skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For one thing, you're not competing against 50,000 other people on the interwebs

You're always competing with lots of other people; and there will be more to compete with tomorrow than there are today. That is the reality of the ever-shrinking world in which we live. The good news is that those same people entering the market are also consumers of goods and services, and thus grow the total value of the market, making humanity as a whole richer.

Anyway, if you don't want to compete, you shouldn't be in a competitive customer-facing industry. You should work for someone else, far away from the sales and marketing process. Design is pretty much always tightly coupled with marketing; them's the breaks.

there's no danger of the client "stealing" your work

This is a wholly orthogonal issue.

There's always danger of clients not paying, checks bouncing, promises not being kept, people stealing art from the web. It goes both ways: I've had designers flake on me and not keep promises and deadlines. This is not relevant to the discussion at hand. Theft of design work happens, but it's not exclusive to the design contest model (and I've never even heard that it's a major problem with the model, but I don't follow it very closely; but, I think the very act of putting up the contest indicates the client would rather buy art than grab something off of the Internet and re-purpose it for free). And, we are specifically talking about someone for whom stealing $250 worth of work would do dramatically more damage to his reputation than a measly 250 bucks. I don't think Tim Ferriss would steal $250 worth of design work.

Where the traditional spec-work model is supposed to be a "try before you buy" thing, Ferriss is simply asking for a bunch of free, final copies to be produced for him gratis.

What a tyrant. Good thing you can decline the offer.
I have plans for that. I released the app, as is, to gauge how much interest there is in something like this.

The app originally started off as kind of a 'cloud management' console that would allow you to create multiple slices on the fly, have packages installed on them, and then have a central place to monitor their health and what was running.

The problem was, I was doing this all on my own.

By the time the original project reached a 'first draft', it was had become really complex and a pain to make progress on easily. The other downside was this complex project was tied to just one hosting provider. Integrating features and support for other platforms would have taken a great deal of work and increased the complexity of the app exponentially.

So I scratched everything and started off with something simple.
I figured at its essence I needed something that would connect to a machine and setup a bunch of software.

So I put together support for a limited number of packages and only one version of Ubuntu.

By doing so I was able to piece together something that is a lot easier for me to expand upon. A pseudo-framework. Something I'm comfortable working in and can change with little effort.

Future goals include:
Adding support for more software
Adding support for more operating systems
Testing against other hosting providers (this is a cloud!)
A management console

The management console will allow you to save 'recipes', so you can have a custom deploy package.

I also have the ability for making the system interactive (ie, a user is prompted for input via the web and their response is relayed to the server). This hasn't been tested as fully as I'd like, and doesn't serve much of a purpose at this point so I left it out of this release.

As for the architecture of the site, NONE of this was built using Capistrano, Vlad, or Fabric. I think all of those projects are great, but they are very cumbersome and don't allow for the flexibility that I get from what I currently have in place.

Judging by the interest this has stirred up over twitter and now Hacker News, I feel it'd be a good idea to move forward.

That being said, once I get a more fleshed out application in place, I plan on extracting the bits I'm using to bootstrap and releasing it as an open source tool for deployment.
Thunderbird latest beta.

I also use the iPhone email client just about as much as Thunderbird.
China’s Trash Incinerators Loom as a Global Hazard
The world is a big place, the answers to your questions depend entirely on your circumstances. Visas depend on the country. As a general rule, US and EU citizens can stay for 60-90 days at a time without hassle in many countries. There are many tax consequences to living abroad - hire an accountant or else spend a pleasant few evenings on the IRS website to find out more.
Withold password, go to jail
I also use my iPhone's client, but mostly for reading emails.
Single handedly created http://Tripntale.com
Mail.app in the office, mutt if I'm terminal bound.
What would I call it if someone asked me to do a week's worth of work for free as a trial for a contract?

Tuesday.

This is what sets me off about the NO!SPEC drama: this idea that lawyers and engineers would never give their time away for free. Of course, they routinely do. I've gotten multiple hours of free consult from two different top law firms, without even any expectation of any immediate work.
Write about two things: What you are doing/how to do it, and what you are thinking about. If it is interesting to you, then you will write an interesting article (or so we all hope). Write for yourself. An audience is just a bonus.

Don't worry about being consistent to a certain subject.
I use the Google Apps/Gmail interface also. I've found that as it has matured over time there are less reasons I would want a desktop client and more reasons for having the portability of a cross platform, location independent web interface.

Gmail is a class act when it comes to web apps.
Help Us By Taking The 2009 Web Application Survey
The US is one of very few countries in the world that taxes their citizens who live abroad.

So yes, technically you'd be subject to pay income tax in both the US and the country you live in, but it is likely that there is a tax treaty with the host country that will let you deduct any local income taxes paid from your US taxes.

