skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The advice that everyone trots out on HN whenever someone mentions hourly rates of BILL BY VALUE CREATED!!1 goes beyond being trite: it's confusing and damaging.

One of the most important things I ever did was work out my hourly rate, using exactly the method outlined in this post.

If you're early in your career, you can't just waltz in and say you're going to charge someone $4,000 to write them an email responder sequence.

By working out the inelastic base hourly rate at which you need to work in order to earn a level of salary you ensure that:

1) You know exactly what your opportunity cost is versus getting a job (ie. you are making a conscious decision to work for $40k/year instead of the $90k/year you could earn if you went and got a job somewhere)

2) You know that when it's time to scale, what you'll have to be able to charge in order to hire someone at "market rates"

3) It makes your negotiating position much much stronger - when people try to screw you down on price you know precisely where your "bottom line" is - at what point am I losing money here?

If you want to bill based on value created, that's great and it's something you can achieve once you've developed a strong position in the market and a bit of a track record.

Up until that point (and even afterwards) it's vitally important to know the base cost of an hour of your (or your employees time).

Saying that someone shouldn't work out their base hourly rate because we should all be billing based on value created is like saying that you should run a retail shop and sell everything according to the maximum you think people should pay, but never look at the cost of purchasing the stock in the first place.
How Many Programming Languages Do You Really Need to Know?
There is no way to comment on these. As pointed out, many of the things exist, but the submitter is merely unaware.

>Email ‘To:’ field randomizer https://medium.com/products-i-wish-existed/5dc3f5cd08ab

For example, it hurts me inside that I cannot tell this guy to use "bcc:"
For my tests I used the default compression levels, so 6 (out of 1-9) for gzip, 6 (out of 1-9) for xz, and 15 (out of 5-1000) for zopfli. My input was the linux kernel 3.8.1 source tarball. This was run on a macbook pro with OS X 10.8.2 and a 2.2 GHZ i7 processor.

time size format
n/a 987640 uncompressed
18.44 210896 gzip
281.44 143128 xz
3604.21 200640 zopfil
Fyi, I believe this is actually a gay couple given the author's name is Peter and his partner is named Danny.
Medium just became an interesting site. It's @ev's new project? Wow. Decent design, and lots of cool collections of articles. Check the home page.
Simple.com lets you set goals and automatically sets the right amount of money aside for you to reach that goal at your desired date.

I have 5 invites if anyone needs one.
Worst case it hit's one of the existing moons and you end up with a lot of crap in orbit. You would still be able to land easily, it would just make keeping satellites alive for long periods much harder, and significantly increase the amount of dangerous meteors that hit mars.

However, if it hits the planet your home free.
That is already known to be incorrect. It's quite evident from his chats that he was reading them regularly.

Also, it doesn't matter. No harm, no foul.
I do not believe that you believe that Manning read all or even most of the documents in the dump. I think you believe like I do that there were a large number of documents in that dump he hadn't read, and could not have judged the safety of leaking.
FanWing
Just think, the company spent millions of dollars training this guy in protecting production data, and then instead of treating him like gold, and putting him in charge of fixing all the weaknesses that allowed this to happen, they pushed him out of the company. Stupidity beyond measure.

Not surprised that this was a gaming company because lack of teamwork seems to be endemic in that industry.
I want that badly. Almost badly enough to just make it my business.
> forcing the /usr/lib update

That's the number one thing to remember with pacman, _never_ force an update. That is how 90% [citation needed] of problems arise.
Nice UI! I will give it a try.
It's talking about the reason for being shot in the first place... Gang violence, war, etc.
Nicholas Tse, a HK actor, has some surprising insights on running startups
Sure, great idea. We are working on gallery/community stuff. Lots to do, very exciting :)
Pick up a sport.
Take midday naps (20-30 minutes max).
Cut back on caffeine and alcohol.
Have someone to talk to whom you don't work with.
Get a dog. Take him or her for a walk when you're feeling stressed.
Establish inviolate downtime.
News reports describing the hundreds of innocent people intentionally murdered by the sort of people the US and its allies are fighting against appear on a weekly basis. The suffering has not been invisible: it just doesn't mean what people want it to mean.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_terrorist_incidents,_Ja...
It was confusing and made me think. They're trying to use how long they've been working together (gel-time) as a sale point. But they say it in a way that it is incredibly vague.

