skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>don't bill hourly

I hear this a lot, but I'm not sure how to implement it. Some people have suggested that freelancers ought to bill for the entire project, but in doing so you run the risk of losing money by underestimating the amount of work and time involved. Some have also suggested billing daily instead of hourly, but if the client expects a "day" to mean "8 hours", how is that any different than just billing an hourly rate?

How do you handle your billing?
I use Venmo to send money between friends. It is the ideal way to deal with dinner bills. "Everyone just Venmo me $11". $ is sent immediately to my Venmo balance and I can cash out at any point.

The biggest problem with Venmo was users. Only my close group of friends has Venmo but with co-workers or strangers we have to resort to cash and bill splits.

Pretty much everyone I know has Gmail. Google just made Venmo obsolete.
Serverside. Not static client side files.
Ask HN: Anyone using app.net?
À few month ago there was so much fuss about it, now I don't hear anything. Is anyone here using it ?
No, what it means is that 3rd party clients can still interoperate with Hangouts. What does not work is XMPP the way app engine uses it.
You're assuming perfect information and low inertia, neither of which is true, unfortunately. It takes a loooong time to train someone up to the point where they can do many of the jobs, and by that point, they're very specialized, which makes it hard for them to hop to another opening.
OMG, the next step is self-awareness!
What do you mean it's awfully hard to do? Psychologically?
did for iOS (http://t.nbcnews.com/technology/apple-says-youtube-app-wont-...)

There is a Google YouTube app for iOS, though.
Free-as-in-freedom replacements for many services do exist. By and large nobody knows about them, perhaps because the community isn't unified on the issue like it was against Microsoft, as you point out. I'm not sure privately working toward cloning services is a good way out of this situation. :)

autonomo.us is one mostly silent place to talk about it.

You may be right that there needs to be a (I think you might mean GNU project, not GNOME foundation?), but for the web. My guess as to why there hasn't been one is that the task is far messier, and there are a lot more choices about implementation. The usual thought following this is that free services need to federate rather than be part of the same project. But this thought could be wrong.
What you are saying is correct, but mostly in a pedantic sense. In the US context, "Dutch" name would mean "of Dutch origin", and not necessarily "as used by a Dutch person." (Many people consider themselves "Irish", despite being 3 or more generations removed from the Emerald Isle.)

The New York City neighborhood of "Harlem," for example, is a Dutch name even though in Dutch it's spelled Haarlem, and the original name for the place was Nieuw Haarlem. It's more precise to say that it's the English spelling of a Dutch name, but most people find that level of precision needlessly detailed.

I have no problems asserting that "Van Vlack" is an American spelling of a Dutch name.
Yeah, that is true. But I use Insyc on Windows because it is much more stable than the default drive app and supports symbolic links. So it isn't so much that Linux support is bad as it is that Drive support is bad.
Hopefully, the ASP can't be used for sending money?
Yeah, he should definitely be burned at the stake for not following the mighty HIG. And releasing the code, what an outrage! Now other developers will fall victim to this ignominous tendency of innovation!
RISE Austin 2013 – Gene Fojtik Presents Mobile Bootcamp
Happy to listen to feedback or questions about the app. As with any data-based service, it's a work in progress and feedback is very valuable for making the app better.

There's some more info about the app on our company blog too.
You're wrong on almost every point. "Don't Be Evil" is not Google's motto, XMPP chat still works fine for my hangouts account and no, they couldn't do it without breaking the XMPP.

I just hope they'll keep XMPP running for the chat. I'll stop using it the second it'll stop working in bitlbee.
"Pink" is the first result to "beam me up" query. Fail
I have heard from somebody else that using XMPP on Hangouts on Plus works. It doesn’t work for me. When I enter an XMPP address, all I get is “send invitation”, but nothing happens when I chose to do that. When sending a message from my XMPP client, it does not show up in Hangouts on Plus.
In short, no, it isn't.

