skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If this ends up happening, does it mean SpaceX will have single-handedly drop the price of commercial space transportation by about 2 orders of magnitude during its first decade of life?

I know they were saying initially when they came out with the first one that it costs about an order of magnitude less than competition, and if they can re-use the same rocket, that should reduce costs by at least an order of magnitude again.

After this they "only" need to make one with a fusion reactor, to reduce transportation (to Mars or asteroids) by another order of magnitude [1]. That's when the true space (or rather solar system) era will begin.

1 - http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/04/10/nasa_fusion_engine_f...
I've read the book before (the Heath brothers are just awesome), and the I do find the metaphors very helpful.

The problem is, I'm a very different person when I'm motivated and when I'm not. I can be the most motivated person after a good conversation with a friend, or a great experience, but I have difficulty maintaining that on a day-to-day basis. I don't feel that this reduces the "quality" of my motivation at all.

This is very pathological for me, and it bleeds into my personal life. I'm bad at keeping appointments, etc. Does that mean I don't care about the people in my life? I don't think so. I think I'm just incompetent, and I need a lot of learning and practice when it comes to being competent, and raw willpower and vague structures haven't helped.

I think I need some sort of structure or prosthetic that I can't ask of any other person (unless I hired a personal assistant to bug me 24/7, which I wouldn't be able to afford). I'm sure there are other people out there who could use such prosthesis, too. In the long run the goal would be to wean myself off of it, but I think I definitely could use help of some sort.
> It's because Google and Apple want it that way

I fail to see where they have had any influence. Apple at least has historically priced a number of their applications pretty high (not all of them though, basically "core feature" applications such as ibooks or podcasts were free, but iwork applications are $10 each, and garageband and imovie are $5)

> also because developers are slashing prices to the extreme to compete.

Mostly that one, from very early on there's been an insane tendency to price-dump and race to the bottom.

> That would certainly result in higher prices.

It would also result in extremely low sales, as known by anyone who developed for S60 or Blackberry back in the bad old days.

> If a large enough group of people start raising awareness and refusing to release their work for peanuts we'll see a shift in the market price towards more realistic numbers.

That's completely unrealistic. It would require a buy-in from every single developer.
I've never been told that. I've been told to get something done. How I achieve that has never been an issue. Interesting, performant, or elegant does not mean it has to be slow. That's part of the challenge. Meeting the demands of the business while meeting the demands of a professional.
P0rnstars After Their Makeup (24 Pics)
Well the user's name is Rav Papa, who is a well known Jewish roman-era scholar, which is one tactic he doesn't mention, press all your advantages, usernames are a great way to show fain to be one side but really be the other.
> They also call swearing "unprofessional", as if that's a bad thing. Again, it suggests a laid back atmosphere, where no-one cares if you swear when you're dealing with a particularly nasty bug.

I don't particular want to be sworn at. That'd be my main concern if I saw someone swearing in a job advert.
Yamaha make the EC-03 http://www.yamaha-motor.eu/uk/products/electric-vehicles/com...

No idea what it's like though
> Unless, of course, you think that companies that actively look to correct that imbalance are the problem, in which case I would pose that you are the problem.

I'm not the OP, but I think it's as unethical to be biased towards any group. A company should do it's best to ignore gender and focus on merit. Companies that 'actively look to correct that imbalance' make things worse and reinforce stereotypes with token hires.

> Ah yes, because calling people out on dick jokes at a professional conference is exactly like the thought police.

Starting a Twitter vendetta rather than approaching people who made a schoolyard joke http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2013/03/25/adria-richards-fi... makes things worse, not better.
I ran into my first experience with this sort of thing while looking into Mormon initiation rites on wikipedia. I certainly understand why Mormons may be interested in keeping initiation secrets off of wikipedia, but wikipedia has no interest in censoring that information. And yet, at least the last time I checked, I had a very hard time finding that in part because of the mess of articles I ran across and the reshuffling of articles.

Is there an easy way to search for deleted articles and read the discussion history for them?
Third thing to add:

3) I'd remove the free monthly plan and just say "Free for your first 100 contact replies". This lets people try it out without having to think about how many valid contacts they get a month and filters out paying for spam messages. It also changes your conversion point from a monthly trigger to a single one so you can do lifecycle emails as they start getting close to their limit.
It was most likely killed by people hitting the 'flag' option on the story. After a certain number of flags the story gets penalized heavily and drops in rankings very suddenly.
> Solving problems is interesting. Repetition is terrible.

DRY.

