to multitask. NPR on the Internet will have to compete with my work, which is on the computer, my visual entertainment (Hulu, Netflix) which is also on the computer, and also compete with incoming mail and other electronic chores. Allocating an specific time for "NPR" and hearing my news programs out of order at different times isn't just the same.

I listen to NPR when I'm overseas, and my listening schedule mimics the exact broadcast times of WAMU, my local Washington DC NPR affiliate. Morning Edition just doesn't make sense to me after 9AM :-P
The anger is because domains cost $10 and SSL Certificates cost $1000.

And you're telling me that companies that have to buy servers (which break, go obsolete, and require power in the meantime), racks, cooling, warehouse space, backup power, and fast and redundant Internet connections, and setup a good way for people to manage their hosting (not to mention support!) "don't have a lot of the large up-front an[d] annual costs"?
You're probably right. But there's a bigger problem here: big corporations make the consumer (the developer in this case) sign the most onerous contract imaginable and say "oh, we'd never enforce it that way."

When the poop hits the fan, they have all the legal leeway they want to strong arm you and you cannot do jack. My favorite example of this is the forced arbitration clauses, where you consent not to even go to court.

The average consumer does not have sufficient access access to legal counsel to enter into such contracts prudently.

This whole arrangement is a slap in the face of equal protection under law principle. The relative cost of legal representation for a large corporate entity is nothing compared to me trying to get legal opinion on my AT&T contract (shudder).
And those people shouldn't be surprised if they remain poor.

This article is all about the deprivations that poor students experience in relation to rich students. I am merely pointing out that studying sociology is an ineffective way of alleviating these deprivations.

I missed the paragraph in the article that discussed how much happier they were than everybody else because they weren't pursuing money, but that is certainly another topic that can be discussed.

I do, however, think it odd that you can walk through a poor, violent ghetto and find a family who has a son that scored 1500 on the SAT and went to a good college. Maybe he is pursuing something "more important than money", but it would seem that money would be really important to someone in his situation.

"Following your dreams" is important, but it is foolish to dismiss the value of avoiding material deprivation and being financially independent.
What more can Stanford really do?

He goes there tuition free, his room and board are free, and he gets subsidized work during the summer. It was two weeks between when the semester ended and he started receiving his summer work paychecks - he really couldn't have saved up enough cash to cover two weeks over the course of a year?

On top of all that, he frankly has no right to be at Stanford with a 1300 on his SAT. I had a friend who was rejected from Stanford even though he was class valedictorian (at a ludicrously competitive school), captain of several school teams, and had a 1590 SAT.

He might be a bit bright, but Stanford has already bent over backwards to accommodate him. It's his fault if he isn't willing to do a little work himself. How hard is it to do 10 hours/week of research (paying $15/hr) during the school year? I (and most other people I know) often do so. He'd have several thousand dollars saved up without too much trouble (since Stanford is already paying all his expenses).
Welcome to running a business, it sucks sometimes. It's often hard to get paid when you're not a W2 employee. The worst stories here are still better than dealing with most affiliate/ad agencies, who constantly try to shift their terms to net-60, net-90, net-120.. and pay late anyway. It seems like this is the default strategy of all B2B commerce.

The good news is that unlike most people who owe businesses money, Apple is too big to get away with sticking it to their developers for too long, and things will probably improve soon. If not, there's always the class-action lawsuit option..
I was suggesting this more for sites like hulu, but when I try the numbers it's actually not unrealistic.

3 pounds is roughly $4.40 USD. The cheapest EC2 instance is $0.10/hour, which would give you 44 hours for that price.

I don't know what bitrate last.fm streams at, but assuming it's 128 kbps, 44 hours would be about 2.5 GB transfer, or $0.25. edit: actually, $0.50 because the data goes in and out of the servers. I'm going off the top of my head here, but I think the rate is $0.10/GB

I figure I've listened to about 65 hours of music in the last month, so if I replaced half of that with last.fm (For example, I can't use last.fm from the gym), I'd come out ahead.