In practice, this means that you will pay only one income tax (but file two returns).
A spaceship sends messages to a logging system I built

(That's the coolest way I could phrase interning at NASA)
I use mailnotify to check a few different accounts
for new messages (http://www.nongnu.org/mailnotify/) then just log on to a webmail site to access the mail.
i bet techcrunch will turn around and sell the data as a report for $500 bucks.
Yeah, but their templates are specifically designed by them with this in mind, which is why there are only a handful to choose from and they aren't very interesting.

Since we allow anything that can be done with CSS, and allow people to upload their own templates, the problem of exporting to different formats is significantly more difficult.
why would you want the rights to something you didn't pay for, and allegedly have no intention of using?

It is absolutely essential, for legal reasons, to get a signed waiver of copyright from any person that you accept spec work from. Otherwise, when Ferriss' book cover comes out, and it is red and blue with a muscular-looking guy on it, every single person who submitted a red-and-blue-muscle-guy cover will sue him for copyright infringement. There could be hundreds of them.

This is why screenwriters are told to never, ever send unsolicited manuscripts to movie studios. The studios will send them back unopened, encased in slightly larger envelopes, because even opening the envelope will create legal risk: If your script for Transformers 3 has been opened, your lawyer will be able to claim that the studio has seen it, and that the giant metal Cuisinart that appears in the final movie was obviously inspired by the giant metal Kitchenaid that appears in your script, and that they owe you $1 million.
Arguing that the government needs to jump through hoops is some sort of defence to you isn't relevant. They can and do jump through those hoops all the time, and home-owners are left with assessed values that certainly don't reflect the value of the home to them.

Of course it's relevant. The easier it is for the government to snap up any property it feels like on a whim, the more frequently this will happen. The fact that it is sometimes useful and necessary for the government to exercise eminent domain doesn't mean there shouldn't be restrictions.
Maybe some day the culture will be right for most people to find one another online. All of our metaphors for it will have to break first, though.
But we can already turn "sort a list of numbers" into a program, although instead of "sort a list of numbers", it's called sort() and takes a list of numbers as an argument. By this standard, most programs are closer to specs than they are to solutions--a testament to the abstractions we already have.
Amen, good to hear this sort of thing coming from a fellow Apple user. Microsoft's 'ecosystem' is far more open than Apple's, so Apple is hardly becoming Microsoft -- they're becoming less and less like Microsoft. In terms of developer and community support, that's bad. In terms of high-quality easy-to-use products that I will love to use, that's very good.
I understood the bit.ly absorption to be more of a courtesy than an attempt to profit. Giving their redirects to a company that has the infrastructure and the long term support to keep them on-line, rather than just let them go dark, would be responsible and really wouldn't help bit.ly increase it's user base at all.
I take it you don't ride buses. They are often completely full in rush hour, including people standing.

Meanwhile, most cars have only one person in it. Maybe an average of 1.5. You could have a carpool with 4 people in it, but I think that's rare compared to single passenger vehicles.
A funny part of the AIGA position on spec work is that it "devalues the industry". Which, of course, it does, if by "devalue" you mean "reduces the cost to access". By the same token, you can always "improve" the value of something by colluding with all the suppliers to jack up the price.
"This is one of the main sources of instability in today's software." is a sweepingly bold statement, which is statistically inaccurate at best and completely made-up at worst. Most likely it is simply applicable to a subset of languages that do in fact make this sort of a mistake easy to make. These languages do not however include either C or C++, which still account for a lot today's software.

If you have a link for the Tony Hoare article, it'd be interesting to see what its sampling base was.
He went on to say that the rumors of widespread e-book app rejection I’d heard were false — that specifically one e-book app had been rejected because it facilitated iPhone-to-iPhone sharing of (potentially copyrighted) books. But that otherwise, there was no sweeping ban on e-book readers.

That's only true under Apple's tortured reasoning that they're not 'banning' apps by only allowing them rated XXX, even in the period before the rating system was live.
NEWS FLASH: Corporation gives non-answer, changes jack shit, and expects sympathy and understanding. Typical.
Delightful puzzles for computer scientists and mathematicians
Point: You will be utterly lost.
Counterpoint: So, too, will everyone else be lost.

Use your time to maximize your experience as best you are able. If you are studious, study your brains out. If you are a doer, find a lab and camp out there until someone asks you for help. If you're a drug user of any kind, walk around the on-campus/near-campus housing until you hear a party, then crash it. If you like guys/girls more than anything else previously mentioned, put some ice down your pants and concentrate on school for a few semesters. When you're confident and familiar, it'll count for a lot more in the long run (plus the available dating pool will have mellowed out by a lot.) Get off campus eventually, don't be a shut-in, don't think of the campus as your only safe harbor.

