skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ever wonder what the Douglas Peuker algorithm does? Here's some visualization.
Here's the Douglas Peuker algorithm in action. DP simplifies polylines by throwing out points that fall within a certain tolerance of heading change. Each successive track sets the DP tolerance lower, so the track gets curvier.

These tracks were taken with my soon to be released iPhone app (not affiliated with EveryTrail.com, but allows uploads to the site).

http://www.everytrail.com/view_trip.php?trip_id=329754

http://www.everytrail.com/view_trip.php?trip_id=329775

http://www.everytrail.com/view_trip.php?trip_id=329816

http://www.everytrail.com/view_trip.php?trip_id=329825

http://www.everytrail.com/view_trip.php?trip_id=329837

http://www.everytrail.com/view_trip.php?trip_id=329848
He starts his article with a line from Maggie Thatcher on socialism. Not a subtle way to tee off a debate

Somewhat inflammatory, sure -- but hardly worthy of a boycott. The vast majority of the Mackay piece is a level-headed argument -- one that you can certainly disagree with, but I think calling for a boycott is schoolyard politics.
I guess we Chileans think alike :P
It used WordStar (which was the defacto standard WP in its day) keybindings and you were able to edit, compile run in less time than any of today's IDEs - all on a 4.77MHz 8088 CPU with 64k RAM !!!
don't forget payroll tax, supplied laptop/desk/electricity/etc, sick leave, annual leave, any skills development, the fact that you're also doing sales (which is probably more than 70K)..

Just because you have 70,000 listed on your annual pay summary - does not in any way mean that's how much your company spends to keep you employed.
When you are a freelancer - you take on a lot of those costs yourself.
You seem to have a lot of Content This and Content That and Content The Other and I'm sort of missing the "sell things to people for money" option. (I suppose, on a reread, that I'm a Content Advertiser under your taxonomy... which seems to suggest that my business model is to be parasited off of by the Web 2.0 economy?)
"It's your legal right, therefore it's acceptable" is a fallacious argument, yet it's the argument you gave. That was the main problem.

That having been said, I would rather not punish people's livelihood for expressing contrary opinions to mine in newspapers.

If the company is actually doing things (putting DRM in music, hiring Latin American death squads to eliminate union bosses, beating employees, racially segregating their customers, donating tons of money to political parties, pulling Google Voice apps from the App Store), then boycotts are fine. If all you're doing is writing an editorial in the Wall Street Journal, where's the rationale? What's so offensive about writing an editorial that it deserves a boycott? What's so offensive about simple disagreement? If I happen to agree with John Mackey will you stop being friends with me? Refuse to let me borrow a couple bucks for lunch even if I have an excellent record for paying you back? Not come to my yard sale? That's a pretty dick move.

I always thought it was reasonable, even healthy to have friends, do business, and even make love with people who have different politics than you do. I don't really care for the alternative.
Boy am I in the wrong business if these kids can knock out CRUD apps for $100K.
For the next survey:

country.

and maybe a basic description of what you do (coder, founder, other tech role, etc)
No, at least I certainly did not mean it to be. ;-)

The original comment, for those that don't get it yet, was a stab at apotheon's comment. It was an attempt to avoid the argument of "what is Zen" before it gets out of hand, as it's been known to do on other sites.

If you're curious, an example:
http://zenhabits.net/2007/01/why-zen-habits/#comments
An awesome comment! My travels haven't been quite that rigorous, as traveling through India by train was so cheap there was no reason not to do it.

Inspiring to say the least; one of my aspirations is to do exactly what you have done in the US but in South America - I've met a few people who have done it and you pretty much reflect what they've said on the subject (only difference being in other countries with less development).
How to Detect and Remove Malware and Rogue Software | TechJaws
Actual, both bestiality and child pornography are illegal in the US, so your photoshopped image(s) would be illegal, and probably would require you to register as a sex offender for life.
I don't really think it's a big deal doing something on the cheap for a first project, the experienced gained and the reference to show future clients is worth it.
OK, you got me there. Example changed.
> They get the definition of polymorphism wrong, because their definition ... is also met by compile time function overloading.

That doesn't make the definition incorrect; there are many types of polymorphism.

Function overloading is an example of ad-hoc polymorphism; generics is an example of parametric polymorphism; and inheritance is an example of inclusion polymorphism.
Could you add estimates of the amount of time each site took you (in hours), not including time spent teaching yourself, but including all time spent writing code, corresponding with clients, etc.?