In perhaps better words, it confused me, thought I'd share, doesn't really mean anything unless you like reading into things of trivial importance. :)
Those 300+ million citizens he swore to defend deserve the truth and there is no law which justifies them not knowing it. We've lost too much to find so little:

http://costsofwar.org
The difference is that if your nuclear reactor failed to account for a particular type of disaster that never actually materialized, we would not talk about how you are responsible for radiation poisoning the entire population and charge you accordingly.

If the vulnerability in your ruby gem was found and fixed before any reports of actual attacks, and no reports of attacks ever came out, we would not claim that you are responsible for some arbitrary number of businesses getting owned.
These suggestions are helpful to me. I tried writing for 15 minutes every day this year, but I really had a hard time finding what to write.
"The original complainant is much more patient than I am. If that's what I'd gotten as "support" on a paid service when reporting a security breach, I would have closed my account and told them to get fucked."

I agree with the end part of your response, but it's unknown if Forrest is a paid customer.
Ha! If only it were only that ;-). (I know you are being faceticious).

No, really it was a genuinely thoughtful and respectful description of the person. I only hope that at my own level, and at some point in life, people I am associated with think of me in (somewhat) similar terms ;-)
This is classy, glorious and full of honor.

Me personally, I would love to fail like this someday.

The most big wins in my life have come after big failures. This guy is set for something big in life.
(1) risks lawsuit unless there's an ironclad purchase/assignment-of-rights with prior guy

(2) only you and he can weigh that prior progress against his future value, and each of your next-best-options.

(3) still fishy and seems irrelevant; if he's receiving cash-up-front from business for living expenses, that either -- (a) won't be paid back in fail-scenario, or (b) will be paid back, when there's plenty of money and it doesn't matter, in succeed-scenario -- then it's mostly like salary, and there shouldn't be brownie points for calling it a 'loan'.
ASK HN: What is Google Glasses' operating system?
Oops, my fault for not paying attention to details.

Still, who adopts a child spontaneously without consulting their parter?

The real miracle here is the partner that didn't leave him over it.
I understand why people praise these frameworks but in my case The Semantic Grid [1] + HTML5 Boilerplate [2] + Nib [3] is all I need to get started with any web project. I first prototype in vector and once I have the general wireframes I start mocking up the layout in HTML+CSS manually. Once the layout is done, I style the UI elements from scratch as well. Am I the only one tired of Bootstrap looking sites?

[1] http://semantic.gs/

[2] http://html5boilerplate.com/

[3] http://visionmedia.github.com/nib/
Even if I grant you that for the sake of argument, what you are saying amounts to "he guessed correctly, but only accidentally, so we should still charge him as though he guessed incorrectly."
Highly related, can you make the "visited" link be a different color for the comments link on the main page? I often peruse the comments without clicking on the link, and that isn't reflected in the comments color.

What would be especially nice is if the "visited" state of the links followed my account around from computer to computer. Once that's in place, a little "x" next to each article that I can click to hide it would be magical.
> Deals you expect to close will fall through. Don’t let your business ride on any one client or project — no one owes you anything until a contract is signed. That being said, deals you don’t expect to happen will happen.

This is gold.
Something like "20 combined years of experience" would sound better imo.
I definitely have more money than I had 10 years back, but the feelings I go through when I'm hurt are the same.
Trying to keep ordered notes via Evernote is definitely more difficult that one would expect.

My current solution is OneNote for skydrive.com + Microsoft's OneNote Android app which performs pretty well.
NOTE: I have no affiliation with Tonido, but I found your visceral reaction really sad.

