skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
550/day is not crazy high at all.
Natural language syntax for chained commands in Ubiquity
Extrapolating from "it worked for Craigslist" to "it will work for us" is highly naive. If someone showed up to a meeting and said, "let's do like Craigslist" and totally ignored all the ways that our business is very different from craigslist I'd be sceptical too.
I have no idea why you're getting downvoted?

I definitely think the subject is more reddit HAHA, then HN intellectually stimulating, but that's getting upvotes and yet your clickable links are getting you downvoted!
I would suspect that many Americans would be willing to make such a sacrifice.
Using Kickstarter to Fund a Small Business
The brand awareness is great, but the question is, how do we get people to open up their wallets and spend money?" said Linda Xu

Ikea China is like a dot com company! :)
I should probably mention that even though I spent 20h/day working on it, I spent/spend virtually every waking hour either reading/writing/thinking about writing software/business. I don't drink, I don't do drugs, I don't party. I live with my fiancee, and work pretty much every waking hour on something or other. I don't have a blog because it would consume too much time, and I don't interact with other developers because I worry that it will pull me toward the middle of the bell curve. I worry that I may be going insane, but only passively.
Ooo, this is total flame war bait.....You're making a lot of assumptions about what a "modern" language is here, but I wont' dwell on that : ) Suffice it to say you should give PHP another look, particularly in the context of some of the PHP frameworks that are popular these days (e.g. CodeIgniter, Zend, CakePHP, etc.)

I develop in Java for my full-time job and develop in PHP for my side projects. I enjoy PHP much more than Java. It's a tool, and as with every tool you need to understand how to use it effectively. Some people don't have the mindset that makes this possible, but for those that are willing to let their instincts take over (as opposed to the compiler) can find PHP to be very productive. That being said, I can't for the life of me understand how something as big as Facebook can be done in PHP, but I'm willing to assume those guys are smarter than I am.
> Check if you like, in every area $/h = energy/capita

Even if one does as you do (i.e., measure energy in dollars) I smell a unit mismatch:

left side of your "equation": dollars per hour

right side of your "equation": dollars per human

which would only make sense if you also show that 1 human = 1 hour... perhaps I should stop now.

But:

> Think of a dorm with lots of volunteers. It costs far less energy to house and feed them than 10 separate houses.

yeah, but consider 10 volunteers who live in their own separate houses, eat lots of high caloric food and write a free software program that I use. Cost for me to get the free software program: ca. 0$. Energy used by our 10 independently housed volunteer programmers to create it? I say: Far more than zero.

I guess we should just agree to disagree here: I think it makes sense to look at the energy used to produce a product without looking at how much the product costs - the measure "energy yield" for products like wind turbines makes sense in my understanding. Your model says that we don't need an energy yield measure for wind turbines - because energy yield is the same as return on investment.
Short answer: by turning down projects that are below your threshold.

Intermediate tactics:

* No matter how your SOW/MSA is structured, don't quote prices in terms of $/hour.

* When you get rate pushback, follow up with a bid for a smaller or more constrained project. Slip scope. Never slip your rate. You'll never get it back.

* Include a support retainer or annual/quarterly maintenance price, instead of giving that away for free.
If Macs 'needed' antivirus software it would be necessary on all versions. Just because they've decided to proactively include it doesn't mean they need it.
I see your point that an OS that only gets trojans is better than an OS that gets trojans, viruses, and worms. However, I think it is possible to confine trojans better than we do today and it would be a shame to just give up hope on that front.
thats a bit like saying "why do you need peepcode when the documentation is online for free?"

because some people are better at parsing instructions into an understandable language :)
It certainly does sacrifice utility, efficiency and (especially) affordability, but so what? It's still a masterpiece of engineering.

