skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I used to obtain reasonable estimates like this: get everyone involved together and make a big list of things that need to be done. Everyone independently writes down how hard each thing seems (usually on a relative scale like 1 thru 5). Put the estimates in a spreadsheet and project it onto a wall. For any item where there's significant variance, argue about it until the variance dies down, or break the thing up into smaller tasks and re-estimate. Then take the mean of the estimates for each item. We'd insist on everyone playing along, even if they didn't know very much. The more data points the better.

Nowadays, though, I use the much better algorithm "it's done when it's done". It goes well with the software process, "program our asses off".
BDB is not mentioned, but Lightcloud, a ~500 line Python script is.
Book of Ruby Completed: 425 pages, 300+ Sample Programs, free
I think domain tasting and tarsnap tasting are quite different concepts; I don't see any reason to open 10,000 tarsnap accounts and then ask for refunds. I'm also reminded of Joel's article about how, because he had a no-questions-asked full refund policy, he never had to actually give refunds. When a customer is asking for a refund seems like the worst time to nickel-and-dime them with fees.
If you're going to stick with this model you should definitely add an auto-recharge feature. This is how I use my Skype account. I auto-recharge $10 every time my balance falls below $2. Very convenient. I don't have to have $100 sitting in there for no reason, but I'm never out of credit.
horus?
http://www.upi.com/Top_News/2009/04/17/Man-jumps-from-plane-...
"The Adlair Aviation's two pilots said the man became agitated aboard the King Air 200 turboprop plane Wednesday night, and both tried to calm him down. However, about 110 miles before landing, the man managed to pry open a door and jump out, the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. reported."
My favorite seat is a flat, backless piano bench. Not only does it encourage movement, also does it encourage great posture. ;) It's a bit like sitting on the floor, but a wee bit more ergonomically friendly.

I've never understood the bean bags.
This is the very important part. I probably had my S3 account for a year until one day I dumped hundreds of gigabytes into it. I used S3 because I already had it setup and it was convenient.
It's obviously not. It seems to be more common in American culture, but I don't have enough experience to evaluate the accuracy of this perception.
Also see http://parselets.com for an open source implementation of this from the guys (tectonic and I) who brought you SelectorGadget.
My vote goes to Programming Collective Intelligence (http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596529321/)
Ask HN: Sales book recommendation?
I've been working as a freelancer web/software developer for almost a year now; however, I feel that my sales cycles are long-stretched at best.
I have no intention whatsoever to "blame the economy" (as it seems to be fashionable nowdays); I'll take full responsibility for this, and thus turn to the entreprenour culture blooming around here:

What books, blogs, or fundamental understanding has made the biggest impact on your sales, and bottom line?

(No cliches, please.)
What's up, bot? Google tries new Captcha method
Good point.

One question. If you know the exact location of all the particles as you do this, and you "teleport" them, but at the same time create a copy in the old location with the same quantum information, aren't you back to the same problem?
The label-printing analogy is superb.

I was reminded of something Dan Weinreb recently said:

[A]t the time Common Lisp was designed, it was assumed that many common use cases and patterns could and would be optimized by a "sufficiently clever compiler". [...] Unfortunately, nobody demonstrated such a compiler at the time, and it turned out to be far harder to do than the designers had anticipated.

http://ilc2009.scheming.org/node/7
In my consulting work I see a lot of usage data from sites of all sizes, and there is a correlation between dial-up users and IE6 users.

I assume that dial-up users don't download Microsoft updates because of the download time and the frequency of updates. At this point, it's probably fair to say that IE6 users will only upgrade if they get broadband or replace their computer with one that has a better browser pre-installed. Since money is clearly a factor in both cases, I'm not holding my breath.

Color TV arrived around 1960, and it took 13 years to pass the 50% bar. (Source: http://is.gd/taGM) Clearly, there are some consumers who will only upgrade when something breaks -- probably because they just can't afford to do otherwise.

I actually feel for people who are still using IE6. For whatever reason, it's either impossible or impractical for these people to upgrade.