Solve the problem of repetition.
I also do this except I'm using a bandaid, it works well and is good conversation starter.
> nobody bothers writing custom bots for your thing

This is not quite true, having written several custom bots myself. Sites with any kind of social contact will become targetted at some point.
None of the images load for me, unless I open them in a new tab and hit 'refresh'.
As Arment notes, there's no way you can build something unique unless 1. you've got dedicated hardware (in which case you'll sell the hardware and give away the application) or 2. it's a small niche market through which you can stay under the radar of price dumpers
pron's point was [~ mainly] about the new languages from Google. nostrademons wrote mostly regarding what I wrote (and why it was wrong/simplified).
Yep, I think that's a great way to get over the fear of shipping imperfect stuff.

Procrastination and perfectionism are very tied together for me- it's largely a fear of failure. To be more precise, it's a structural, habitual, systemic underestimation of how it's better to fail a little bit every day than to "fail by default" (as JK Rowling beautifully put it) because you never try at all.

I see a lot of parallels between this and smoking, or any other unhealthy, damaging habit- an inability to grok, at a very visceral level, how small things add up to big ones.

The only way to learn is to stick to it, and anything that helps me/you stick to it is worth trying, I think.
For one, "How the FBI found a beautiful adult woman's webcam spy" wouldn't sound equally perverted.
Didn't that student sue his school and get a settlement for a whole lot of money? I know that doesn't mean there aren't more of these cases but its still illegal.
> Sometimes I also think if it would be different if I was born several decades earlier.

Check out section 7.6 of Phil Greenspun's SITE CONTROLLER thesis http://philip.greenspun.com/research/tr1408/complete.pdf . It seems there has long been plenty of undesirable programming work (anyone for in-house COBOL?) but a BS in CS may have been a more reliable route to interesting work before the PC software industry.
Actually, you probably want to do something similar to what Danny Hillis did with Babble. In his case emit speech sounding zero info sounds. In this case, vibrate similarly to a keyboard writing Lorem Ipsum (though not exactly that - then it could be filtered out). Best thing would be to train the babble-keyboard with the pattern of the specific user.
great tip on the md5, thanks
I would love to see how much better the detection would be if the accelerometer input was combined with the microphone.
For stuff like tab completion and for launching small command-line apps (think "grep", "sed", etc), absolutely. A penalty of hundreds of milliseconds for the _launcher_ alone can double (or more) the total execution time.

I use zeroinstall a lot (I'm a contributor), and I turned off tab completion because the lag (of the python implementation) made me wonder if my terminal had locked up, which was far more distracting than trying to remember the available arguments. I have re-enabled it in the ocaml port, because now it's effectively instant.
> most people would opt for a free cup of coffee over a paid one, if quality was similar.

Quality does not enter the equation. Most people will opt for a free cup of coffee over a paid one if the paid cup is the best coffee in the world and the free one is barely a step over ground-up dried shit.
What a devious headline. Imagine it as "Codebreaker for MI6 murdered after going to <FILL IN THE BLANK>" and you'll spot the trick here.
Hardware random number generators are tricky. This project doesn't appear to have mentioned any of the tricky parts or how they were tackled. It looks like a fun project to noodle about with though!

Spotting correlation and skew is interesting. Finding the right balance of speed and fidelity is tricky.

Here's some previous comment about Entropykey (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1453299) and here's some stuff about testing and using hardware RNGs that I was reading a while ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6060636)
You sound quite a bit less open minded than the old fogey you're responding to.
I've been working on something which will automatically hash the name fields in a form and generating all my forms with javascript. Haven't considered adding hidden fields but that might be a good idea. And probably recaptcha when all that inevitably fails.

Unfortunately I think spam detection is always going to be a moving target. A lot of these techniques depend on spammers not wanting to go through the trouble of tweaking something for your particular site, but if your site turns out to be popular or if they have that sixth can of Red Bull and decide to get clever there's not much you can do.
How long did it take to build the app with all functions?
To extend willvarfar's question, can you shift color channels in a reversible way so as to get compression.

Compare the two process.

1. raw_image -> image_compress(raw_image)

2. raw_image -> shift_color_channels(raw_image) -> image_compress(shift_color_channels(raw_image))

* Thinking out aloud *

Is the 2nd process feasible?

Is it possible that the current image compression algorithms pick up on the aberration patterns which invalidates the need for the 2nd process?

In the case of image compression using wavelet transforms (which many methods use) and if wavelets can pick-up on the aberration patterns, could the hurdle be finding a finite set of wavelet functions that can work for majority of the lenses?
Is it exhausting being better than everyone else?
Later on in the sentence: "if you're a low-profit site for them".

Still, it's a very easy way to deter large amounts of spam, no matter how good a target you are, so the ROI is almost always positive.
>We pour all our creativity, time, and passion into creating basically worthless products... we're in the business of making products that provide very little value to people.

Yikes.
To give a perspective on numbers I host/maintain blogspam.net and we've blocked 1 million spam comments in just over two weeks.