There's room in the world for both types of products: the ones that do all things reasonably and the ones that do one thing extremely well. The one-thing-extremely-well type are usually the more interesting, whether they be designed for ultra-high speed (Veyron), ultra-high efficiency (Tesla) or ultra-high affordability (Nano).
presumably details on why Leopard ASLR "adds no real security" are discussed in http://www.matasano.com/log/986/what-weve-since-learned-abou..., which will eventually be reachable again?
The OP has.

I've also done budget/independent/backpacker travel.

Trust me, you won't turn into a hippie; you'll just get more cultured, rougher, intelligent, and worldly. Oh, a lot of things stop scaring you too (things like not having enough money, being alone, silly things IMHO).

You meet incredible people too. I admire many of the people we all collectively tend to admire on Hacker News (PG and other hacker/smart people); but the people you meet across the world are so intelligent it will blow your mind - without ever having come across a computer in their entire life.
Over the past few years, I've worked on quite a few PHP/MySQL/jQuery/Oracle webapps for clients. I've never worked on a plain HTML site or a Flash site, so I can't provide any stats there.

Here are some of my stats - most projects I have worked on cost around 10-20k, average around 75-100 an hour, and take approximately 3 months of part time effort. I've done maybe 15 to 20 projects of this length/cost. I like projects of about this size because: I am not overwhelmed, it allows for nice quarterly vacations ~ a week each, the requirements aren't overly complicated, I have free time during the day, and the projects don't drag on forever. I freelance in Austin, my wife covers me on her insurance, I'm in my late 20's, and have done this for 3 years.

I have bid on a few 100k-size, year long projects, but have not been selected for any of them so far. So it goes.
I saw one example result that said the user came from "Turk". Presumably, the site just generates ten Mechanical Turk tasks that pay, say, 75 cents, and keeps the other 25 cents for itself. I wonder if you could just put the tasks up yourself and get the same reviews cheaper, or if the site does something more than this.
Algorithms, complexity and data structures. Depending on the job, review some hw/networks things (I've been asked to fill a table with the OSI model).
The government calls it "speed limit."
That's some good stuff, man. I dig it.

I'm an old metal fan, but going back to college gave me a taste for this kind of stuff.

Hands In The Air is spot-on. It's my favorite. You've got good story-telling skills, which isn't common in music nowadays. And the guitar work is great!

Question, though:

How on earth do you keep it together on stage when people are talking and girls are cackling in the audience during your whole performance? That would totally blow my concentration.
My first thought was to just post the answer to save people the bother, but I didn't want to spoil the submitter's game.

At least having the links there might shave a few seconds off the time we are wasting on this story.
The usual approach for these problems is to admit that you don't know what the rules are, and instead train a statistical classifier based on some sample data:

http://crm114.sourceforge.net/

Depending on how hard your problem is, the accuracy of the classifier may not be very good. You can try to come up with fancier "features" to extract from the items and feed to the classifier, or you can use "artificial artifical intelligence" and just farm out the work to Mechanical Turk at a penny per review.
Which non-relational database is powering the NoSQL East website? :)

Love the UI...very cool. I was hoping to find some Zork commands in there.
Brilliant advice.
This is good advice, but OTOH, I do think it's going about things the wrong way to a certain extent.

Testing your site with certain strings isn't a complete way to determine if it's safe or not. You should "prove" to yourself it's safe against all attacks. Not just the ones you know about.

Definitely worth trying the "problem" strings as a simple sanity check though.

For example js code:

a).
myNode.innerHTML = someUserInput;

b).
myNode.appendChild(document.createTextNode(someUserInput));

It's clear from the source that a) is vulnerable, whilst b) is not. I think programmers just need to be trained to have massive alarm bells go off in their head when they see some external string used in the output/markup in an unsafe way.
I definitely think that traditional single-malts produced with renewable tidal power is a better marketing angle than traditional single-malts produced with nuclear power.
why the downvote? It was an honest question.
If this type of feature can prevent a good portion of users from unknowingly installing malware via random .dmg files loaded from the net, then I'm all for it.