That would make it easier to compare.
Yes, I know. It would be quite low in USD.
ah, steak and strippers :)
The Binary Marble Adding Machine
Because IKEA is a global brand, they need to maintain safety and pay standards that wouldn't scandalize their Western customers, which is why their Chinese factories can't produce for the same prices as local competitors.
You're making the same mistake made upthread; price by value, not by cost. Payroll costs, leave, utilities, all irrelevant.

Freelancers make more because they accept risk. Customers pay extra to mitigate scheduling risk, recruiting risk, and project risk.

(Yes, you're not viable if you can't at least pay freelancer overhead and still have a living wage, but that has nothing to do with what your bill rate is.)
But surely you have to agree that there will be a peak at some point, I mean we're pumping oil much faster than the rate at which new deposits form in the earth, right?
Detroit mallrats don't make as interesting of a read, but definitely the behavior here (sleeping in a store bed) is a whole new level.
Wouldn't the cost per square metre fall with efficiencies of scale alone? While it might cost $200 per square metre in the beginning, the costs would fall over time.

Non-standard parts installed by huge amounts of human labor vs. standardized solar panel installations dropped on site a la prefab housing?
If you just make discoveries, it's not science, no. If you communicate them widely in a way that makes your discoveries replicable by anyone of sufficient training and interest, then yes, it is science. It's just a word! Its meaning is a combination of discovery, openness, and total honesty. As long as you're more or less doing those things ... you're more or less doing science.
damn I need to charge my clients more.
Feedback, Please RE: techtrica.com
Very useful advice! Now, I just have to put these ideas into action for a project I've had on the backburner for a while...
Really? I know I've hooked up my touch via usb, and there it is in xcode. A heck of a lot simpler.
> Today, they're the butt of every joke.

I think this trend probably peaked a few years ago (Family Guy is a good example.) You can actually see it reversing if you watch King of the Hill: the earliest episodes generally show Hank as a small minded redneck, whereas later episodes portray him as a lone voice of sanity.

Anyways, if you look outside of comedies, there are plenty of masculine male leads in popular shows (Jack Bauer comes to mind.) As for race, I can't even think of a popular drama where the male lead is black (and the other characters aren't.) But maybe I just don't watch enough TV.
$68/hour is less than my mechanic charges. It's not a bad living, but for a feast-or-famine consultant supporting a family as a sole breadwinner, assuming 70% utilization, it's a gross 95k salary, from which you subtract self-employment tax.
Next Cash for Clunkers: Appliances, Computers, Landline Phones and TVs
The Non-Expanding Universe
I think his explanation is just wrong. My understanding is that the web app says, "Hey, if you give us a URL, we'll POST (or GET, PUT, etc) these parameters to it whenever a certain event happens." On your machine, you just set up a script at the URL. Then whenever someone you follow on Twitter tweets, for example, Twitter will POST user=blhack&tweet=My%20spoon%20is%20too%20big to the URL you gave them. That effectively gives you a push API instead of the conventional pull APIs.

http://webhooks.pbworks.com/
In fact, complications in calculating sales tax cause many businesses to outsource their entire payments to something like PayPal. If instead they had a number of competing sales tax calculators and other services, one can imagine a payment platform built on a loose network of services with the ability to failover when one goes down.
It is an argument that defines my methods for learning, which is that I learn on my own. Not a disdain for learning. I strongly believe in learning by doing.
There is no law against "passing on the right", at least not if this means "passing someone in a left lane while you're in a legitimate lane to the right of that vehicle".

For example, in the state of NY:
Before you pass on the right on multilane roads such as expressways, make sure you check your mirrors, use the proper signals for lane change, and look over your right shoulder for other vehicles. After passing, be sure to check over your left shoulder, and to signal, before returning to the left lane.
http://www.nydmv.state.ny.us/dmanual/chapter06-manual.htm
How to Respond to Criticism – Learning from Dr. King
What Scares Google
Arterial traffic available on Google Maps
Could you please provide an example for this?
Dear asshole,

It was the black man who was edited out.

Perhaps this correction will serve as a reminder not to jump to conclusions; particularly ones which match your passionately held (and, by the way, disgusting) preconceptions.

Additionally I hope my use of 'asshole' above will hit home, setting you upon a course of introspection and self doubt, at which point you realize that you are, in fact, an asshole.

You will then sell all your worldly possessions and motorbike to South America in a journey of self-discovery, never to be heard from again.
Here is the problem with this debate. On one hand, people say, "We need more H1B visas to handle the engineering workload in the U.S. There aren't enough skilled americans." They also say, "We must make engineering more attractive to Americans. Stop focusing on sports, et al and focus on creating brilliant minds."