Of course, it wouldn't be worth the hassle for last.fm (killing and starting instances every time you want to play music? not for me). I may try it with hulu though, just for fun.
Ask HN: Best way to get freelance work without being treated like a commodity code monkey?
I have many years of programming experience in the U.S. under my belt but when it comes to finding freelance work I'm completely in the dark. One of my fears is that unlike being an in-house developer, a freelancer is at risk whenever s/he attempts to find a new gig, of being treated as a low-cost commodity service without any attention paid to years of experience, diversity of knowledge, etc. Sites like odesk put an American programmer in the same ring with his/her lower cost counterparts in other areas of the world, many of whom are more than capable of competing in terms of skills and intelligence. What's a good way to look for freelance work (in NYC) without competing purely on cost?. Are there particular freelance websites that are more oriented towards dometic US projects and talent? I'm wondering whether anyone has used sites like http://www.rentacoder.com or http://www.elance.com/ or http://freelanceswitch.com/
They all seem to expose an American programmer to the problem I'm talking about. Are there any others I haven't heard of that might be more favorable?
Great detailed feedback! I really appreciate this. Thanks.
Maybe they go into sociology because they are good at it, or they enjoy it, or they can't find anything more lucrative, or (most likely of all) it was the first interesting opportunity to cross their path... exactly the same reasons anybody else would do it.
GE's Augmented Reality Demo
On the one hand, a house is one of the only forms of leveraged investments the majority of the population will ever have access to.

On the other hand, it's a massive liability. Reduced mobility, little to no protection against disasters(fire, flood, tornado), property taxes, maintenance and repairs, unpredictable market forces, and so on.

I rent a house.. it's the best of both worlds.
I agree. The idea is great, and would save some dev time and learning about various communication streams, but it's not affordable.

Were we to switch to MessagePub just for the e-mails we send from JamLegend for friend requests, challenges, referrals, new songs, etc, our communication costs would increase by 600%. For reference, we use sent.com at a price of $25 for 6 months, which lets us send up to 2K messages/hour. Paying $2500/month would be a vertical hike from $4.16/month. I know your pricing page lists that custom solutions are available for high volume, but I can't imagine that the price would come down enough to be reasonable.

So, I think the idea of one service to hit your users on whatever communication medium they like is cool, but the pricing isn't affordable at scale. Think about it like this: if somebody else had built MessagePub, could you afford to have ShareMeme use it?

It makes more sense for products that don't send a lot of messages, and need to be able to send to all sorts of devices. One example that comes to mind is for server monitoring: if a server is misbehaving, you want to be notified, and if you don't see the first message, the message needs to escalate quickly on multiple mediums, perhaps to other people.
NY Times Article: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/09/technology/09topps.html?_r...

"Webcam Brings 3-D to Topps Sports Cards"
That's why writing a blog is such a great idea. If you keep one not for marketing but just for personal thoughts, you find that you learn more about yourself than you'd expect. (I'm nearing my blog's one-year anniversary, and I find that writing in it has really solidified a lot of my views, among other things.)
http://www.springerlink.com/content/022501181p3h764l/
Mix 1 part bad clone of 2002-era hotornot, add two tea spoons of sexist subject matter, three pieces of non-obvious business or hack value. Stir together under slow fire and add a cup of 43 minute old account and half a slice of URL submission without a paragraph of introduction.