So many people these days just install anything without really checking what it is. I don't consider this anti-viral, more like a condom for the lazier users.
Huh? There is no feature in OS X that makes it any harder to write self-replicating code ("worms"). Code running in almost any OS X process has full access to all the xnu system calls, and (invariably) to at least one user's home directory and Library/ folder.

There's no operating system in common use for which malware distinctions are meaningful. They're all equally vulnerable.
Massive Twitter Security Hole
BootCycle FAQ - Brighton, UK's Answer to Y Combinator [My Own Blog]
Sounds like some aspects of Google Wave. Interesting idea - make it big before Google Wave is released and takes off, or you might have trouble gaining traction. ;)

Good luck!
ever tried to follow those free online instructions? ouch!
I might just be getting old, but I seem to remember virtually every virus being distributed as "SuperFunGame.exe" as well. My point, though, is that these terms are silly, and arguing over them dignifies an undeserving research field. So you win. ;)
How the monetary system really works
Yep. Short answer: Leopard didn't randomize important core libraries.
I can also find people in the anti-'government healthcare' camp whose only objection to the program is the throw up the nebulous term 'socialism' as if just saying 'socialism' means that they won the argument. While many of these same people don't bother to examine many of the government programs that we have in existence today that qualify as 'socialism.' I find these people particularly irritating.
They removed the Native American from both ads.
Is there some reference for the statement that they are failing to chase monetisation solutions because they are "unsexy" as opposed to some other reason?
I address this on the FBA FAQ, question 10:
http://www.feedbackarmy.com/questions.slp

In short, here is the value add of Feedback Army:

- it's easier to get started with and use
- results are available as an RSS feed
- FBA worker form now has built-in grammar and spell check courtesy of http://www.afterthedeadline.com

If you don't like a response you get, it's a one click rejection process. Mechanical Turk lets you reject responses too, but it's a few more clicks/pages than one.
Some concrete things you can do to learn, just based on what I've found enjoyable and worthwhile:

Solve some Project Euler problems, then read other solutions in the forums and try to implement some of the algorithms and optimizations you find there. This will force you to learn some basic algorithms and some math, and expose you to a wide variety of concepts and techniques. (Yes, I am constantly pimping this on HN.) http://projecteuler.net/

Learn a new programming language or two every year. By learning extremely different languages (C, Lisp, Haskell, Io, Forth, Mercury, J...) you'll learn to think in a lot of different ways. But even before that, just translating what you know into a different context will help force you to learn the names and underlying forms of most of the fundamental building blocks: data structures, closures, higher-order functions, polymorphism...
http://learnyouahaskell.com/

Read research papers related to your field. When you don't understand something, follow the citations or look it up in Wikipedia. If you don't know what to read, start at ACM Queue and see what's interesting. Then branch out into other publications.
http://queue.acm.org/

Watch lectures from MIT OpenCourseWare, especially 6.001 (Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, taught by the authors). Among other things, you'll learn how to build a simple interpreter and compiler. http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Electrical-Engineering-and-Compute...
> Even if one does as you do (i.e., measure energy in dollars) I smell a unit mismatch: left side of your "equation": dollars per hour right side of your "equation": dollars per human

> which would only make sense if you also show that 1 human = 1 hour... perhaps I should stop now.

Come on, I thought you would do that yourself.

Fine:

capita := person/year
person/year * 260(work days/year) * 8(hours/day) = person/hour

energy/capita = energy/person/hour

$/hour := $/person/hour

energy/person/hour = $/person/hour

energy = $

Seriously, you could not do that yourself?

As to your second paragraph - someone is paying for those people. You are basically shifting the energy cost of your free software program onto the energy cost of whatever they are doing for money. Which is exactly right. People will do _something_ with their free time, and the energy cost of that item, should be, and is 0. Since if they did not do one thing, they would do another.

But if they got paid less, they would do less. So whoever pays them is the one responsible for their energy usage.