It might be harder to be an independent developer these days in the mobile landscape, but having those skills makes you valuable. I don't think it is too late.
It's definitely not the lack of features, since XMPP is extendable. I've heard that the protocol is quite chatty and would cause power drain on phones. That could probably be solved with a binary serialization alternative to XML, though.
In related news, Google also just dropped Drive pricing to exactly 50% that of Dropbox. Looks like they're trying to monetize all that huge capacity they have floating around.

It's about time AWS had some serious competition.
30% of all airplane passengers never turn off their devices during flights. Now THAT is a large number of devices. How many of them interfered with critical plane systems, and what percentage of that interference caused an accident?

This is a situation where we need to move beyond platitudes and run some actual experiments, preferably random controlled trials. Load a couple of planes with several hundred smartphones and tablets each. Have the devices on one plane turned off and the devices on the other turned on. Fly a third plane completely empty as a control group. Measure the interference on all three planes and then compare the numbers.
By billing daily or weekly, you may not have to keep track of all the billable time or worry about not getting compensated for late night calls. Plus, you are not punishing yourself for getting the work done early :)
Once upon a time a new google product being launch was really exciting and I'd sign up however I could. Now I just feel a little scared as I watch new services being offered that aren't really innovations just attempts to devour other businesses. Every new release these days seems to either be reimplementing features available elsewhere on the web by perfectly good sites or a direct affront on my privacy.
> It's cool that "Alex Knapp, a science writer at Forbes" has solved one of the major issues in the philosophy of mathematics by, erm, just asserting that Platonism is false.

And what is wrong with saying that? The burden of proof is on Platonists, just like it is on theists. I don't see any reason not to think that Platonism has been a huge waste of time.
If you are donating, then you are putting your trust into Zach Braff and his judgement to create the movie. If you don't trust his judgement, including on where/how he accepts money, then maybe you should not be donating at all.
>YouTube wants viewers, regardless of which platform they're coming from.

Then why don't they make an Windows Phone YouTube app and show ads on it? Hell, show double the ads just to annoy WP users.
Or are they afraid that it will hurt Android?
I think their app isn't handling orientation changes properly. I signed out and tried it again and I can consistently reproduce the bug.

If I am signed out, the app will never launch in landscape orientation. If I am already in landscape orientation, I can sign out and see the login screen in landscape as I should. However as soon as I rotate to portrait, I can no longer get back to landscape.

As an iOS developer, this definitely seems like a problem with the app itself and I've not experienced this elsewhere.
it's awful hard to prove a negative... I would list all the companies with which I had IP agreements and state that X,Y,Z are the areas and this application wasn't built using their time and resources so there is no conflict and I'd offer to contact someone if they had a concern.
Will there be a way to turn off personalization? It's not clear from the video or the site.
Its not on Android, so...yeah. "On paper" it looks pretty good though.
I've used the Caltrain/Bart and NYC versions of Embark for a while - its really irreplaceable. Jazzed to try this.
Google enthusiastically kills legacy and niche products. I'm making wild guesses, but I don't think we'll have support for XMPP clients in the long run.
Yes, and on top of that, you want a payroll service brand to speak to its professionalism and reliability. Not edgy "hipness" (especially if you are failing hard at that aspect).
They were the market leader because they were the only noteworthy and reliable player in the market.

Competition from upstarts like Stripe has pushed them to take customer service seriously.
Facebook. Wikipedia. Yahoo.
True, but you can bookmark it, and compare it against the one used by others. They're also short - you can write them down and communicate them offline.

To compare, ssh uses no PKI, but is relatively resistant to MITM as it stores public key fingerprints for a given service on first access.
They make a Windows 8 app which provides access to all of their services (with ads): Chrome.
Where is the vitriol from this coming from? This isn't some massive new UI paradigm, it's effectively a theme!

And a handsome one, at that.
My guess is, [expected revenue per user] * [expected number of Windows Mobile users] - [cost to build a decent YouTube app] is a negative number.
Or, perhaps, the standing community can help enforce community and platform norms, as we're apt to do, by explaining what those norms are, and why.

