skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It seems to me that you got seriously shafted on that deal. I don't think that the app I made was much more complex, i.e. I probably maybe spent 10x as much time as you did on that one, but I made 200x more money doing it. The pricing of these things seems to be very subjective to me, and contingent on numerous factors including: How much they've actually got to pay for it? How much they think they can get away with? How much they think someone else would bill them for it? How much their friends tell them it should cost? What is the actual application? How much incremental money do they stand to make as a result of its existence? And very little with how much time/effort actually goes into it on your part. Ofhand, you could have easily made at least $5k on that site. And if it was for a more general purpose, i.e. as opposed to just one dealership, you could have made much more.
I would assume Twitter is using conventional ERB templates since their front end is written using Rails.

The ERB templates used by rails don't escape HTML by default--you have to write <%= h user_provided_value %> instead of <%= user_provided_value %> to mitigate cross-site scripting attacks such as this. It's pretty easy to miss, even if you know you should always escape user-provided data.

Django's template engine, for instance, automatically escapes strings (though I think this can be disabled). To not escape HTML, you must either specify it or a method producing said string can mark it as "safe".

Though ERB is great in that it's incredibly versatile--we use it to generate several types of configuration files--I would very much prefer for it to escape HTML by default when asked to render a string in the context of an HTML page generated by a Rails app. Form helpers and methods such as "render" could be modified to mark Strings that contain HTML you wouldn't want escaped as "unescapable", much like Django does.

The way it works now invites problems like this, even from competent programmers.
I'm guessing this doesn't hurt IKEA much. When time will come for those people to change furniture, there's little chance they'll go somewhere else. And even in such a visit they will leave money for food, drink and small purchases. Overall it's worth the extra customer. They don't even form large queues.
100000$ for two months work seems like a good price.
I, likewise, am planning to shop at Whole Foods more frequently now. Actually, one of the reasons I didn't shop at Whole Foods before was that it was always too crowded. Maybe it'll be easier to find a parking space from now on. (It helps that my local branch is in Berkeley.)
TED Talk: Wireless Electricity [video]
I think it looks pretty cool. I don't have a group I need to set up right now, so it makes it a little tough to really give it a run through.

I'll definitely bookmark to check out later though.
Talk of IT innovation is the last gasp of the IT cowboys
There is independent confirmation of this at the MacRumors forums.

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=768932
Here's the funny thing: Mackey actually was a progressive before he tried to actually run a company.

That's why I can't take these political disagreements seriously. What makes you so sure you're right about politics and Mackey is wrong? I used to be wrong about quite a few political issues--maybe I used to be right, and I'm wrong now. How do you get so confident in your political opinions that you want to get in the way of people expressing a contrary viewpoint?
Nice to know that all that money I've spent on Laphroaig over the years is being put to good use.
only issue is people aren't going to create an account and give you the feedback you really need - inside your site. Homepage/etc feedback is easy to come by, by comparison.

That being said I have used Feedback Army once before months ago and received decent to good feedback quality. I guess I just need to ask better questions.
However, if everyone carried 10-15 extra car-lengths ahead of them, the total capacity of the road would be greatly diminished; you would just be moving the jam to the on-ramp.

The peak performance of the system is actually a mix of altruism and selfishness.
I think it's really funny that his hands are still brown.
They seem to get finding the median slightly wrong:

"Note that finding the median of an array is a special case of this where k = n/2."

I'm pretty sure it should be k = (n+1) / 2. (If there are 5 numbers, you want the 3rd one, if there are 6 numbers you want the average of 3 and 4.)
low/high is very subjective. depends on a lot of stuff.
Agreed that F.U.D. is old-fashioned/crude compared to reason/responsibility for a parenting tool. If the consequences of actions are known ahead of time, and the consequences are 'dealt' every time, there's no need to toy with strong emotions.

