skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
But pressure can be applied to vendors.

For instance, you tell the vendor that your entire site upgrade is contingent on having access to betas, previews, or some limited number of licenses for X number of months so that you may port and test your internal applications. This is hardly an uncommon problem when upgrading, and it's a good bet for a software vendor to allow small samples for a short period in order to enable larger purchases.

It also doesn't hurt to remind vendors of what you could be doing instead of putting up with them. Tell Microsoft you'll virtualize all of Windows on Mac OS X. Tell them you've been impressed lately by OpenOffice 3. It doesn't even matter if you have a real intention to switch, they just have to believe that you will.
You're assuming that a monkey that eats 20% less than a monkey that's given the choice to eat as much as it wants necessarily isn't underfed? Maybe. But without some other research that I've missed, that really begs the question.

I think anyone living in a western country has enough data to realize that people eating a western diet tend to be overfed, so the comparison between westerners and Tibetan monks has little to do with monkeys.
Glad to see this is getting a good response. This is a rough draft of a personal experience essay I wrote for my English class. It's got plenty of flaws and was scary to publish in such an imperfect form but in my mind it's the most important post I've written.

Thanks again for reading guys.
What I meant exactly is, give an estimate and an hour quote. Let the client know that if you complete the project in less time, you will charge less and vice versa. I've found that in all projects specs change and things take less or more time than estimated. Nothing sucks more than working free because you underestimated a task. Also if you have a fixed price, you will invariantly be motivated to take the quick and dirty solutions everytime. This will not lead to success for the project.
Microsoft To Crush Google Docs
My iPhone Is Dead, but Apple Customer Support Is Alive and Well
Vista? We're still on XP. Personally, I don't see any reason to move to vista, let alone windows 7.
Yes, I expected Kiko to look much more like how Justin.tv has turned out. Whoops!
Thanks for the advice! I need to focus on my studies right. what about summer, can I take a (programming) holiday on it? Is it bad or good? Shall i in summer still focused on medicine?
I think the problems Summers identified here are common to fields that are very politically charged. I think that "scholars" are more likely to trumpet questionable or even clearly false "research" - and their opponents are more likely to angrily attack them for these mistakes.

Suppose that an immensely convenient theorem showed up in a math paper 10 years ago, that was later shown to be flawed. Well, I suppose math grad students looking to solve problems would be tempted by this theorem, and might erroneously use it for a while. But unlike the "rule of thumb" inaccuracy, math doesn't tend to induce the same wish to believe. We may "wish" to believe that a map can filled out with four colors, because it seems like a cool concept, but we're not going to get angry when someone shows that our current proof is false.
So does the speaker in the podcast say things like "Holy at-sign dollar hash percent exclamation mark"?

They use a bunch of "funny bleeping sounds" in the podcast.
What seems to matter now is the investment that companies have made in all their software. Unfortunately, it doesn't matter if that investment was wise, or if the alternatives might be better; any transition is believed to be too risky, expensive, or even unnecessary.

So far, the only thing that seems to make a dent is a system that allows virtualization of Windows. If you want to help rid the world of Windows, then you need to start there: build perfect compatibility in a sandbox, while making something obviously superior that runs outside the sandbox.
Terrible advice!

Also, if your side-job is at _all_ related to your main job, be very careful, and lean towards quitting sooner rather than later. Talk to a lawyer to make sure you'll actually own your side-work and get your documents in order.

Figure out a realistic assessment on how cheap you can actually live. This will be different for different folks. Examine your savings. See if you can get some Angel Investments (know any rich people you can convince that your idea is good?) This analysis will tell you how long you have until you need to find another job for someone else and give up. I'd be scared if this number came up as less than a year.

If it is a money-making idea, and you can get some angel money (or VC, or have a nice nest-egg), don't hesitate to hire people with the skills you don't. Particularly sales, marketing, and CEO. Geeks think we can fake these, and I've faked sales better than a salesman can fake code, but it was a mistake.

If you can do the math, see that you've given yourself enough time to develop a product and give it a chance in the marketplace, can hire the key personnel and afford them, have an actual business plan - go for it! Especially if you're under 30. The downside to a failed startup is actually rather small, and I've found people like it that I've founded a company on my resume, even if it didn't succeed. And if you create something people will actually pay for, hey, congrats!
COM was the hammer for the longest time, i'm glad .NET is making its way :)
Take it up with Dijkstra. I learned QBasic at around the same age, as well, and I don't feel impaired either---though Scheme certainly changed things at around age 14. I'm sure he was talking about Other People.
aha that's the crucial bit of info I had never heard before :) cheers works for me now.
This is the reason my wife and I share Facebook passwords. Presumably, if one of us dies, the other one will want to be able to rapidly revise the Facebook page of the other. Maybe Facebook will die before either of us, but it's good to plan ahead.