And then, perhaps, we will preserve one of the things that has made iOS, and Mac OS X before it, such a pleasant platform to use: platform consistency.

Oh, the horror.
Herbert Dow, the Monopoly Breaker (1997)
That's fine, the anonymity works both ways. You can't access an .onion without using tor, and in this way, use of tor prevents the .onion service from knowing who you are.

Contrast The Silk Road, where the .onion is being used primarily to protect the identity of the service itself (as most of the users give their physical addresses to the service).

Both are hidden services. One is privacy for the client, one is privacy for the server.
What an unutterably bizarre article. "By cajoling more children to enter science and engineering [...] the state increases STEM student numbers, floods the market with STEM graduates, reduces competition for their services and cuts their wages." It almost makes one wonder whether the author knows what STEM stands for - he seems to see it as just a type of labour, in the sense that an oversupply of plumbers, STEM graduates or scaffolders will depress the wages of that group.

Perhaps I'm just irretrievably biased, but STEM seems, as well as being an enormously vast field it seems lazy to lump together, to be the engine of human advancement and economic growth.

If student A, an engineering student, is put in competition with student B, who could have been a good lawyer but chose a Maths degree, and student C, who had to choose between music and physics but chose physics at university, then A's wages might end up slightly lower but we are all likely to end up better off.

But it's not just that I am a science-biased technocrat - I don't especially want to drive our future judges and music professors into engineering careers. I think it more likely that technical education is just under-taken-up at all levels compared to what would most benefit society, and people who could perfectly well cope with technical careers end up taking jobs in the service sector that provide little training.

To take a shortage of technically-trained people, paint that as a benefit for the wages of the currently qualified, and argue to maintain the status quo on that basis is just short-sighted nonsense.
I don't hate Microsoft, nor do I adore Google, but yes recoiledsnake and cooldeal are well known Microsoft zelots.

They will defend Microsoft at every turn and they will attack Google in every comment they make about them. Their posting history is very desciptive.
Given that the kepler telescope exceeds its original mission lifespan by 4 years, it's safe to say that the kepler mission is not really "cut short", more like "cannot keep going".
As a user, I am upset that it is getting harder to communicate with people. Everyone has their own non-interoperable (but cross platform!) protocols/networks/gardens now.

* blackberry bbm
* apple imessage
* google hangouts
* skype
* whatsapp, etc.

As a user, am I supposed to have an account with one of each of these things? Have nine different apps open all the time? This is as bad as icq/messenger/aim/etc was back in the day. sheesh.
I run plenty of Java every day without breaking out in hives. I don't particularly enjoy _writing_ Java, though, and the most natural way to extend the Java interceptors is to use Java (Jython notwithstanding). I could have been clearer about this in my post.

I should also add - Burp is a fine tool, but I would hope there's room for more than a single "industry standard" in this area. Mitmproxy has some comparative strengths, is completely open, and is improving rapidly. I'd hate for people to be discouraged from trying it out and helping to make it better.
That sounds good from my end (as the freelancer), but won't the client be upset if they pay a day rate for what might end up being a half day's work? I guess the client would have no way of knowing this, but it still makes me feel uneasy.
If they cared why wouldn't they buy Waze?
Better yet, mine failed. I'm presented with this page: http://i.imgur.com/hPqLd58.png

On the phone, I'm told roughly: "I'm going to ask you four questions to verify your identity. The questions are based on publicly available data." [hold]

(He just asked me the last four of my social and the year of my birth. And my address. And is now preparing four questions.
- Where was my SSN issued? Multiple choice.
- Which month was I born? Multiple choice.
- Which name are you associated with (weird list of names? None of the Above.)
- Which county have you lived in? Multiple choice.