External guilt plays with self-esteem, which is hard enough for kids. It's bad enough goofing up and feeling that feeling without having someone tell you you're an idiot and will burn in hell forever. (Lots of kids die over that stuff.)
A Manifesto for Slow Communications
Incidentally this is a good metric in hiring decisions. Anyone who has the time or interest to complete this survey is probably not the best fit. It would be like if you asked an interviewee what the like to read and they said Cosmo and Redbook.

Now that I think about it, every time I see someone post one of those things I subconsciously lose a little respect for them. :-/
That being the case, it's still surprising considering that this was missed considering how simple the interface to Twitter really is, and how few "unsafe" user inputs there are.

Also surprising that this was brought to light so late in the game.
Why The Aversion to the Low Hanging Fruits?
Just a public service announcement-- for those of you looking to validate your own site for XSS exploits, you'll find that this list is particularly good at giving you "problem" strings to test against:

http://ha.ckers.org/xss.html

We honestly thought we secured XSS with common libraries on every field for one of our sites, but we paid a contractor to go through and use those strings in various unexpected places and they found a few special and unobvious spots that fell between the cracks.

Don't think you're immune just because you use all the right frameworks and input sanitation tricks. Even the best web developers are going to mishandle things from time to time.

If you think it's irresponsible for Twitter to miss some XSS vulnerabilities, you better be doing this testing on your sites, too, before someone else does and calls you out on it. If you're not testing at least the easy user input exploits, you don't really know how protected you are.
Did you? Read it again.

It's missing the point and excessively patronizing. He is sticking it to his customers, you just aren't reading critically. To his credit, he's been consistent -- I found articles about the WF health plan from way back where he is equally patronizing about how his employees chose the "Suck Less" health care plan by vote. Gee, thanks. :-)

Lets take some choice quotes:

Covering the naive, self-serving bases we have:
"Repeal government mandates regarding what insurance companies must cover", "Enact tort reform to end the ruinous lawsuits that force doctors to pay insurance costs of hundreds of thousands of dollars per year." Incredibly naive. Just astoundingly so. Also, note the complete lack of concern for the patients in this triangle. Or at least the ones who may not have the privilege of working at WholeFoods.

And under the WTF category: "Finally, revise tax forms to make it easier for individuals to make a voluntary, tax-deductible donation [for people with no insurance]". Does anyone think this proposal is actually legitimate? This is the most intelligence insulting bit of ass-covering I've ever seen.

But it doesn't end there. He references an article in Investor's business daily which is basically full of lies (look up the rebuttals -- it's quite humorous)

And I love this one. Note the pre-built conclusion: "Why would [Can,UK employees] want such additional health-care benefit dollars if they already have an "intrinsic right to health care"?" Well, fucking duh, they don't need high deductable insurance from WholeFoods, and they want access to extra benefits in some form. But, he's smart, he knew this already... He just didn't choose to phrase it that way.. for our beenfit, of course. :-)

And we have the patronizing implication in: "Unfortunately many of our health-care problems are self-inflicted:". If that isn't a huge fuck you, I have no idea what is.
I'm constantly surprised by how few people have heard of the "3 second rule".

The rule is simple and works for any traveling speed: pick any arbitrary mark on the road, watch as the car in front of you passes it, and count 3 seconds. You want at the very minimum, 3 seconds to pass before you pass that same mark.

This not only has the advantages described by the OP (he's definitely following it, if not calling it by name), but one thing he didn't mention is that it can save your life.