It's also possible to entirely delete a Facebook account.

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=16929680703

I see the steps here include logging in as a particular Facebook member before following a specified Facebook link, so that is why you and your loved ones may wish to plan ahead for password exchanging (perhaps only effective on death, as specified in a will).
If you are going to use a freelancing site like rentacoder.com you'll finish working $10/hour until you get good feedback. But I'm not sure if you got good feedback your rate will raise. The median is $20/hour for all freelancers in Odesk.com (which is much more better than rentacoder.com)

A solution that work: build something and make it open source and free.

For example build a Wordpress template (a premuim one) add SUPER functionnalities, good silk design...

People who will love your design, will hire you. You'll get a lot of requests, then choose the best.
They give the name of the main authors (first and last), and the journal in which it has been published in the same paragraph, which is actually amazing in a vulgarization article...

Usually, you can be happy if they named one of the investigators. It's all about "scientists".

That said, it's true that the article itself is light on facts. The fact that the paper had been published in Science was a good hint, though.

I don't think that your "high energy" profile is related to your late profile.

Disrupting the natural sleep tendencies (usually) results in diminished energy. The early vs late type depends on a balance between the day/night light variations, and an internal clock that produces an internal sleep pressure.

I think that early people have an endogenous cycle shorter than 24 hours, and the opposite for the late type.
It's ok to quietly burn some bridges. Most of what was said was "unethical" but you can go far without being that bad.

Let's say you are talented, make 80 to 100k, work a 60 hour week most weeks, and work as a low to mid level drone at 5,000+ person company. Chances are you can work 40 hours a week for 6 months without getting fired. You are not going to get a significant promotion or pay raise any time soon, but that's fine if you have other goals. And you might find you can do this for several years.

Not enough? Let's say you have 2 weeks of vacation and take one day a week off for 10 weeks, in 10 weeks you will have earned a few extra days, so you can probably do that for ~3 months. If they let you move some hours around you might be able to do that for longer. You might try 4 * 9 + 4 hours of vacation for something like 6 months.

PS: Performing as well as the average office drone takes a lot less effort than you might expect. I would avoid working on you startup while at work, or sleeping at work. But, plenty of people pay their bills or check personal email and do other things that give them more free time at home.
I have found Cringely to be usually essentially correct even if he is wrong on details. You just have to know which details are important and which are not. The strategic importance of Windows to Google and for Microsoft of not again getting the attention of the Justice Department by anti-competitively squeezing Google functionality on Windows (now that Bush is out of office) is absolutely correct.

Microsoft is clearly going to provide Google enough competition that they cannot roam too far into Microsoft's profit center. And Google is absolutely focused on Search using OSes to press the market (including Microsoft) in directions that Google needs to maintain its position and grow it.

Cringely is absolutely correct on the points that matter here. Contrary arguments centered on staffing sizes and such are I think probably correct but missing the point.
One more routine maintenance task that no longer needs performing, it sounds like, which would be an upside. I skimmed, though.
Iranians are some of the most active internet users in the world, particularly when it comes to blogging, social networking, and similar activities. It's no surprise that Twitter has been embraced and used by Iranians.

Your doubts seem to stem from anecdotal evidence and lack of understanding of how Iranians use the internet.

Most of the people tweeting were seemingly new users with very similar English language avatars.

Twitter usernames are forced to fit within a Latin character set, so it's no surprise that many used English words (many Iranians can speak English, you know).

* I didn't see the Iranians I knew with green avatars.*

The tinting of avatars to green was a movement by others to support the Iranians, not a move by Iranians themselves. Although, of course, it is inspired by the use of green by Iranians in real-life to support their candidate.

Also take note that the green "opposition movement" is supportive of the old clerical power elite that has been in power before the current one.

That's not necessarily true. It is true that in most areas, there is no fundamental difference between the two candidates, and the opposition candidate was part of a previous administration. However, this is missing the point. Iranians realize this, and support Moussavi because of the differences between his opponent, not the similarities. Moussavi represents a small shift from Ahmadinejad, but a shift nonetheless. It's a shift that would give Iranians slightly more personal freedoms, which would allow them in four years to push for a candidate that represents an even larger shift, and so on..

That having been said, it's true that Twitter shouldn't be receiving credit for its role in the Iranian elections; the credit should go to the Iranians themselves. Had Twitter not existed, they would have found an alternate method of disseminating information.
Built to Fail: What Google, Ideo, and 37signals have in common
I don't know about your state but in Virgina uemployment caps at 378$ a week. Legaly you are not allowed to work. Still, that can go a long way and you can move to a cheeper cost of living area.
Average price of an iPhone app is going down. [Charts]
I may take downvotes for this... but was that even written by an English speaker?
How Much Equity Should A CEO Get? Management Equity Compensation Benchmarks
Extending Tokyo Cabinet DB with Lua
It's a shame I don't have this system to cope with the disruption of 45 second adverts.
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If Google won't filter the garbage out of the results why doesn't someone build something that will, for example, instantly remove any webpage that hasn't been updated since 1999 etc.etc. Off topic yes, but I find most of the sites that come up, well, useless.
However, it wasn't as easy as it is now. As far as I know, most IRC servers don't let you send and receive SMS.
Allow me to try rephrasing this:

"60% of companies say XP is good enough for their purposes."