I answered them correctly, obviously. Now being redirected to a survey.
The article only states that it went away when the device was turned off. Unless you got this report from some other source, the "started again when it was turned on" part was not the claim.
Like most of Bitcoin, the coming battle will be primarily about hype and speculation, with only a tiny minority of people actually fighting anything. The government is not terribly worried about alternative currencies, as long as the financial institutions that deal in those currencies follow the same laws as everyone else:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_community_currencies_i...
I know you can but it's not clean. Also with Groovy on Grails early on there was some issues with timeouts if you're applicant wasn't popular, that was until GAE allowed to run a hot instance. Probably why it didn't have an uptake.

Also, anyone who is doing javascript is probably avoiding java and doesn't want to figure out how to put the right files together to deploy such an application.
Not core to their actual revenues but it'll help massivly in knowing who are real users. Easy to automatically fake gmail/google plus accounts that look realistic. An account with real payments going to/from it is likely to be real, and can be tied to all their other services. And obviously when paying for things on youtube (which will become more popular soon) it will be as easy for youtube/gmail users, as it is for iOS users to pay for in app purchases.
Not mentioned in the Show HN, but they're YC S11. And aside from Dropbox they are probably the one YC product I come into contact with the most often.

It's terrific how they got funded in spite of the difficulty of the difficulty of monetizing this (at least, in the short term).
Apple developed the original YouTube iOS app with Google's blessings and pulled it after Google released their own official version.
What is the supposed relationship between your first and second paragraphs, aside from both involving the IRS?
Send Money with Google Gmail
Same reason the vast majority of devs do not make a WP app, or release a crappy version 2 years later.
and that there's a download button.
So, when Microsoft's IP is infringed (patents, etc), it's a tragedy. When Google's (or its partner's) IP is infringed it's something sinister. Gotcha.
Spread Your Link
Can you withdraw money with Wallet in as many countries as with Paypal, though? That has always been the biggest adoption hurdle, I think. If not, what has taken you guys so long to do it? I want Google Wallet to be a real Paypal competitor, but it doesn't seem to be - or at least it hasn't been until now.
I know. I was alluding to Gruber's strong bias towards Apple, and that he should give Google's products and services the same allowances that he would give to Apple's.

edit: sorry, might still not be clear. Gruber seems to be implying that Google fans are believing something that isn't true; by extension, Gruber's disagreeing with Larry Page's statement that Google is "building great things that don't exist", and both of his paragraphs are dedicated to that point. If he were more objective, he'd have to also say that Apple doesn't build "great things that don't exist", and that the enthusiasm of Apple fans is unjustified. That's pretty far from Gruber's usual take on Apple.

But really, I think that's a less interesting debate than the one about whether or not Google is starting to look like 1990's-era Microsoft. "Embrace, extend, and extinguish" might arguably describe Google right now too.
I think coldtea was implying that there's something else that 13 year old boys (assumption from GP name) generally want more than anything, and it's generally a bit more physical than Gmail invites.
> This isn't some massive new UI paradigm ...

Flat UI isn't some massive new UI paradigm? I thought that's exactly what it is.

> ... it's effectively a theme!

One of the major components of the success and pleasantness of iOS -- and Mac OS X before it -- has been platform consistency.

Apple has made a study of this, and that's part of what users are buying when they buy Apple's products. Dismantling that consistency (rather than, say, building on it) is detrimental to your user's experience and the cumulative value of both the user's purchase and training, as well as other developer's investment in furthering the platform.

There certainly can be a fine line between building on the platform standards and dismantling them, but rewriting all UI components is very much on the side of "dismantling".
Without getting into a big long billing discussion, just change your minimum billable time from an hour to a day. If you spend less than a day working for your client, bill them the day anyways. Just make it clear up front that you bill in daily increments.

Serious clients won't even blink. Most of the people you work with at serious clients aren't even spending their own money, and so daily or weekly billing simplifies their lives anyways.
Yes, https://alpha.app.net/grr
>I haven't ported any of my own apps to Win Phone either - what's the point when nobody is using it?