Similarly, groups argue that outsourcing jobs is acceptable, another that it is not.

The problem is that we cannot have both. You cannot convince students in america to invest 6 figures into their education if they know those jobs will be filled with immigrants or shipped overseas. If there is no opportunity for jobs or an income that can absorb the investment in the education, then students will not enter that profession.

Technology employers in America argue that limiting H1B visas is stiffling creativity and the ability of companies in the U.S. to innovate. If this is the case, rather than paying individuals from other countries less to do the same job, pay locals more to do the same job. Give them more of an incentive to enter the work force. Value the work appropriately to the difficulty and investment level needed to complete the task. Being an engineer is difficult. Not everyone in the world, can, or wants to do it. There has to be an incentive to perform these difficult tasks.

The reason that we need to curb H1B visas and the outsourcing of jobs is precisely for the same reasons that the employers say we need to increase them. We need to curb them because we need america to remain more competitive.

There is a difference between America remaining more competitive and American corporations remaining more competitive. The former means american citizens and our nation remains strong. The later does not. If, for example, we continue to increase H1B's and off-shoring of technical work, then the logical conclusion is that there are no longer any native born americans to fill these positions. If this is the case, then America -- the nation -- is vulnerable to those countries with citizens and patriots to foreign entities who do have those skills.

This will leave America at an extreme disadvantage in the long run.

If engineers, who, arguably produce much more value to society than athletes or even CEOs were to earn as much money, the professions would be more popular. Instead, we have individuals who could make lasting changes to the benefit of our infrastructure, our technology, and our culture are entering other fields because they are more lucrative and are more appreciated by our society.

If we continue to outsource the jobs, it is a big sign that those who perform these tasks are not really appreciated. Engineers are not appreciated in America. They are appreciated in other countries. Compare our culture to Germany. Germany appreciates technology savants and the result is evident in their current account. Relatively speaking, they are the richest nation in the world.

And America is the poorest.
Behind the Scenes With the World's Most Ambitious Rocket Makers
Yea, actually. it has potential. I'd like to see richer linking, i.e. give me the material safety data sheet and a laymans definition of toluene when I click on it, rather than the current 'chemical.' But that may be in the pipeline.

Overall, though, it's facts nicely reorganized in a sensible and informative manner. That's moving in the right direction.
In a way, I feel like I'm throwing this to vultures, here. :) Originally, wanted to use the domain for a fun word game type thing, but think this is more appropriate for a domain name which just happens to be an anagram of the word "architect".

Researched competition, and there's not much. There is

http://www.architectsusa.com/

which is hideous and seems to have been built sometime in 1997 or so, and also

http://www.1800contractor.com/

Which isn't very interactive.

So, last week and over the weekend (while hanging out at the hackerdojo open house on Sun.) have I been working on this.

Please give feedback, constructive criticism, etc. I am aware that the "build" portion of the site (techtrica.com/build) looks bad in GoogleChrome, but since this is simple prototype for now, I'm not overly worried.

It has a decent revenue generation model. Pricing is somewhat arbitrary, but reasonable, I think. Thanks.
You got downmodded for complaining about being downmodded. The anchor price for generic (solo, incl. project management and interaction design, but excluding graphic design) web dev is ~$120/hr, but Rails and Django people are hard to find right now.

iPhone rates seem to top out at around $200/hr, and iPhone devs "feel" like the hardest consultants to hire right now, so there's your range.

Note that these rates bear no resemblence at all to what a big firm would get. There are all sorts of other risks big firms mitigate that you can't. [%]

[%] (to wit: the risk of negotiating with your brain fully engaged)
that's because they're only allowed to use paint...
Realities of life are not taught in high school. Regular High School is a joke, however, specialized optional programs like International Baccaularate or AP, I found more challenging than most college classes. Unfortunately, these are optional, IB/AP should be the norm.
The "piracy is wrong", "no it isn't" arguments are pretty tired at this point.
Here's a useful outside perspective:

http://www.cartalk.com/content/columns/Archive/1999/October/...
Burning Man Gets an API
This is so familiar. Smart economists tell us that something which seems so unsustainable is in fact sustainable. Remember when we heard that home prices had never declined on a year over year basis and that the extreme price appreciation from 2000-2005 was somehow rational? This argument feels exactly the same.
Well, Laurent charged only $ 500 USD for his solution (but that's an anomaly).