We could get into whether Windows 7 is compelling or not, but perhaps for what most companies need done, XP does it.
Yes, and the image of the cover of WIRED is very telling. They have especially suffered from this over the years. For every great piece like the one Neal Stephenson wrote on the people who deploy undersea cables (http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/ffglass.html), it seems like you get ten like the one shown in the article.
I mean, tiny button. Not a huge button that is used by file upload field. Something like this: http://i30.tinypic.com/34f0knt.png

Or you can put this option in menu or status bar or whatever.

By the way, I don't understand your complaints about design and layouts. I've never had problems with designing forms. Maybe this is because I didn't try to replace native controls with some uber-fancy things? (which is a good thing)
The most interesting part of this article is that the talk got accepted to Blackhat. I'm sad to be missing the HN members' talks there, but I certainly don't mind missing a talk about a vulnerability dating back at least to the 1960's (in regards to key-presses, further for emissions security in general) : http://cryptome.org/tempest-old.htm
They can avoid program breakage by emulation, much like Apple did with early releases of OSX.
swik.net - For some reason I see it's "search" pages every day in search results. Put two protocol names together, or a language + protocol and you're almost guaranteed to get it in the second place :/

scribd - They hide your search phrases somewhere in the page, so that you can think you've found exactly what you were looking for. But all you get is some random, slightly related book that doesn't help you at all.
HTTPRiot - Consume REST Resources on the iPhone and OS X
How to Launch a Small Business on a Shoestring
The article has an odd cadence to it, doesn't it?
To Lead More Effectively, Increase Your Self-Confidence
Unfinished TV Web App Looking for New Owner
I don't want to take a look at the site because I'm at work, and value my job, but do you encourage any of the site users to help weed out the crap?

I have a few communities and admittedly, they're not webcam oriented (which likely helps), but they pretty much moderate themselves. (Report links, power-users being assigned moderator powers, etc)
There are two things working against that idea: 1) monopolies are illegal in most countries that you'd be targeting and 2) achieving monopolies in most markets is difficult.

In your bakers analogy, the barrier to entry is low enough that other bakers could set up shop and create competition. The video game console market is large enough that there will always be some company that could pounce on an opportunity. In fact, it's happened twice in recent history. Sony with the PS1 and Microsoft with the XBox.
Microsoft to step up Google battle
Continuous body monitoring: New Information from Toumaz CEO
Xbox Live Arcade is great. I'm hooked on Settlers of Catan on it.
Accordance of mp3 - accessible everywhere - poetic
It's from the UK. RTFA.
Trucks at Jobs
All The Information On Trucks........
http://www.google.com/search?q=%22not+hacker+news%22+site:ne...

yields "about 7,220 results" on Google
Existing software & driver compatibility, hardware compatibility (and cost of replacing old kit), roll-out time and user training are just the beginning.

Enterprise-scale rollouts for new software are never as simple as "putting the disc in the machine and waiting".
Folks, this is supposed to be satire. Everyone's taking this advice seriously again. See my previous comment from an earlier Dudely article: http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=671618

This is equivalent to getting worked up over an Onion story.
JavaScript Diff
"Most people use passwords. Some people use passphrases. Bruce Schneier uses an epic passpoem, detailing the life and works of seven mythical Norse heroes."

Given this fact, it's not too hard to see why he would have come out against masking . . .
I love the "Winners are made of fail, losers of excuses" point. It really is true that if you don't fail and always come up with excuses, you'll never win.

Really great to see you honestly blogging about your life.
Data point: My mother was a programmer back in the 1950s. She wrote numerical programs that simulated missile trajectories... in octal. She thought it was great when she got an assembler.

I don't recall her ever saying anything about discrimination on the job. The thing she griped about was being told by a math professor that math was no place for a woman.

Maybe there are some gating effects happening that steer women away from trying technical fields? It seems to me that, within most software places, you belong if you know your stuff. Nobody cares about your race, gender, religion, sexual orientation, or other basis for "discrimination". We care if you can code. (If you can't code, and got the job as a token person-of-that-color/gender/sexual orientation, then we usually have a problem with that, but that's not the same as bias against that color or gender or sexual orientation.)

That's the way it's been almost everywhere I've ever worked, and I've been in software for 25 years.