Why do car "pile ups" exist? It's because someone was driving along just fine, when suddenly they come to a crashing hault (at 70+MPH), and all of the tailgators behind them are not physically capable of reacting to the situation in time. SMASH! You're fucked.
The conversation unalone and I had last night in the broader context of the unwillingness by Web 2.0 companies seemingly unable to go for the "unsexy" monetization solutions.
How do you know we haven't had one already? :/
Disclaimer: WSJ's parent company owns Facebook's biggest competitor, Myspace.
Tech/business jargon: "leverage" (when used as a verb)
anywhere: "utilize" (when used as a word)
Yeah, come to Massachusetts and I'm sure you'll have an entirely different experience.
It definitely took more than 3 hours, I'm not superman lol. Everything was made from scratch. The admin panel took most of my time. Keep in mind I also made the design, registered the domain name and set up the hosting. Support was also provided, we got together so I could explain how he could manage the website on his own. It was my first real freelance project though, so I let him choose the price.
Most freelancers who can solo a multi-month .NET or RoR application make more than 75/hr.
The Internet is about to change
Sick Around the World
Your pricing may be off by as many as two orders of magnitude.
Missing from this: any mention of cost, so out of interest I went and figured it out.

Assuming a cost of $200 per square metre, carpeting the 336,000 odd square km required for 2008's energy usage would cost... 67 trillion dollars. Factor in a bunch more for transmission and storage.
Both of those "bites" are true, but what the market is compensating you for is risk, not overhead.
The government is unbeatably efficient at writing checks.

I think we have different ideas about what economic efficiency entails. I'm not sure that "efficiency" at wasting money is a good thing, nor is it usually what is meant in the context of providing services. (I have not yet had an opportunity to read your link, however, so perhaps this is answered in it).
Precisely. As well as the increased risk of having no contracts for long-stretches of time, and the additional overhead time of promotion, customer relations, etc.
It seems to me that boycot is perfect way to censor people. I find nothing wrong with it. There are social consequences to what you say. This is the way it should be. Government cencorship, on the other hand...
If you're going to say:

"This shows that folks in favor of government run healthcare are not really interested in a debate - they are interested in complete victory, with zero dissent. It's an ideology, not a rational position."

You have to recognize this happening on both sides of the aisle (Town Hall Meetings anyone?)
In the UK, you might get to do one or two courses outside your field if you really want to and they're basically relevant, but what you "major" in is all you study. No-one makes engineers take classes in creative writing f'rinstance.
Apple including antivirus is probably a smart move for the future, but in the short term I hope more mac users start to realize that their computers are still capable of being infected, albeit a lot less likely.
Executive brief: I'm a complete drudge, as should you be.

It's people like this that came up with Six Sigma.
how much per hour would you say that it's worth?
Used it before and got great feedback. Highly recommended, but I think when we did it initially it was slightly cheaper. Still very much a bargain.
The distinction becomes relevant when comparing operating systems and their relative susceptibilities to viruses.

That a given operating system is vulnerable to malware in general is not notable, because users will be duped by dancing babies, porn, and infected stolen software.

That a given operating system ever allowed unaided self-replication take place is, and this is where Apple's marketing message has been placed.
According to a schedule recently posted on the pgsql-hackers list (in message "8.5 release timetable, again"), an alpha will be released around 2010-01-01. This is just probably documentation for REL8_5_ALPHA1_BRANCH.
Dad called it "cruising."
That comment put this into perspective and gave me a light bulb. Thanks!
The Demography of Napping
How would I go about styling a Google spreadsheet?
a coworker of mine recommends Traffic, on this topic, by Tom Vanderbilt.
Yet it's a perfect opportunity to show that your "side" is the rational one.

I read an opinion piece in a local (Monterey, CA) weekly paper, trying to explain why the Whole Foods boycotters are completely different than the "teabaggers". It essentially was, "we think those guys are retarded, but he's why we're not retarded, even though you can't tell us apart by looking."

The ability to self-delude is a key attribute in taking part of silly "us vs. them" partisan politics. Issues like health care are amazingly complex, but it's easier to go with the groupthink and take up a rallying cry than dig into the issue and realize how nonsensical the "bumper sticker answers" are.
For the slightly-more-expert take, you might like a site like this (seems like 99 designs but for usability reviews):

http://usabilitytest.com/

Also I saw this service advertised before:

http://www.usabilityfeedback.com/

I've never used either of those, but I have used Feedback Army and can recommend it as a way to get sanity checks with multiple people. Sometimes it's hard to tell if a certain stock photo is "creepy" unless you launch or use a service like FA, so it ends up being well worth such a low fee (for us anyway).
Lexington sc homes
Most people encounter a little anxiety and stress in life. Actually, such things can be good for the body.These signals keep us alive and safe. They also assist us to solve our problems.
That thread actually brings up a really good point: we need to train users to update apps only via the official OS-sanctioned update method (Windows Updater, OSX Update, etc), or via the app's built-in update mechanism.