> I think it makes sense to look at the energy used to produce a product without looking at how much the product costs"

Except that they are the same thing. Let me shift a question to you: Which energy costs of manufacturing will you include, and which will you exclude? On a previous post you excluded materials and wages. I can sort of understand wages, but why exclude energy cost of materials?

> Your model says that we don't need an energy yield measure for wind turbines - because energy yield is the same as return on investment.

Correct. You keep coming up with these points that are totally correct. So I think you understand me very well (despite the silly thing about capita and $/hour).
Except that Sparkle is ridiculously terrible for doing security updates. Since it doesn't ship with the OS or even provide a means to have a centralized second-party updater, every app has its own copy in its bundle, and it only gets run when the app is running (and by default only on launch).

Vulnerabilities in need of patching for desktop apps generally take the form of accidentally executing malicious input -- with Sparkle in a document-based Cocoa app, that input is already being parsed before Sparkle is loaded.

It's even worse for plugins -- if you use ClickToFlash you know exactly what I mean -- as a plugin to a Webkit plugin, Sparkle runs roughshod over the address spaces of every Webkit app. If said Webkit app itself uses Sparkle, you're fucked, especially if it's a different version of Sparkle, or one of it's many forks.
Ack, I am sorry if this came off as flamebait in any way at all.

My point was just that I've fallen into the common trap of focusing on languages that are currently in the limelight; and maybe it's time to think about putting PHP back in to my toolbelt.
Am I missing something? Is what I said offensive in some way to someone? If so, would you please care to clarify?
A Teenager’s Dream: An iPhone App for Free Texting
Looks like it is a mac and they may have edited out the logo. Can anyone else tell what's there?
One of the great things about the internet is it's always about to change.

I think these services have interesting models....but I'll be damned if I'm going to let a 'sales tax calculator' blow a sale because it goes down. A rational business cannot rely on services they can't, at least in some small way, control.
Doodle for better concentration: doodlers remembered more names
Where are all the beautiful girls gone?
I thought that the Web 2.0 revolution brought about a huge wave of user-generated content. A Web 2.0 app doesn't necessarily have to create content or aggregate content. It just needs to make it easy for users to create the content and share it with their friends.

It seems like there are a lot of gaps in these categories.

And I still hate the buzzword "Web 2.0".
Project Euler looks good. I actually prefer solving problems rather than reading alone.

I'm coming from a .Net background where a lot of things are abstracted from you. I haven't done low-level languages for a long time. I guess it's time to do it.
* A worm is self-replicating across a network, typically without any interaction from a user.

* A trojan requires a user to grant the malware privileges, or just to install it or at least to run it with their own privileges.

I don't see how that's not an important distinction.
Black men in Poland?
Compare. What do you think?

http://www.microsoft.com/businessproductivity/default.mspx

and

http://www.microsoft.com/poland/businessproductivity/default.mspx
I'm not sure if this is intended, but the overlap in your <h2> tags hurts my eyes.
I don't interact with other developers because I worry that it will pull me toward the middle of the bell curve.

Didn't you say you used RoR? You're okay with using other folks high-level code, but you think interacting with them will pull you towards the middle of the bell curve. Interesting.
I'd like to take a second to remind folks that this is the reason that companies want to have access to your facebook pages, have you sign away your right to blog in public, etc.

While it's obviously a bit different for a CEO (being more in the public eye, and seen as the 'face' of the company), HR and legal departments are worried about similar backlashes from comments made by 'grunt-level' (or even mid-level) employees.

This is obviously a flawed assumption, because the people at the top of the company have a higher chance of garnering public outrage against a company, yet they are the ones with the most leverage to say 'screw you' to such policies that would limit their free speech and (at least try to) negotiate them out of any contracts.
Aliens, it's definitely aliens. Wait, it's called the Arctic Sea, penguins it's definitely penguins, emperor penguins! Wait, it was sailing too far south for penguins in a non-refrigerated vessel, Alien-Emperor Penguin Hybrids! Being, er delivered to North Korea, to, er, make counterfeit US One Dollar Bills!