I will not feel bad for flagging this as SPAM.
Facebook: Responding to Your Feedback
Access Enablement or Accessibility?
Mark Pilgrim and Sam Ruby have been going back and forth and back again about accessibility and in particular the SVG images on Sam’s blog. In Mark’s latest post he explains the somewhat crazy world of access enablement
Am I missing something? Why would you expect a connection?
This guy is awesome! I bought his audio book and "loaned" the MP3s to a friend. He has since begun re-writing many of his essays, AND has enrolled for a $3,000 summer course with Zinsser in NYC. If that's not a ringing anti-DRM endorsement, I don't know what is.
PayPal, Amazon's payments API, or Google Checkout. And possibly others I don't know about.
The article is a bit inflammatory as it does not give much detail. Here is the entire section 6.3 which mentions the 90 refund policy:

"6.3 In the event that Apple receives any notice or claim from any end-user that: (i) the end-user
wishes to cancel its license to any of the Licensed Applications within ninety (90) days of the date of
download of that Licensed Application by that end-user; or (ii) a Licensed Application fails to conform to
Your specifications or Your product warranty or the requirements of any applicable law, Apple may refund
to the end-user the full amount of the price paid by the end-user for that Licensed Application. In the
event that Apple refunds any such price to an end-user, You shall reimburse, or grant Apple a credit for,
an amount equal to the price for that Licensed Application. Apple will have the right to retain its
commission on the sale of that Licensed Application, notwithstanding the refund of the price to the end-
user."

You can see a copy of the full agreement in this techcrunch article (also posted to HN):

http://tinyurl.com/c6szk2
IPhone Makes Up 50 Percent of Smartphone Web Traffic In U.S., Android Already 5 Percent
1) Escrow based freelance sites are a scam. Rentacoder is an outright scam. Odesk will have a little nice timer on the desk and the project owner will be able to track your progress as 1second precision. Too micromanaged.

2) There is nothing inherently precious about an "American Programmer", Yourdon's 15 year old polemic notwithstanding.

3) Craigslist. Nice portfolio. Cocktail parties. You will end up doing software, hardware and websites, prepare for that. You will end up moving to the business side of things, asking management types what they need done and you will be writing tens of emails a day in correspondence, meeting people face to face and juicing software requirements out of one off-remarks that people make. You might also end up becoming an integrator or procure hardware and software licenses.

Just don't expect to write fancy systems software for a living and brush up on your PHP and system administration. It's a million-hat job.
What's the best way if you're a non-profit? Are there any banks or credit card processors who would waive fees for non-profits?
Right, everything's out there if you're willing to dig for it. It would be nice to have everything in one place, though. I'm not saying it's hard, it would just be nice if it were all organized ahead of time.
mmm scrolling iframe, classy.
"we just wanna try if this could work"

You could have known if it could "work" the moment you edited the source code of your web app and hit reload of your browser. Elementary one-table database backed web app. And if you mean commercial success or wide appeal, you have hotornot to look at.

This sexist submission is reddit-grade my friend. I suggest you retool it as a clearinghouse for supporting women in politics, at least you get to keep the domain then.

"how can I do a paragraph of introduction, you mean just a first comment?"

You should see an edit link right next to your story submission. Click it. The two little text input areas are for title and link. The slightly larger textarea is where you put your summary. A little background would be nice.
I wouldn't say that it feels like I have more protection. I trust my bank. I bank with USAA and I have never had any problems. I ended up filing an insurance claim on an item my dad bought me, and I'm pleased with how it turned out. So basically, I'm a customer for life.

I have not heard good things about Paypal. There are a lot of stories about people getting ripped off using paypal. And as a seller, it is risky. One scam is to buy something off of Paypal, report it as destroyed, and then ship back worthless material.

Paypal returns money to fraud victim, sends him to collections:http://consumerist.com/5041902/paypal-refunds-50-defraud-sic...

Customer gets billed twice, Paypal does nothing:http://consumerist.com/5048218/blockbuster-double-dips-in-pa...

Destroyed Item scam:http://consumerist.com/5159479/ebay-scammer-says-pc-destroye...