The sort of "oh hey, QuickTime needs to update, run this file" should automatically set up alarm bells in everyone's heads.

OSX is lucky in this respect - it has Sparkle, which for a large part has become the de facto software updater for OSX. It has a simple UI that users recognize and approaches universal adoption.
I agree, but I simply meant that the numbers for "doing fine" differ between salary and freelance, just as the numbers for "doing fine" differ between Topeka and New York.
Interesting to see the backwards bending supply curve of labor in effect. The poor nap, the middle class do not, and the rich do.
sweet fancy moses!
I see the purpose of the cloud being easy scalability, but from a cost perspective I'm not quite sure it's inexpensive enough yet for most startup's. A one off use for a calculation makes sense for a quick answer to a calculation but for an extended connection it seems like it's cheaper to use dedicated hosting.
International Domain Name Spoofing
hmm. even for a year's worth of work it seems like a good price.

100k/year gross working only 20 hours a week is pretty badass if you ask me. The average (full-time) web developer salary according to salary.com is 70k/year.
Charlie Brooker Is Right About Everything
Work on what you feel yourself drawn to the most.
Ask HN: Computer Science Fundamentals
I went to interview with a startup last week. Unfortunately, I didn't get it and I never really gave them enough reasons to.

They asked a number of computer science fundamentals that I used to know back in college (e.g. hashing, pointers, etc.) They said they asked candidates about these because they prefer developers who know the impact of their code in the smallest details.

Any suggestions on what else I should learn related to CS fundamentals?

I'm hoping that on my next interview with a startup, I'll be more prepared.
OK that makes more sense then what I thought he meant. But it doesn't make that much sense when you consider that the ultimate end is economic collapse.

If corporations just put up with what ever conditions we force on them, in the short therm great, but in the long term we're screwed.
This might be the worst example of underpaid I've ever seen.
How is that low? once again, I must whip out some statistics:

http://swz.salary.com/salarywizard/layouthtmls/swzl_compresu...

The average full-time web developer salary is 70k. I'm not saying I don't want to make $150k+, but I just can't find any way to substantiate the claim that I'm worth that much.
Sony to link Readers with libraries, allow e-book borrowing
I've been trying to work this out for some months now, so apologies for piggy-backing onto this question:

How do you actually achieve market prices?

I'm aware that there are massive differences in how much you can charge based on location, but I still feel I'm hitting more resistance to my asking prices than I should be. As far as I can tell, it's not a quality issue. I've had repeat business from almost all my past customers and none of the others were unhappy as far as I can tell, and I've had zero downtime for over 6 months now after starting 15 months ago.

Yet, if I give a straight hourly figure, 90% of the time I'm either told it's too much or I never hear back at all. I do a little better when quoting a fixed price based on the same hourly rate (plus buffers, etc), but many times the work is too ill-defined to come up with a definite offer, so it comes down to giving an hourly rate, with the usual result.

I've had the most success and repeat business with extremely time-sensitive projects, or projects that have gone off the rails and need turning around. I charge about 50% more if I'm basically being asked to work day and night. Once the work is done and done well (and it always is), I can generally get future projects at the standard rate with no major trouble.

I've reluctantly tried the loss-leader strategy of charging less on the first project, and as expected it's not terribly effective.

So as far as I can tell, the issue isn't so much the price as proving I'm worth it. How do you guys handle referrals, references, etc.?