That's a hell of a lot of spam.
While I get (and largely agree with) the sentiments on that site, god that was painful to read. Time to create readability-motherfucker.com, I guess?
It shouldnt be a violation if I'll visit UK only to get new contracts and work on them remotely. I also have my own LLC in EU, so I can act on its behalf making taxation for customer easier.

The question is how to reach the market?
The challenge is I can't think of anything better. It just seems like if one complains about too many guns in their neighborhood, there are better solutions than mounting a machine gun on the roof.

Perhaps I have sympathy because I'm a "Take the entire of resumes from HR" type of person. When I was job hunting, I thought that the screening mechanisms for jobs were all pretty bad, so I don't have a "Go to site X for better." I wonder if the net effect of this will be people sanitizing their offerings to hide their culture. Or will it be like attracting like?
Ad Startup Makes Ex-Employees Disappear with Photoshop
Opa: Safe and Secure Web Development
I've felt this way before. Dejected that the my new job wasn't an exciting candy land of save-the-day hacks and movie montage of elegant code spanning the screen. My expectations were too high. I thought we would always do the right thing to kick out software all grown up ready to take on the world.

When the realization set in I got angry. First at the job then at myself. I held it tight knowing someone was to blame. Anger lead to depression which sparked more anger. But depression won, and eventually lead to a calm realization that programming wasn't the magical world I wanted it to be. So it became just a job.

I never wanted it to be just a job. I work with people who don't know a bit from a byte. They could care less what I code as long as it works. For a long time I believed them. I just made it work. Recently I've started to believe again.

I've started to believe in the magic again. I'm learning that within the boundaries of my job I can create little realms of beauty. No one cares how I code so I can code to my own enjoyment. I've stopped caring what other people thought. And I've stopped looking to the job and outside world to give me enjoyment and I've started looking inside myself. To find the joy in my own actions, in the moment.
I don't think he was implying any of those items were "superior" to their alternatives as much as pointing out that the cultural familiarity of the list allows it to slip by without us questioning what a desire for pizza and ping pong have to do with the suitability of a candidate to a job.

That aside, as a beer aficionado, I think that the "craft" has at least another generation or two to go before it's at wine-like levels of sophistication. It may never get there. The fundamental "problem" is that it's too easy to make world-class beer. Wine is heavily dependent on the whims of climate and the particularities of soil, while executing a great beer recipe just requires skill, time, and more or less readily available ingredients.

EDIT: Yes, there are exceptions. Wild-fermented lambics require the right yeast-populated environment, but even that is something you can "grow" anywhere with enough time. They're not making more coastal hillsides in France.
It sounds to me like you may have ADHD. Dr. Russell Barkley mentions in one of his speeches[1] that frequent prompts are one effective way to keep someone with ADHD accountable and on track. You may want to watch this shorter version[2] and see if you recognize yourself (that's doesn't proof anything of course, but it's a start).

[1]: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NUQu-OPrzUc

[2]: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LyDliT0GZpE
I think your comment is an example of exactly the sentiment this blog is trying to address: Complaining into a void. Users should value what you want them to value. Apple & Google should fix it.

The reality is that Apple & Google have their interests driving them, user have theirs & App developers have their own. Anyone who finds themselves frustrated and complaining into a void needs to channel the stoics and devote their emotional energy to stuff that can be changed, preferably by them.

That said, I don't quite agree with his approach. The price of a cup of coffee is not a good benchmark unless you happen to be selling tea or biscuits or something else in the coffee shop. The Cup of Coffee is a little anomaly involving self esteem, addictive substances, morning routines and other bits and pieces of dark magic. Every environment has its own price dynamics and very few are similar at all to coffee shops'. In a supermarket people are very cost sensitive. An extra 30¢ can be the difference between customers choosing one jar of instant coffee over another. That's less than one cent per cup of coffee. Enough with the cup of coffee already. If it helps you make a sale, go for it. If you are using cups of coffee to justify to yourself why people should be buying your stuff when they are not, don't.

There is a chasm between $0 and $0.01 for digital goods that is confusing but undeniably there. Yelling at it that it shouldn't be there and holding up your overpriced cup of coffee as proof that selling stuff should be easier is useless.

It's hard to sell software with a value anywhere in the ballpark of a cup of coffee regardless of price. That is reality. It was hard before the App store. It's still hard. It's also hard to sell (ppv) episodes of Breaking Bad (even though they're awesome), digital subscriptions to newspapers (even though the paper versions were clearly worth something to some people). We can discuss why the experience of buying software or TV shows isn't as rewarding as the experience of buying coffee, but lets not try to argue that it is or should be when it clearly isn't.
HNdigest: The top Hacker News stories in your inbox, on your own terms
Cute name.

I host a site to stop forum/blog spam but I suspect there would be value in a general-purpose login-test. Of course with a botnet the owner could configure each node to login only twice, as they do with SSH dictionary-attacks.
Line icon set for UI
I think I do exhibit ADHD symptoms, but I don't think I have it, or if I do, I don't have it bad. I can get a little dramatic in my writing. I have been able to make some progress on some fronts, I'm just easily dissatisfied.