"Your affiliation IS relevant when promoting services, because it means it's not an honest recommendation from a happy user, it's paid shilling."

That's not a fair criticism. In this case, there is an issue with dropbox, and he is pointing to a solution which obviates the problem at hand:

'Check out Tonido Cloud (http://www.tonido.com/cloud/) and host your own dropbox.'

I think the wording was poor, but reading into the website offering it is clear that the company doesn't have access to the local credentials. In this case, since the alternative doesn't suffer from the problem at hand, I think it's fair for him to mention the alternative.
Perfectly fair equity splits- great video
Thank you, Watsi founders, thank you.

rock on
Yes, on that point I see we genuinely disagree.
Manager OKRs, Maker OKRs: How I'd Change Google's Goal Setting Process
A discussion on conflicts of interest
Say you set a session cookie that spans multiple subdomains (cookie domain = `.example.com`).

Now, if one of your authenticated users visits the wrong subdomain, they are directed to a server of name.com's choice.

That server now has access to your user's session ID (using Javascript or PHP or whatever to read the cookie).
Both had a 'tipping point'/threshold mechanism, and IIRC some of ThePoint's early example scenarios were attempting to influence local businesses with the promise of coordinated patronage (or boycott). So distantly related, I think.

ThePoint had a certain Hippie-Dippy earnest utopian vibe, while Groupon seemed to go 180" in the other direction, with mercenary/cynical sales/PR/accounting tactics.

I've wondered if the stark contrast between the lack of uptake when ThePoint offered people the chance to "save the world!", and the exploding interest when Groupon offered "save half off!", helped rationalize the later anything-goes-to-make-a-buck ethos of Groupon.
That is biggest problem I have on my blog. What to write about. This helped a little but not a huge amount. Still stuck.
To me, the most interesting part of this is the switch to Zepto. Can people weigh in on its performance over jQuery, and the overall tradeoffs?
Face to Face communication already encodes emotions and experiences fairly well. What's missing from written and or auditory only communication is the body language side channel. While you can feel fear when reading a novel, and joy when talking on the phone etc it takes a lot more effort to evoke such emotions. What would be really interesting IMO is if you could add that side channel to recorded video etc and really feel what a directory was aiming for etc.

PS: Learning to communicate over a neural link would be at least as hard as learning a new language, which is why I suggest the side channel approach. Body language is useful and much simpler than say Spanish.
I would think it would be more complicated given the population difference in the third world vs. the first world.

That would be pretty interesting though.
It's cool, I'll just re-link it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahmudiyah_killings
It's not even clear that the rolling release will be intended for non-enthusiasts at this point, however as a matter of policy you can be pretty sure that any update applied to the rolling release will need to be tested against users as old as the last LTS.

That means the same sort of transition of config files and libraries that occur on release upgrade would just happen during a normal package install, which is pretty much how it works anyway (a release upgrade isn't much more than a giant group of packages being upgraded together -- all this logic is stored in the packages themselves).
BigDog Throws Cinder Blocks with Huge Robotic Face-Arm
That's an exaggeration, sterilisation should be sufficient.

Edit: I'm being sarcastic.
tl;dr: read http://hastebin.com/raw/gefuxumubu

"your affiliation is quite relevant. When you are talking about something when you have a clear conflict of interest, you need to disclose it. Then at least the reader has the right context in which to make a decision."

I used to think the way you do. Then I entered the financial world. At this point, I've seen so many people talk up their positions without disclosing that I automatically assume everyone has a conflict of interest. Then something really strange happened: I stopped caring about the affiliations and really focused on the veracity of their statements.

I recommend you read http://hastebin.com/raw/gefuxumubu, which is a copy of the zerohedge.com conflicts of interest policy. We are all adults here, and a person's persuasion shouldn't somehow affect your ability to make a rational analysis of the arguments that a person lays out.