More complaints:http://www.consumeraffairs.com/online/paypal.html

So basically, I trust my bank's customer service, and I don't trust Paypal's customer service. So I view Paypal as a potential headache if I have a problem with a purchase. I have generally had good experiences with Amazon, so there is no negative association with that brand, but I don't feel like I really need more protection than my bank gives me.
Panda3D, developed by Disney and given to CMU for research. One real MMO built off of it, Pirates of the Caribbean.
Just to clarify, I wasn't saying there is anything precious about an American programmer versus programmers in other countries. What's precious to me is my ability to pay the rent. And finding a job would be a nice first step. As I said in my original post, I understand that foreign programmers are more than able to compete with me on every measure. Except that I'm here in NYC and they're not. So if that's the only advantage that I have, how can I best use that? I'm not making any judgments here. Or if I seemed to, I certainly didn't intend to convey that because that's not the way I think. Nevertheless, I appreciate your well-considered response. It sounds like it comes from some real experience with Craigslist-based gigs and sounds pretty realistic. Thanks for the feedback.
One of the Spreedly cofounders is a PCI expert, and we're building the application with PCI compliance in mind. Security's a big deal for us, and for now we're focused on the practicalities of being secure rather than the (expensive, time-consuming) trappings of being certified as secure. We'll definitely get our gold sticker eventually, but not quite yet. In the meantime, we have a constant focus on security and spend regular time looking at the platform through that lens.
Thanks for that link, it was fantastic. It remained mostly non-technical and yet was still a great nerd read. I always thought Carmack wrote fun stuff (and not just in code.)
Picwing launches a new product: Picwing Automatic Prints
You're in a position to test providers for conversion rates, but $19/mo is too much? That seems crazy to me.
Life After Google
That fits what they told me pre-nda (at least, the $1k/mo minimum). They did hint that we could get a $500/mo minimum, but never really said much about it.
Makes you wonder why ISPs are not discarding packets with spoofed addresses, instead of letting them escape into the greater internet. Is it too expensive to do? My knowledge is a bit rusty, but isn't this a common router function?
Yeah, that works. I mentioned computing convex hulls because I wasn't sure whether your CAD program exports "manifold" meshes, that is, closed polygonal meshes where each edge is connected to exactly two faces. When a mesh is manifold, it is possible to compute whether a point in space lies within or outside of the mesh, for example. It is also possible to compute the mesh's mass properties. In the video game industry, artists create models with techniques that are much less precise than CAD techniques, and so non-manifold meshes are very common, which makes them difficult to analyze in physical ways. The solution to that problem is to decompose the mesh into a set of convex hulls, then analyze the convex hulls.

The other reason I mentioned convex hull computation is because PhysX can only simulate dynamic actors that are composed of boxes, spheres, capsules, and convex hulls, IIRC. Arbitrary polygon meshes aren't supported for dynamic actors, because they are very difficult to simulate in realtime. So if you wanted to use PhysX for dynamics simulations, you would probably need to decompose your model into a set of convex hulls.

Good luck -- if you need any assistance with PhysX, feel free to contact me at shawnpresser@gmail.com.
It's bad because the expectation you set with your users is that that service is free.

With last.fm, it was free, but you could upgrade if you wanted to. Until this point in time, it wasn't "free, but only if you're from the right country". Had that been stated in the beginning, they wouldn't have been as successful and probably wouldn't have been acquired by the CBS.

They basically did the worst thing possible. They've collected user data, which they needed for their recommendation engine. They got users to fill out information about the bands whose music was on the site. Now, they're cashing in.

As DHH and 37signals and various other people have said: Don't be afraid to charge for your product.

They screwed up and now they will face the wrath of the community.
Clean the earth in 26 days
Facebook Relents: Users Get More Control With Redesign Tweaks
Be careful... http://groups.google.com/group/phonegap/browse_thread/thread...
Funny timing.

It appears that Apple is rejecting iPhone apps built with PhoneGap.

http://groups.google.com/group/phonegap/browse_thread/thread...
I think we read it different ways. I read this as a "fish out of water" story, not a "sucks to be them" story.