A lot of my work involves NDAs (as it's often subcontracted), which makes referring to existing work and customers extremely difficult. I have a few customers who are brilliant and who I can use as references, but as far as I know, nobody has ever followed them up. Other than literally becoming known by everyone in the area, what other options do I have? Am I expecting a higher conversion rate than I should be? How do I go about finding more well-paying customers?

Maybe I'm tending to the wrong niches, too. My background is mainly in high performance computing, game tech and web apps.

- I've had zero HPC freelance work, and no leads either. No clue where to find them.

- I've had a sizeable amount of game tech programming, but getting reasonable money from game devs seems to be like squeezing blood from a stone.

- The web app business can yield better results, but there's a sea of awful programmers (who seem to exclusively know PHP for whatever reason) out there who call themselves web developers. Their hourly rates are dirt cheap, but their efficiency is lower still. I still can't reliably get this through to potential customers.

- The easiest money is in business-y/enterprise-y development. Except the only way I seem to be able to do this is via subcontracting, which is suboptimal because it's the middle man getting the reputation.

I'm not sure what other areas are more lucrative. Embedded stuff seems like a good fit to my skill set (game console development isn't far off) but I have no clue how to even find potential customers. I'm not sure how or where best to sell myself to enterprise-y businesses.
The blog links were failing whenever I clicked the links, I rechecked them and they look legit enough although I'm still somewhat dubious.

However the whole deal makes no sense, in the UK IIRC you have to be served in person and it has to go through the local justice area and again IIRC London has about 28. I imagine, the Australian system being based on the UK legal system, the courts would never even hear such a claim, especially from a US based company! It's actually a frivolous lawsuit, they purposely sued him in the wrong jurisdiction as a scare tactic.

Edit: The reason I feel it is false is not only because it's a US based company suing a UK citizen in Australia. But it's a defamation suit going through the Supreme Court, which in commonwealth countries is reserved for the most sever crimes (the high court is the appeals court). This means the case basically has to have a jury, defamation rarely has a jury.

The whole thing is false, my suspicion on the author is severely reduced (especially seeing where he's worked) but no legal firm in Australia would take on a frivolous case when both the prosecuting and defendant parties are both not based in the country.
I'm a Zen Master, I have the degree to prove it. Your use of the term has been approved by the ZCUZ (Zen Committee On The Use Of "Zen").
Why do you need a paid screencast for this? The directions are on Apple's iPhone developer site.
so young.
This varies dramatically depending on what highway you're on.

I've driven like the article suggests on Rt. 128 and it totally works. My lane ended up moving smoothly (albeit at a reduced speed; I still can't go any faster than the average speed of the cars in front of me), and nobody cut in front of me.

However, drivers on Rt. 2 are routinely crazy. There've been times I've been going about 70 in a 45 zone, with a guy on my tail, then he'll pop out from behind me, pass me at about 90 mph, cut right in front, and then tailgate the person in front of me until he does the same stunt. Luckily traffic on Rt. 2 is light enough that this doesn't cause many jams, but it does cause its fair share of accidents.

Then there's the Rt. 2/3/16 intersection by Alewife, where it is customary for about 5-10 cars to run the red light before somebody finally stops.
A trojan is malware that misrepresents itself as something else (eg, user is tricked into willingly downloading and installing SuperFunGame.exe which is actually malware), it has nothing to do with the result of running the malware (which may or may not be to allow 3rd party access to your system). As with the trojan horse, it's just a delivery mechanism for something else.
The guy in the middle is white then black.
Thing is, I wonder where I spent the money.
An "average full-time web developer" covers a huge number of roles, most of which don't solo end-to-end on applications.
Ask HN: How to determine temperature of text?
Given a review, say, about a book. What is the best way to determine if the review likes the book or hates it? Just doing a keyword search of "good" or "best" doesn't seem to cut it. What if the review says something like "this is not as good as that"? Some semantic analysis seems necessary.

The harder question: now that we know the review is positive, how can we assign a degree of positiveness? "The best since sliced bread" is much more positive than "good, but can be better".