So what I'm trying to say is, there's almost always room for some introspection, but maybe we're too hard on ourselves? Maybe the lack of women in software isn't really the software guys' fault?
Hi, I'm the site author. Here's an experimental SVG page that addresses your comment. I may be switching to that one of these days.

http://animatedengines.com/svg/test.xhtml

Thanks, everyone, for the kind words. And, I'd love to get your feedback on the SVG page.

-Matt
"These virtual objects are easy to secure because they are all structured the same way, according to the same standard. Security applied this way is also very strong, because, even though a hacker may somehow penetrate one bubble, this does not mean that he will be able to penetrate other secure bubbles within the system."

We provide uniform compartments which are somehow not all subject to the same vulnerabilities!

"Safe Worlds already has semantic search. It will take a couple of years however before sufficient data is available in semantic form, for Safe Worlds semantic search to be competitive with Web-based search engines like Google and Yahoo."

It'll be amazing! And we have a totally legitimate reason not to have anything set up that can demonstrate it!

This is pure snake oil, and it deserves a better fisking than I have time for right now.
The standout there is Apple. Apple builds great products, doesn't do focus groups. They probably do multiple iterations but without large betas, the audience of those iterations is probably very limited.

Their releases are not cheap - once you announce a new iPhone, you cannot change the hardware before release so you really need to get it right. The soonest you can update it is a year or so.

Most of all,Apple is the canonical example of the 'great man theory'. Apple has several of them - Jobs, Ive and several others whose names generally don't get publicity.

Now, this is not to say the original posts points aren't valid - most people don't have the talent or expertise that Apple do. But I just couldn't resist throwing in the obvious counter-example.
DDOS Attacks Wane in US, May Result in Mass Bot Suicide
And thus begins the network of the Qeng Ho.
from http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=why-do-we-s...
"There is a catch, though: The more we swear, the less emotionally potent the words become, Stephens cautions. And without emotion, all that is left of a swearword is the word itself, unlikely to soothe anyone's pain."
Seems more of a "I want to do this thing, therefore if I do it, I'll feel slightly better" sort of thing. I mean, people get accustomed to cussing. I sure feel better when I get the urge to do it and can actually do it.
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Entrepreneur 2.0, or How Does an Artist Become a CEO?
Which does not actually make a difference here since for most of the time Iran was blocking all SMSes (I agree about the ease-of-use angle, it allowed technology-use to reach a critical mass)
It's standard procedure in academia---in CS, at the very least---to notify the people you're correcting in advance. This ensures that they (a) know about the problem, (b) are aware of your efforts and can comment directly to you, and (c) can participate in the discussion that ensues when you publish.
Office 2010 Includes Office Web, But Not Available Until Next Year
Meet Jim Bishop - The Man Who Built His Own Castle (video)
Cache please? Unless that's the point, since his server has since melted into a pool of lava.
The actual story is much better:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/motoring/news/5803066/Cars-to-be-...

I wonder if the summary was created automatically.
Cool--that's a great rig. I'm exploring it all now on the IM forums.
$100M in Facebook stock sought by Russian "Digital Sky Tech"
I'm building small, portable, high-efficiency LED-based lights these days. Unlike most of my "toy projects" I have real uses for high intensity, battery powered lighting.

Current one now in design is a belt-mounted light powered by a 3-AA battery.
I agree that digital assets are barely a consideration for people especially in relation to a topic like this. The idea of creating some sort of standard way and turning it into a business is an intriguing one - why couldn't you just have something akin to a password keeper (like a virtual security box) that you must provide a person to pass onto in the event that you pass away?

I'd probably pay a small amount for that, assuming that the security features were incredible.
10 best apps currently running on my Android phone
Me to. I suppose, at least in my case, that's a good thing because it means no one on my FB has passed away yet.
Summary: Direct communication with users yields better software. Dedicated tech support often translate poorly from user issues to feature requests.
Ask HN: Best e-commerce solution?
I couldn't find any threads relating to this topic, but if there already are, please point me in the right direction...

I was recently hired to redesign an online store for a local store. The solution they are using right now is terrible. I spend most of my time trying to figure out why my CSS, which works fine on my local server, doesn't work in their templates.

I was wondering if anyone had experience with pre-made ecommerce solutions, particularly these:

Magento (http://www.magentocommerce.com)
Zen-Cart (http://www.zen-cart.com)
osCommerce (http://www.oscommerce.com)
X-Cart (www.x-cart.com)

Or would I be better off building a custom solution?
Sounds like a nomination for an Ig Nobel is in order.
Remember to actually solve a problem, rather than implement your idea. I'm in the same situation, and we keep motivating ourselves by refocusing on the customer centric model proposed by Steve Blank. Small iterative cycles, actually talking to your customers -- that's your advantage. Be small, be nimble, and you'll be harder for the big guys to keep up with.