If you want to design a site that doesn't work with IE6 and you can afford to cut off 10%+ of the general population, just do it and explain (nicely) that the site requires a newer browser. They probably won't upgrade, but you've done your part. No need to resort to trickery.
Asking "aren't women allowed to prefer an alpha male without being accused of wanting to be degraded?" is like "aren't red octagons allowed to have 'STOP' written on them without being accused of being stop signs?"

No one is accusing anything. You don't see the red sign and "accuse" it of being a stop sign. You realize immediately that it is a stop sign (pattern recognition) and behave accordingly. Behaving accordingly with respect to such women is avoiding them entirely.
Finder.
Bruce Sterling is awesome! He's one of the very few people who I'll at least skim pretty much anything he writes, watch all his talks, think about what he says. Sometimes he's wrong, but it's always a great ride. Love the guy.

Funnily enough I basically hate all his books but who cares.
Research on High Performance Web Systems
Had not thought about that. I suppose once one has all the quantum information one needs, one could "splice the signal" into an arbitrary amount of copies. Unless there was some entanglement going on. That is, if Origin Point and Destination Point where put into some kind of EPR entangled state to preclude both points having a "copy" at the same time.
When do we get to start crusading against IE7?
That's a cool idea, but they'll still have to provide an audio CAPTCHA for blind users, which is easy to solve.
"The problem, it seems to me, is discontinuity."

It's really just a philosophical problem. It's also hard to explain why.
brilliant response! curious to see what audi does next...
This one is great as well: http://www.thetalentjungle.com/hospitality_blog/index.php/ar...
Are you minifying your javascript?

500KB is pretty huge. Does every user need that? Perhaps you can use a smaller bootstrap script to pull down only what's needed when it's needed.
Dude, go to college! You should definitely take some online freelance work and submit to topcoder and all that. However, if you have a passion for this area and intend to spend a career in it, just bite the bullet and get a highly theoretical, mathematical education to understand the fundamental truths about information processing and computer architecture that underly every programming project. I don't have much advice about where to go, other than the best place you can afford!
* SPIN Selling by Rackman

* The Sales Bible by Gitomer

* Selling to VITO by Parinello

* Lead Generation for the Complex Sale by Brian Carroll

* http://www.marketingsherpa.com/

* http://blog.startwithalead.com/weblog/

* http://www.linkedin.com/groups?home=&gid=35771&trk=a... This one is a linekdin group that sends out a good email news letter
Really?

https://www.google.com/accounts/NewAccount
I like the web and connectivity because I like making shit, he doesn't address the developer side of it all.
I wonder if we're using the same phrase but meaning two different things.

If what you're calling an "alpha male" is a domineering asshole, I actually agree with you 100%. There are definitely dysfunctional women who like that kind of guy and I've learned to steer clear.

If we're talking about "alpha male" in the evolutionary psychology sense (i.e. conveying confidence, virility, and leadership), though, I think you're incorrect to say that women who look for those traits in a partner are just looking to be degraded.
Geoffrey Moore's Crossing the Chasm

Bosworth/Holland's Customer-Centric Selling
freelancing right now is way too saturated, without feedback/reputation you'll be bidding on projects and noone will pick you since you are untested.

I'd focus on making some niche website for Tunisia since that market should be pretty open
Hey, BDB sounds like a tried and true technology; we can't possibly have that in our app cloud. Only the fad and bleeding edge for us.
Wow, I could barely make out the audio captcha!
Talking about the post office's losses without citing that context [universal service] is disingenuous.

The article devotes much discussion to the Universal Service Obligation; its origin, rationale, effects, and ways it can be updated without generating the tens to hundreds of billions of dollars of losses the USPS is now racking up. Did you read the article?

But personally, I like getting my mail no matter where I live.

Should the rest of the country pay tens to hundreds of billions of dollars for your convenience, if they don't share your preference?
Sure -- it's basically half of YUI. Unminified it's 2.2MB. I've found that the time it takes to parse and load (not download) the javascript can be significant. I get away with showing content quickly and loading scripts in the background while the user is reading.
You're only looking at it from the shipper's perspective, not the receiver's. The postman is a romantic figure because of the recipient, not the sender.