Well off families tend to promote well-offness as a virtue to be striven for. Poor families don't tend to do that.

I feel like you're leaving out this whole gap between rich and living in the ghetto. There's, you know, middle class, which is where someone getting bachelors degree from Stanford and a PhD from Notre Dame in sociology is going to land.
Here is a list of all the recent CL computer gigs in NYC that demand only a local candidate:

http://newyork.craigslist.org/search/cpg?query=local

Cast your social net wide and deep. Talk to everyone. Usually you start your freelancing career with accounts you get from previous employers, coworkers or people in your daily life who know what you do AND that you're available for freelancing work.

Here is a tip: instead of just reading the available jobs section, read the services offered section. What might seem to you as "competition" might just be someone with complementary skillsets. Partner with them. Try a post like "software engineer seeks competent business person"; grab everyone who replies to you and kick some ideas back and forth. Offer them hefty cuts and they will go out and source you a project.

Scratch backs and offer kickbacks. Most people just need a "computer guy" and they have no clue what sort of service they need. Offer free consulting help ("hey, let me come with you for that meeting, I can suss out the guy for you and see if he is really good", etc.) Once people consider you "their guy", they will turn to you for help.

However, it takes ALLOT of fucking socializing, chit chatting, catching up and going out for coffee and beer. You're gonna kiss the REPL and that debugger good bye for a few months my friend.

P.S. Don't hesitate to take a side white-collar gig (sales, support, billing, etc.) you will get some killer domain knowledge, make contacts, and you can always resurface as a software developer when you know of their needs. Right now, in this economy? I wouldn't hold out for that $120k C++ Architect job that we all had a while ago.

Cheers!
With articles like these, it's no surprise that Chronicle is going out of business. I was a low-income student in Staford, this article is a curious mix of misleading and plain wrong. I know that time is ripe for class warfare, but come on.

* Financial aid does not cover housing during the summer because Stanford undergrad is not in session during the summer

* Seeing how Stanford covers tuition and all the expenses for low-income students it's actually cheaper to go to Stanford than to stay at home. It's vastly harder for middle-income families to afford full cost of Stanford, than it is for low-income. Welcome to the modern elite college price discrimination/income redistribution.

* having a car for an undergrad is unnecessary and uncommon in Stanford (it's a large and self-sufficient campus), it's a luxury or cost of doing business if you have an off-campus job.

* there are good opportunities for low-income students got make a little extra money. Taking out a bit more in federally subsidized loans (reasonable if you expect your income to increase past college) and subsidized on-campus jobs which pay more than most post-undergraduate starting salaries would be good options.

* so on, so on ...

The lower-than-Berkeley Pell grant percentage is interesting. In addition to irrational belief that Stanford is "school for rich kids" I'd also point to the following rational reasons:

* Stanford is more selective. You get drastically fewer poor kids as you move to the right of the bell curve.

* Stanford practices affirmative action based on race. Berkeley is prohibited by law from using race and does it based on socio-economic status. Meaning that relatively to Berkeley Stanford discriminates against poor kids to free up space for protected minorities.
Facebook Responds to New Layout Feedback
There's no way to know the address is spoofed without replying to it. It's the same idea as "spoofing" the return address on a letter.
Yea its a botnet and the traffic is spoofed. we never get the same IP twice. Unfortunately it's so much traffic that the firewalls just collapse. Even if you blackhole all traffic they still jump into the blender as soon as they acquire the main ip.
It's also counterbalanced by there being an obviously standard, reasonably portable distribution of Python. You go to Python.org, and there it is.

It took me a while to find a Lisp that I liked, and it certainly wasn't a decision I was prepared to make while I was still trying to learn the basics. (I eventually settled on Chicken Scheme.)
Why are people like Mike Zusman get certificates for already existing domains, which can then be used for extremely effective phishing attacks? The "verification" is a joke at best, harmful at worst.