In this case, if you bothered to look at the offering, you would see that it indeed obviates the problem that dropbox has all of your emails: when you self-host, the accounts are stored on your servers

Note that I haven't actually tried the service, but this is based on my understanding of the offering. There may be vulnerabilities in their implementation. Who knows. But to immediately dismiss a remark because of a conflict of interest doesn't change the fact that the argument may be factually correct and germane.
The letter is great -- super-gracious, self-deprecating, funny, self-aware. It makes him look good and makes it pretty difficult for other people to criticize or attack him. But I don't think the letter necessarily reveals (1) his true feelings about anything or (2) whether he's a good guy to work for.
Well, are we talking about a personal blog or startup blog? What market are you in? And what are your goals for your blog?
We looked at Stripe as a source of inspiration when we were rebuilding our API: http://developers.box.com/docs/

I've always wondered how this was implemented:

> We keep a per-user version which reflects the state of the API the first time the user made an API request
So? This happens all the time.

"I feel like I have to defend my honor here."

That's a source of the problem. There's no attack, nor nothing to defend. I see a difference in coding styles. I see that cmawhorter react in a way which does nothing to help the process.

If I understand, one of the points of the exchange is that cmawhorter has a peeve against the use of 's === t' while wolfeidau prefers that style. Douglas Crockford, of course, suggests using '===', and it's perfectly acceptable for wolfeidau to require that of any contributed code. That cmawhorter reacts so strongly to others who don't share this peeve disagree suggests that cmawhorter may not be an appropriate collaborator for wolfeidau.

"working with me into making this something you find acceptable"

It is not a reasonable to assume that others are obliged to work with a pull request submitter.
Looks good (loads fast) and I like the coffeescript support.
Would we still blame a company for leaking 6.5 million hashed passwords if the hackers decided for whatever strange reason not to take advantage of it?

Would we blame someone for putting arsenic in their spouse's meal if the spouse coincidentally passed up dinner that night?

Would we blame someone who killed a family of 5 by driving drunk on the road even though he or she is way too impaired to think straight?

Whatever else I believe, I believe people are responsible for their own actions. If I mess up and things still don't go screwy it's luck, not a positive reflection on me.
This story was covered by lots of outlets. I don't understand why you think this is partisan on the Journal's part - seems like a reasonable recap of the story.
Hear, hear. To be dismissed as clock-punchers like that is... well I can't say it's entirely unexpected. I've been dealing with it for years now. I saw an opportunity in college to learn a great programming language that none of my peers were studying and it has paid me very well ever since then. But all along the way, I've received this very attitude, this "oh, you're not a real developer because you use the Evil Closed Source Software." And it's disingenuous, because they gave up on Linux for OS X years ago, with .NET being more open source than any of my former classmates are now working on (well, the ones who didn't finally give up trying to get jobs at Fedora and finally taught themselves C#).

It is just such a turn off. You work hard and do good work and get ignored for a bunch of people who only think they're inventing new things because they've never seen anything outside of Rubython before. So you don't make mention of doing .NET to avoid getting dismissed from the start and then everyone thinks nobody does anything in .NET because they've never heard of it in the pop-tech press.

But I think I'm just about over it. I've got my own core set of code that I use. It makes me super productive. I know I can do anything I set my mind to. I don't need acceptance from the trendy crowd to get good work done.
Bcc is different than what he's describing
Male, 6'2", 250#, athletic, weightlifting and rowing.
(partial (+ 1))
I would love an invite if you still have one to spare. What do you think of Simple.com so far?
This was a nice short read. However, I'd like to see something between this and The Four Steps to the Epiphany. Something that held out its hand, so that I could grab it that would lead me step by step to:

1. Find out what in the hell I'm good at, love doing, and should be doing. Every book and website I read about this leads me to believe that I'm "creative". We'll that's great, but I don't know how to turn that into a business. I've read plenty of "you can do it" but there isn't a lot of "this is what you specifically should be doing because I know you- seriously".