And, frankly, the idea that my letter excludes your letter from the carrier's mailbag is laughable. No, they cannot fit in the same physical space, but there's room for more than one letter in the bag/carrier/truck.
This "leader of the pack" thing is overrated IMO. Being the leader of a bunch of boisterous pussymen doesn't make you attractive, quite the opposite. Depending on the environment, you may appear more attractive being the strong, silent type minding his own business.
A lot of spam operations use humans to solve captchas, so this isn't much of a change for them (actually could make it easier for them).
Is this guy serious? he is confusing justice for stubbornness.
In my experience, if you ask the people who use IE6 why they don't upgrade most of them will respond with something like "What's IE6? Oh you mean Internet Explorer. What's wrong with the one I have?" and then if you finally convince them they they should upgrade you have to explain to them how to do it, which for most people who are still using IE6 can be a big challenge.

My grandmother uses IE6. She says it works and doesn't want to bother with an upgrade. She doesn't care that you app doesn't render properly :)
We, uh, we fixed the glitch. So he won't be receiving a paycheck anymore, so it'll just work itself out naturally.

We always like to avoid confrontation, whenever possible. Problem is solved from your end.
Then you missed a lot of meaty info because of a throwaway line.

Compared to other subsidies the government has been giving bad actors, this USPS subsidy to the credit industry is minor, yes. But it's surprising how merely mentioning it closes your mind to the rest of the analysis. It's almost like you've got a post-hypnotic suggestion preventing you from questioning certain monopolies!
The 100 Best Business Books of All Time has a list of 12 Sales/Marketing books on this page: http://100bestbiz.com/more-on-the-100-best/

The list as a whole is pretty solid.
Wow, that's incredible how much noise they've added. I couldn't make it out myself. Its bordering on unusable IMHO.

Still, I wouldn't be surprised if a computer could get 1 in 4, which is plenty to be effective. They're still only using the 10 digits for the signal.
Ready, Fire, Aim: Zero to $100 Million in No Time Flat by Michael Masterson is pretty good.
"they still go for the strong guy over the "nice" guy"

The antonym to strong is weak, not nice. I think people often forget that girls, particularly sane and intelligent ones, do not reject the prototypical "nice guy" because he is nice but because he is a pushover. That is, weak. You can be strong and nice. In fact, I think the strongest ones usually are "nice" or considerate because they can afford to, whereas at least where I'm moving, being an asshole or abrasive is a sign of weakness.
Coping with change on Scrum projects (part I)
Working for justice can also involve accepting compromises along the way to one's goal.
People who start wars may claim that they are starting wars because of principle when they are really starting them because of expediency.

The author of the submitted blog post is an economist, and as his example points out, if people are FRANK that what they are arguing about is personal expediency, they can usually be persuaded to make reasonable trade-offs that reach a mutual, peaceful agreement. But if people think "justice" (who defines that?) must always be defended to the utmost, they are unlikely to reach agreement with other people who have different ideas of what justice is.

A readily apparent example: is there some basis in "justice" to say which national government should control the territory of east Jerusalem?
Selling the Invisible by Harry Beckwith from the list is a good one.
I have implemented something similar called "Visual captcha", where the user has to pick the cat out from 6 randomized Flickr pictures. The code is freely available and should not be hard to integrate into your own projects. Read more on: http://amix.dk/blog/viewEntry/19338
I am going to stay away from framing content, but I set the recipes to open in new tabs and added the sorting description to the front page. Thanks!
I really like the tone of this article. While informed by the market-liberal/competitive-economics viewpoint, it's not doctrinaire. It's respectful of the historical rationale for the USPS and realistic about the political environment for reform. It makes practical suggestions with examples of the companies and other countries that have succeeded with similar policies.
Which was the joke, right?
It's cool that, according to the article, the BMW ad is by a local dealer, in response to Audi's national campaign.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rivalry_(economics)
All of those (+numbers) next to guest names means that they are bringing additional people, which is added into the tally of total guests.
"Actually modified Newtonian Dynamics or MOND equations are WAAAAY harder to swallow than dark matter."