Point: Younger people at your school are still hormonal, just like high school.
Counterpoint: When everyone's lost, it's good to be found. Find yourself -- not just within you, but in others. Independence is not overrated, but it is often ignored.
Also, if you do use this app and find it useful I am VERY open to feedback.

If you encounter any errors or wish that the app did something that it currently doesn't do, PLEASE email me via either info@sliceapp.com OR support@sliceapp.com
pine.

I kid, I kid. I use google apps all around (work & home).
Chosen, inevitable, and contingent: the technium and its direction
SquirrelMail, Thunderbird
Thunderbird, Usermin (our webmail client), GMail, and the Android mail application, in that order.

All of my @virtualmin.com mail comes to one mailbox via aliases, and I can access that box from home on Thunderbird, the web with Usermin, and my phone with the G1. GMail is for personal stuff, and for chat.

Our support is handled through a ticket tracker, which makes things dramatically easier to manage.
If you did something that 99.9999% of the population did not do then you are special by definition.

Teenager's have significantly different levels of cognitive ability compared to adults. There is a reason most people look back on their teenage years and say "why was I so stupid" and honestly it's because your brain was less developed on a biological level.

http://books.google.com/books?id=2xpvp4ie_8MC&dq=hippoca...
ok, here's what i like and dislike about living in argentina and starting up a consulting business and building a product on the side.

first, yes, it's cheaper, and yes, the wine i buy is better 100 fold than the states, and yes, i would say i've cut costs by about 40%. my kids didn't belong to a private club and take swimming and tennis lessons in seattle... so we're not taking advantage of the cost savings we could.

but it's still hard: hiring is hard. getting a good cultural fit is hard. building a business that works within the legal framework is impossible. i'm deathly afraid of hiring local talent because it's VERY easy to be sued due to the employment laws of the country.

but it's great: you get a lot of time back in ways i can't explain. it's like you get to ignore a lot of the BS that working in seattle or SF can overwhelm you. explaining the details of why that is would be a longer post, but every tech expat i know in argentina talks about the same thing - somehow you feel more in control of your schedule and your life.

do it when you can hire foreigners, keep your team small, keep your relationships and contacts with people back in the states or europe, and get paid in dollars or euros (or build a product that makes dollars or euros), and can come back once in a while - anything else and it's not such a great deal.
If P=NP, then mathematics as a field would be destroyed.
Stephen Cook writes:

For example, it would transform mathematics by allowing
a computer to find a formal proof of any theorem which has a proof of reasonable
length, since formal proofs can easily be recognized in polynomial
time. Example theorems may well include all of the CMI prize problems.
Although the formal proofs may not be initially intelligible to humans, the
problem of finding intelligible proofs would be reduced to that of finding a
recognition algorithm for intelligible proofs. Similar remarks apply to diverse
creative human endeavors, such as designing airplane wings, creating physical
theories, or even composing music. The question in each case is to what
extent an efficient algorithm for recognizing a good result can be found. This
is a fundamental problem in artificial intelligence, and one whose solution itself
would be aided by the NP-solver by allowing easy testing of recognition
theories.
If you did something that 99.9999% of the population did not do then you are special by definition.

My circumstances were special, not me.

Teenager's have significantly different levels of cognitive ability compared to adults. There is a reason most people look back on their teenage years and say "why was I so stupid" and honestly it's because your brain was less developed on a biological level.

Cognitive differences do not preclude all responsibility. As it currently stands, most teenagers are provided with none at all, despite their historically demonstrated ability to shoulder considerably more than our institutions provide.

I was not special -- I did quite a few phenomenally stupid things as a teenager -- but I also learned how to be an adult sooner.

[Edit] One of the dangers of expressing this opinion is that it triggers cognitive dissonance amongst those who did follow the standard protocol.

So, allow me to reiterate -- given the proper circumstances, I believe all teenagers are well capable of accepting quite a bit more responsibility than they are currently allowed, but most never have the external encouragement or motivation to do so.
I created a website that 3/4 of my college started using - and still uses now that I'm gone - solely through word of mouth.

menumunchies.com - for those interested
I've heard good things about coffee shops, but I haven't tried them yet. According to a recent article on YC, this is a "third place." (The article was about MMOs.) Pubs and bars are also "third places."

Essentially, though, yes, there is no solution that rivals college. Often people say that their college years were the best years of their life - I wonder if this is a leading factor in that decision.
What have you learned about what they have done that is interesting?
Why not make it real email than implementing half-baked solutions?
1) That's actually not what I've heard from the friends that went to Ghana or Madagascar or Nepal - they seemed to get far more out of their study-abroad experience than us normal folk who went to New Zealand or Australia or Oxford. Many of them have traveled significantly since then - both to go back to where they studied abroad, and to other developed nations like Europe. Judging from my circle of friends, it seems like studying in the developing world is a life-changing experience while studying in the developed world is "merely" a nice experience to have.