Thank you so much for your concern, though. What are the solutions you're talking about? Do you mean medication? I think I'll give myself a few months to try and work things out myself (I think it's really just very, very bad habits entrenched throughout my adolescent years that I have to unlearn).
But there are nearly infinite numbers of "small niche markets", many of which are willing to pay a lot of money because in their case the app provides enormous value.
LG Ultra HD TV Prank - End Of The World Job Interview [Meteor Explodes]
I don't think it is app pricing that is the issue. I think it is far simpler. With a phone, you are spending a lot of money, but you are getting an actual physical thing.

With software, you are spending money on bits. Spending even small amounts of money and getting nothing physical in return just feels very odd after decades of consumerist stuff acquisition and a few hundred thousand years of hunting and gathering.
I don't. There is no implication of being "in the break room". You've badly misread something.
What? That wasn't what he suggested at all…
Haters gunna hate, but I like the spirit of the presentation.

This is better than a flashy flat one-page design with a lot of color and no substance. It's more personal, and is a unique touch. I know why he created the product, what it does, and how to get it.

As for the product itself, I think there's a real need for better bookmark organization that's done well. I'm not sure if this is it, because from the features exhibited it seems a lot like just using Evernote Web Clipper. I'd like to see features that help organize my bookmark folders better, maybe using tags for links and folders or some other creative organization tactic. Evernote WC can do this, but it doesn't do it in a lightweight way where I can get good overview of my links.

Better yet, having a relation graph would be nice too--grouping by links added in a certain session or around a certain concept. For example, I want to find all of the links I found when I was looking up "CSS vertically centering div".

Anyway, great work OP.
So I guess this is why DEFCON officially discouraged feds from attending this year?
Whatever the people think of these -isms being bad, I am convinced that a person has a sort of right to not having to deal with people he doesn't like.
But you know __why__ it isn't terrible - unlike people stuck in other professions, one can pick whatever interests them, work on it, and with minimal cost show case it to the whole world, and if that gets some attention, maybe they can land an interesting gig, or the random stuff they work on might even take life on its own. It doesn't happen frequently but last time I checked there were a few that did happen this way.

So if one limits oneself to just what the customer wants boss what the boss demands - programming is terrible, but programming unlike most other jobs allows one to follow one's own heart with costs tending to zero.
How often do you use non-USA, non-NATO services?

Can you name 1 that has as influence in your life as Twitter, Facebook, Google or Apple?

Why? Maybe its because USA/Western people dont have trust in companies from Brazil, Russia China?

Its not because they dont exist, Orkut was ahead of its time, vkontakte has all that facebook has and pirated music on top of it, maybe its just that you are steered into USA controlled "content" just like Iran, Chinese citizens are steered towards baidu or whatever.
Doesn't this count as possession/production of child pornography, under current laws?
Here's what it's like to start writing a book
I guess what happens to this page is separate lesson in its own rights.
I agree. The preference for stable, well-paid, predictable careers is a global phenomenon, and especially in poorer countries.

And had this article been nuanced about that (as many earlier articles and posts on this topic have been in the past), it would have been okay.

Instead it reduces it to some kind of peculiar Indian trait ("The Indian and his insatiable...") while painting the second most populous country in the world with the widest of brushes ("Indians just can’t deal with the fact that someone without pedigree can get somewhere in life").

My statistics weren't meant to prove the opposite, that India is somehow very startup/failure friendly (it isn't, not by a long shot), but to only disprove the author's sweeping claim that the lack of a pedigree is some unsurmountable obstacle to succeed in India.

Sure the average VC or bank manager or prospective in-law might value an education over none (assuming ceteris paribus), but let's not use that to completely devalue the importance of a formal college education totally.

Is all.
What about giving away the first version of the application, and charging only for upgrades? This way the user has a chance to integrate the application into their life before you ask them for money. Nobody likes shareware--if you have an explicit time limit then people won't feel comfortable with making that app 'apart of them'.

I think pricing like this could work well for open source applications too. I see people now putting up donation suggestions with the download (see elementaryos for an example[0]). The problem is I am not going to pay for something that I have never used before. However, if I like the application, payment is easy, and the pricing is reasonable, the warm and fuzzy feeling of helping a community project that is apart of my workflow would probably be worth the money.

[0] http://elementaryos.org/
I think that's giving too much power to your job.

Your boss may not let you work on it but there's no reason to not work on it outside the job for 5-10 hours a week, just for kicks. Those kicks might be enough to keep the day job more bearable.

If at the end of the day, putting in 5-10 hours a week extra out of your own time for it is considered too much, then accept that you also see your work as just a job.