Maybe, but "dark matter" smells so much like "magical substance we can't observe directly." It's like the controversy over Mercury's orbit—Mercury's orbit was "wrong", so astrophysicists posited another planet, Vulcan, between Mercury and the Sun, that affected Mercury's orbit but (due to the brightness of the sun) was not observable.

Then, after Einstein made his revisions to Newtonian dynamics, they recalculated Mercury's orbit according to Einstein's formulas, and it was right.

The thing is, Einstein's physical equations were, for all intents and purposes, the same as Newton's for pretty much everything we had a chance to measure, until we started measuring things like the orbit of Mercury. It wouldn't be that odd if even Einstein's physics are, on the galactic scale, only approximate in their own right--close enough for GPS to work but not close enough to explain galaxies.

Or maybe there is dark matter. I'm not qualified to give a good judgment.
How does car advertising work? Do the manufacturers compensate dealerships for doing ads? Do dealerships pay a monthly fee to help the manufacturer with marketing efforts? I've always wondered how that works...
Microeconomics of the Consumer Web.
Sorry for the mistake. When you do a normal "ln -s" on the console, it looks exactly the same as an alias in the Finder with the little arrow overlay, which is why I was confused.
Also it's sometimes used as porn-bait (i.e. enter captcha to enter the "free" site).

Human solving is pretty cheap too. I've heard quotes about $2 for 1000 captchas. I guess with 1 click instead of 5-7 letters + enter - it's going to be cents per thousand soon enough, cause you don't even need to know keyboard well or type fast enough. So, I'd say that might be a step backwards.
Bob Bly.
he doesn't address the developer side of it all

Well, not to put too fine a point on it: We're a vanishingly small percentage of humanity.

What we think about the web is disproportionately important, because people who build the web have a certain amount of power to control how people use it by tweaking the design. But, ultimately, we don't get to choose how the medium is used, any more than the makers of the atomic bomb got to choose how that was used... or the people who write music and books get to decide how their work will be reviewed and who will quote from it.
Friedman quotes the mild, pleading, bumper-sticker form of the attitude he is criticizing: "If you want peace, work for justice".

There's also the group-chant version: "No justice, no peace". In that form, it's almost a threat: agree with us or we'll riot.
If only I could pay $1 a month to make Facebook articles go away...
This is why I don't enjoy talking politics with many groups of people. If someone assumes having the wrong opinions is evil, then the discussion is likely to be uninteresting and achieve nothing more than hurt feelings.

Once having the right opinions becomes a matter of justice, then you might as well end the discussion right there.

While I agreed with a lot of their positions, in retrospect the anti-Bush movement was bad for the level of discourse in this country. People became accustomed to dismissing their opponents as evil idiots, and this phenomenon is especially noticeable among my generation.

This relates to Paul Graham's "Small Identity" post. Having a small identity probably correlates with having a smaller domain where one invokes passionate moral outrage.
I find this post pretty interesting for a couple reasons.

First, doing a quick wikipedia search tells me that he is a law professor at Santa Clara University (where I went to undergrad) which is a Roman Catholic Jesuit institution. He is an atheist.

Second, he's basically arguing that the common slogan that people working for social justice often say "if you want peace, work for justice" is rather..hmm..presumptuous?

I haven't read any of his books, but it seems like such a radical position. I wonder where he gets his beliefs, because certainly the institution that he works at is exemplary in promoting compromise...especially when it comes to religious thought.
Perhaps as a publishing protocol Atom is a failure, but the related subscription protocol still has legs.
Tunisia don't connect to Internet alot, also they are not really interested on HighTech in the exception of few around the web.
The Web of Data: Creating Machine-Accessible Information
Damn and blast, where is the podcast of the Bruce Sterling SXSW talk? It doesn't appear to be up here yet:

http://sxsw.com/taxonomy/term/44

I'm tired of all these bits-and-pieces leaks. Sterling's one-liners are much more fun -- and often make rather more sense -- in context.