There, solved it. So now that's over and done with, can we find something else to satisfy your intellect, not mysteries that are only a mystery because the investigation isn't complete yet.
Nice, patient guy but there's a better way yet if you can afford to gamble with your time a bit (don't try this if you can't afford to lose a little time).

When confronted with a single backed up lane, use the uncontended lanes to zip to the front of the wave and merge in _at speed_. Maintaining speed is important. If you don't find an opening, you'll have to abort and find another route to your destination.

The up-side is that this almost always pays off and you waste little time slowed by traffic or slowing others. The reason is because many people who queue up resign to the monotony and pull out their phone or their air drums, etc. They pay enough attention to brake consistently but not enough to accelerate as soon as is possible.

The vast majority of the time, you can slip in front of one of these 'sleepers' before they notice the opening or have fully accelerated. Because of inertia, they will go through an acceleration period where you pull away from them leaving them a very sufficient gap.

Another way to look at this is using the available real-estate to ascertain a proper zipper-merge. If done right, you wait less and no one gets stuck behind you. This is especially useful if you commute five days a week--the payoffs over time are well worth the occasional crap out.
or to have both problem and solution objects with ways to compute the latter from the former.

problem domain objects are often part of the input and internal computation space, whereas solution objects are usually user-friendly world views. so both are helpful to think about before writing too much code.

in the financial transaction example, input and computations occur over transaction objects. however users want to navigate monthly balances. thus, there has to be a cross reference or object transformation from the highly granular transactions to monthly aggregations.
A 12" PowerBook.
My point is exactly yours, but with added testing:

* Do the Right Engineering(TM) to guarantee no XSS
* Followed by having someone else confirm your certainty.

If you only do the first step, I'm nearly certain your site will eventually be vulnerable simply because we're all human and it's so easy to make mistakes in user input handling.

Otherwise you can wait until someone else proves that you missed something (using similar easy tests). Maybe they'll be nice people who will tell you about it. Maybe they'll be mean and will make you look like a fool publicly. Or maybe they'll be evil and exploit your users without you ever finding out.

Trust, but Verify.
Somehow I feel that this post was more about being boastful than anything else.
It is still haiku
5, 7, 5: Maximums
Shorter is okay
Thanks for the advice, Thomas!

Short answer: by turning down projects that are below your threshold

I'm slowly getting to the stage where I can afford this, but I've only built up about 6 months of runway, and it seems nobody starts projects in winter, which meant I came this >< close to running out of cash in February. I'm trying to avoid a repeat performance. Is it adviseable to turn down below-threshold projects purely for reputation's sake?

No matter how your SOW/MSA is structured, don't quote prices in terms of $/hour.

Easier said than done. I keep doing this dance where I'm avoiding giving an hourly figure, but end up going nowhere. Do you have a more specific suggestion for how to go about doing this? Also, what does 'MSA' stand for in this context? Too many meanings for google to be useful.

When you get rate pushback, follow up with a bid for a smaller or more constrained project. Slip scope.

Thanks, that's useful. Thinking back, that's happened by accident a few times, but I'll consciously encourage this in future. Some customers seem to fear this though: it seems they're afraid I'll build something only I can maintain and then charge them crazy money later. Maybe this happens. I don't know.

Never slip your rate. You'll never get it back.

Yep. I expected that, had to do it once or twice anyway. No fun at all.

Include a support retainer or annual/quarterly maintenance price, instead of giving that away for free.

So far, I've just billed individually for any but the most trivial maintenance. (e.g. 15-minute fixes to bugs that were blatantly my fault) How do I avoid scope creep on flat fees without it seeming like a raw deal to the customer?
When a stock goes up in price, nothing has changed. It's still the same company. Information you get has changed, sometime just via the price.
I think Rails 3 does escaping by default, no?
I'd say there is a pretty substantial difference between teenagers doing this vs full-blown adults (with adult responsibilities and adult powers) doing this.
If you don't mind me asking, where/how do you find projects to bid on?