2. Help me get my ass off the couch with a plan. A plan that leads me the way a morbidly obese person could be inspired to start doing small exercises like barely sitting up, but eventually actually get in shape. Not just a book on getting a business plan together. If I wanted one of those, I could spit 20 feet and find one. I mean a plan step-by-step of what I need to do to go from making X at company A to making X on my own, with a limited amount of time making x * 0.75 or x * 0.50.

3. Tell me whether I really need an LLC or just business insurance. Tell me the laws for doing business in my state, in my country, with other states, with other countries. Do I need a VAT id? What is the difference between a quote and contract of work that I'd need to do business with the U.S. government vs. a small company in Germany vs. a small company in Australia? All of these details, but in a really friendly language.

I know there are groups that support entrepreneurs and startups, but most of them don't support them to go international from day one, and they are more geared to evaluate and provide funding so VC's can invest and reap dividends. I have been approached by people around the world that want to pay me for my product or services, but can't because they can't tell me what I'm supposed to be doing.

That's the kind of shit I want to know. I love reading these hopeful posts. But even the most informative don't touch the surface, and the ones that go too far into depth miss the practical stuff.

I know it isn't easy. It sounds like I want everything wrapped in a golden ribbon. Well, I'm getting paid pretty well full-time and though I've always wanted to take the jump, spending years reading about others that have done what I want to do (kind of- if I knew exactly what it was), has gotten me nowhere.

Magical information and assistance like this just doesn't seem to exist.
Yeh, so true. It's a good hint you're shopping right if you have to bend down a lot and, hey, free workout. Also I know a huge number of people who well know how to cook, but just don't get round to it. Something, something delayed gratification, future time orientation, blah. Also, why am I reading hacker news and looking at knowyourmeme when I could be cooking dahl and rice?
Mainly workload and expected results, as well as high standards set for myself.
J2EE: Compare RESTful vs SOAP Web Services
The fact that Conan points out how lucky and rich he is makes his letter a bit better in my opinion. (And let's be frank -- if you watch the film made about Conan's banned from TV tour it's clear he was very hurt by the whole deal.)
The cost of bandwidth and storage is dropping at a faster rate than inflation. Besides, I'd say 90%+ of the blogs on a service like this would be mostly text and low traffic, and $5/month can cover that today several times over.

That said, I'm not sure I'd trust another blogging service by the people that created Posterous. They already had a chance to demonstrate that they would keep the service running for the long haul and they didn't. I'd suggest people take their $5/month and spend it on Wordpress.com.
How to Compress Microsoft Word Documents?
FCC To Investigate Cell Phone Unlocking Ban
Hey, thanks for the ideas. Unfortunately not, I'm in Australia.
Ask HN: How far does a confidentiality agreement go?
I recently parted with a startup after three years to do my own thing. I think it's good to look back before looking forward, so I wrote up a rather long post recapping my three years (mostly relating to my own personal growth, the things I'm good at and the things I didn't enjoy).

As a courtesy I sent it to the CEO to see if he had any objections, which he did. After editing some of the more obvious bits and making the data more vague, I sent it back. There's currently nothing in there that I wouldn't put on a resume (i.e. we used this tech and that tech or I implemented this practice and that practice). After two weeks of hearing nothing, HR responded that it was still chock full of confidential info, that they weren't willing to tell me what was confidential, and that they would be in touch if I posted it.

Is that just bullying? I believe in good faith that there's no actionable "proprietary information" in my post, but it seems like they're making a pretty overt threat. Any advice?
You might want to consider doing laundry more than once a year, but until then: http://www.postmates.com/getitnow
I think this would be the right place to bring this up: Is language support backed in or can everyone write a plug-in for his language? Implementing highlighting, completion and repl for all the different languages users could want seems like an enormous task. At the same time this is where Emacs shines: supporting a new language rudimentary is easy to do, adding more advanced support isn't too hard either. Will users be able to define new language modes?
I guess my opinion is based on person experience, but I am totally open to hearing a different point of view.