I suppose, if I had been willing to spend more money, I could have just gone to SXSW and heard Sterling in person. But, instead, I have to wait like a mendicant for them to get around to dribbling it out to me. Maybe this is what Sterling was talking about.
Are your rates public on your site? If not, I'd start there. If your sales cycles are long, there's nothing that will qualify leads faster.

If Brian Fling can do it, so can you: http://www.flingmedia.com/contact/ (drop-down under New Project Request)
can't someone figure out an anti-spam method that doesn't require a captcha? I mean its not like captchas even work, I'm yet to see one that works 100%
If you think the US tax system is bad, get a job in Canada or Europe. I've done this and am dealing with the combination of lower income, higher taxes and currency fluctuations. However, it's interesting work so it's an acceptable tradeoff (and we've been able to lower expenses and expectations).
Yes and no. Yes insofar as a majority of the Western (United States and EU to a lesser degree) military actions post-Cold War have been for humanitarian reasons; Kosovo, Somalia, original Iraq war, etc. We (the West) sent troops into the situation not because our national interests were threatened, but because some brutal dictator / warlord / whatever was committing genocide / murdering all his people / etc. And we (again, the West) thought this was wrong. So there is a moral component here.

However, these military actions represent a small fraction of the wars going on around the world, most of which are internal civil conflict; Chad, Nigeria, ethnic conflict and insurgency in India, etc. Not really much of a moral component in these conflicts.
Highly recommend - Selling the Wheel!
I did some freelancing couple of years back. If you need a steady income then learn PHP and graphics design. I mean you should be really good at either PHP or graphics design (better yet, be good at both). Be patient, start small and just hang in there. You will win projects. If you're lucky, you will be probably find some good clients that will stick with you for a long time but this is a rarity. I'm honestly not too sure if you can make a career out of it. However, your goal should be to earn enough money so that you can get a good CS degree in near future. You can start with odesk.com, rentacoder.com as these are free , however, competition is fierce. Good luck, mate.
Crossing the Chasm is a good book, but as a sales book for a freelancer?
I think what's worst about the US system is that it's confusing and arbitrary and has tons of loopholes.

Also, the US is one of the few countries that still taxes you even if you don't live in the country.
Sure anyone can call anything they want "just". But for the most part they're wrong. I'm not going to dance around saying that a moral is what you want it to be. Moral relativism is for the spineless.

There are certain fundamental truths. Sure, there might be some shades of gray, but white and black exist in the world. The lens through which true justice be viewed is: how does taking one action over another effect the advancement of the human condition. Therefore, as evidenced by history, justice sits on the side of freedom.
I wonder how difficult would it be to include support for SQLite right there in the browser, or at least an ECMAScript implementation... Kinda like Adobe did with AIR.
I agree, my use of the term "leader of the pack" was imprecise. Women are attracted to a mix of strength, status, command, and dominance. If you are a leader of a low-status pack, or a pack that appears desperate and trying to hard, it's not going to help you very much.
you need to look to the future, sure right now its probably pretty weak, but if you get your market share now, 5 years from now when everyone is on the web, you'll be the eBay, Craigslist, Digg, Facebook for your region.
How to Win Friends & Influence People (http://www.amazon.com/How-Win-Friends-Influence-People/dp/06...) - Seriously.
Is that really effective? Just take some face detection code and have it learn what cat fur looks like instead.
Sign up for Gigapedia.org and you can get it. Email me if you have questions about how to DL it.
> People who start wars may claim that they are starting wars because of principle when they are really starting them because of expediency.

This makes it very hard to evaluate whether "if you want war, work for justice" is a true statement. (The counterargument runs something like "appeasement never works, etc. etc." Of course, the proponents of this position find lots of examples where appeasement fails, but that's obviously only half the story.)