2) Agree, but I didn't do so myself. Mostly because studying abroad was totally a last-minute decision for me - I got to a week before the deadline for the spring semester, found out all my friends would be abroad for the semester, and thought "Shit - what will I do for a semester?" Better halfway than never. My friends that spent a whole year got much more out of it - after a semester, you're still sorta a tourist, while after a year, you've really started to internalize some of the culture of your host country.
Mail.app with MailActOn (http://www.indev.ca/MailActOn.html) which I am not affiliated with and is not free. Use it for 7 email accounts, lots of RSS, all filtered carefully into one combined inbox and organized manually but quickly into local folders with that MailActOn app.

In my experience heavy use of Mail.app results in accounts that do not get checked for email, and show no connection error or indication of a problem. No email for an hour and I restart the app. I wish refreshing my accounts actually displayed the status of checking each account, it is very obvious sometimes that the refresh button does basically nothing or at least doesn't inform me in any way what it is doing...
Well, for one you don't need Openid to register. Stack overflow scares a lot of potential users. It is more geared towards programmers as opposed to designers.
Really wish this site would bill itself as "Web Development Q&A" instead of "Web Design."

Of the three pages of questions currently on the site, none of them would be better described as "design" than "frontend development."

It's time we granted these separate professions the dignity of their own names instead of forcing everything into the hodgepodge of "design."
The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution
I can't believe I'm going to say this

don't laugh, but I use outlook, and .........AOL.

I've had the AOL account for years and I've never cared enough to switch it over (it handles all of my spam like e-mails anyway).

I've never really cared about my e-mail client in general. If I were motivated to switch - which is the most intuitive for organization?
looks like I'll have someone else take care of the jokes from now on.
Does this surprise anyone? If you're served a warrant, you have to unlock your doors or open your safe, too.
The cynic in me sees two differences:

1) Much smaller user base

2) The Litmus ad on the right side of every page

EDIT: The rest of me sees healthy competition and an interesting take on freemium marketing for their money-making app. :)
This is probably why PG keeps putting "a dating site that doesn't suck" as one of the ideas they'd like to fund... ;-)
How to Write an RFP for a Web Design Project
Not exactly a gap. It's just trying to be a domain-specific site. There're plenty of examples of this. For example, you could view HN as a domain-specific digg or reddit, for tech/startups. Even though you can make a subreddit or similar.

Perhaps they felt there was a lot of bad quality for HTML/CSS question and answers on StackOverflow, so they built this. I don't think so, but it's possible that the creators do.
Much like how Steve Jobs delivers a keynote
Would you mind talking about this with me?

jpwagner [at> mit <dotty] edu

Thanks!
You've never had a problem with a null pointer in C or C++? Ever?

You didn't answer my question, either. What do you think are the most common sources of instability?
I am wondering, however, if the display time is faster now because the new site doesn't have much user load where the old google site is relatively busy.

The claim about 'faster' is that newer search results show up sooner than they did on the old google. That is, new results get indexed for display earlier.
I'm agreeing that they are different. I'm merely stating that the physical and neurological differences are not enough to legislate what young people can and can't do. Society will always view young people as inexperienced, and those youngsters who haven't proven themselves will always have their place in society.

What would I make different? Not that it's practical (or even non-nebulous), but I would restore the "child-adult continuum" that the article mentions, because I agree with the author when he says the age-based restrictions tend to delay the onset of real, actual, adulthood. Which is bad.
I've been toying around with an idea about that... guess I should get work on it ;) While in college I never truly appreciated the kind of massive ache we have in the market for a dating site that works...
Gmail in a Fluid app, and Mail.app on iPod Touch.
Well nothing but I mean it would be interesting, should they happen to go into a technical explanation.
Lead systems engineer for ABWR Feedwater Control System Units 1 & 2, Lungmen Nuclear Power Station in Taiwan. Designed it 10yrs ago, just going online now.

http://www.power-technology.com/projects/lungmen/
I've only been watching the app store from a distance, so maybe I'm missing something from my perspective. But it seems Apple has been getting negative press from the beginning of the app store and made little effort to change, at the expense of both developers and iPhone users (and likely Apple itself). It's good to see them changing now, but I have to wonder what rock they've been under for the last year or more.
I just pulled up your profile, but alas, no contact info :(

Going to Costa Rica next month but I'll be down to South America in January, we should definitely meet up when I'm in town.
Much smaller user base

Since SO content is licensed under creative commons, there's no reason they can't feed in all questions into SO... I suppose it might be tricky to merge votes of the (much larger) SO audience with votes of their audience, and has interesting implications to SO's business, but it's certainly doable.
you just have to learn how to delegate