So Google's complaint is that "nobody" is using the Windows Phone Youtube app and that this is hurting Youtube because "nobody" is watching so many ad-less videos on Youtube that it's robbing Youtube and content creators of all the "no money" gotten from no ad views in the app which used by nobody? Oh, and did I mention nobody can use the Windows Phone Youtube app because nobody is using Windows Phone?!
I'll start with the second part of your question;

[Can] Corn be a "store of value". What about gold? Or oil?

It doesn't matter.

The whole point of the 'Money Services Business' designation which Bitcoin just ran into is to enforce standard regulations for all 'Financial Institutions'. The definition of 'Financial Institutions' already includes brokers, broker-dealers, exchanges, etc.[1]

So [is] a corn broker considered a money exchanger/transmitter?

No. They are considered brokers. Brokers and commodities exchanges are regulated separately by FINRA and the CFTC/NFA and therefore are not considered MSBs. From the regulation: The term “money services business” shall not include: .... A person registered with, and ... regulated by, the SEC or the CFTC. [2]

It's all there. The concept of a 'bitcoin' isn't actually very original, people have invented dozens of currencies and other schemes to launder money and avoid taxes. Whether or not that was Bitcoin's intent, it's going to have to play by the rules as if it were.

[1] - http://www.fincen.gov/financial_institutions/msb/definitions...
[2] - http://www.ecfr.gov/cgi-bin/text-idx?c=ecfr&SID=b49834e1...
another app for the 7-min workout is http://7minworkoutapp.com/
> As always, let me remind you: don't bill hourly. You are not a furniture mover.

This is some of the most valuable advice I've ever received. I have patio11 to thank for it!
That is their problem and not yours. Establish a sane pricing system, communicate it to your client, and move on. I would (again) argue that hourly billing is almost never a sane system.
> But sometimes you don't need a doctor to give you a diagnosis. You literally only need a prescription.

I don't think any legit doctors write prescriptions without first making, or verifying, a diagnosis.

Hiring a developer and telling him, "Don't think, just code," seems like a recipe for disaster. People who insist on going about it that way get the software they deserve.
Exactly - I've never heard the term "hand holding" that didn't go along with, "You should be able to figure it out - it's a FB clone, for God's sake"

"Real" development companies have full-time people writing specs - you need to come up with something better than a few Google docs if you want the dev to just run with it, especially if (s)he's on a fixed contract.

Hourly, now, is a different animal :-)
Collaborative vim plugin
Apple eBook Price Fixing Ringmaster
What would you do if I published a broken password hashing scheme and encouraged others to use it?
Rather than this being the start of an evolution away from Objective C (which to me seems both unlikely and terrible), I wonder if it could be the start of an evolution away from AppleScript towards a user-scripting language that is easier to sandbox, more portable, and is familiar to a lot more script writers?
Are you talking about Pidgin + GTalk + OTR Plugin?
Definitely Microsoft-ian naming. It's as if there's some hierarchy of product branding like some java package definition:

com.Google.Play.Music.AllAccess

As to why you'd use it, I'm hoping they are going to compete by offering functionality (the demoed playlist lookahead and the swipe to ignore feature looks pretty cool) and perhaps ramping up features faster than their competitors.

But another goal is to just have a service that attacks their competitor's strengths (mainly Apple, also Amazon). If streaming is popular, music purchases are not and music stores suffer = Google starves it's competition.
> They need to kill it and millions of Windows Phone
> users will be left with no legal YouTube app.

The point is that this app isn't legal.
Almost Flat Design- The future of iOS design?
Agreed. A friend of mine keeps raises his bidding price as he gets overloaded. If they pay the amount then great; if not it is better than saying "no" to potential business.
This doesn't seem like a good way to 'kill it off.' I would imagine that the vast majority of users aren't using this feature (even though they probably should).
Huh? "Criminal" and "illogical lawyer" are racial groups?
Given Microsoft's track record, for, oh, I don't know, their entire existence, it's no surprise they're not well-liked. Whereas Google just hasn't had nearly three decades to be evil; give them time.