If you are serious about web apps, then scaling the back end comes into play, which means getting into distributed systems. Networking, security and SysAdmin become relevant as well.

I think it's fair to charge up to $100K with a college education and/or work experience in the field. Other professions do so as well.

Go pick on other professions: i.e. banker bonuses, real estate commissions, union rates, lawyer rates etc.
Ask HN: What do you use for personal, offsite backup?
What do other HN users use for personal, offsite backup?

I want to find an automated solution that doesn't cost a fortune.

With the number and size of files I have, buying storage somewhere and encrypting the files myself isn't very feasible.

My one requirement is that I be the only one that is able to decrypt my files.

The only service I've been able to find that allows self-management of the encryption key is Carbonite, but they don't allow it with the Mac client.

I just refuse to trust a company with all of my data.

Does anyone know of a good, hacker-friendly online backup service?
(Hey, an admin of my generation! Not many of us left.)

Reading the second poll, it seems that the plan is to apply it to all BLPs immediately. I only hope it stops there.
What every programmer should know about memory: CPU Caches
It's odd that you count completely on validation to catch problems like this, rather than escaping the output as well. Writing regex validations to prevent malicious input seems like a seriously error prone thing to be doing.
I might be wrong a bit cause I use adblock (for instance I was surprised when someone told me reddit has ads)

google.com and most other search engines.

twitter.com

wikipedia.com

most "we're a list of links possibly with voting/commenting sites".
I use tarsnap. (Also, I wrote tarsnap.)

I feel bad about advertising my product here, so I'll stop there and let other HN readers tell you how fantastic tarsnap is. :-)
Boasting usually isn't done to make other people feel bad; it's to make the boaster feel good. This post could serve that purpose even anonymously. If people confirm that you indeed are being highly compensated, that could make you feel good about yourself.

Not that I think that was the intention.
Not sure why you consider this such a touchy subject that you had to do it anonymously. Charging money for your services and skills is not a bad thing.

I've rarely done software development contracting, but I spent several years as an IT contractor (with a lot of scripting, and simple web-based UI work to make it possible for non-technical people to carry on when I've gone). I started at $95/hour, and by the end was quoting $150/hour with a four hour minimum for off-site work, and eight hour minimum plus expenses for on-site work (with a $1000/day discount rate for multiple days).

Most of my development work over the years has been product-focused, wherein no one client paid for the whole thing. I would build as generally as possible, retain ownership, and sell the result to many customers. I wasn't very good at this for the first five years or so, however, and ended up doing a lot of development for pennies on the dollar. I would talk to a potential customer, they'd say, "We wish your products could do X and Y." and I'd think, "Yeah, I bet a lot of people would like that", and would offer to provide it for some ridiculously low price ($199, or whatever) as a plugin for my existing product line...spend two or three weeks working on it (and sometimes money for icons, design, other developers, etc.) and then never sell another copy of that plugin. I suggest not doing that.
Ahh, looks like it's being rolled in sometime soon:

https://rails.lighthouseapp.com/projects/8994-ruby-on-rails/...
Sony Challenges Amazon with 3G E-Reader
Apple tries to 'pull the wool over FCC's eyes'
There's a big difference between "hurting America" and "hurting Americans".

Maximizing societal value may mean moving industry to places where the government is less of an impediment to efficient value creation. In the long (and usually, short) run, that's good for people. But it may mean that American jobs move to India, and American workers can a) follow their jobs, b) create new jobs by starting a new company in America (and deal with whatever caused their old job to leave), or c) whine and moan until someone gives them a handout.

Move, build, or cry about it. Doesn't sound like anyone's really being hurt. It's not like IBM is stabbing their workers, they're just telling them that they can work somewhere else, or get another job. Seems fair enough to me.
Ugh, this sounds like a very very bad dream.
Link to API docs:
http://earth.burningman.com/api/docs
Thanks!

Good Wave is definitely some exciting technology. I feel that MooGroups and Google Wave have some similar functionality but not a complete overlap. Perhaps even integrate with Google Wave in the future.
Now you know how it feels for me to see a bunch of Microsoft promotional material without any white males. To be edited out. Asshole.
Like...Speed Dating for Hackers
cool, I hope to be there.

I think its amusing the tag-line is:

"select fun, profit from real_world where relational=false ;"

This is SQL structure. A problem with NoSQL is we need to communicate queries in a language we all know. Even if you're a SQL noob, you still describe examples in a SQL-like syntax.

This movement should really be about alternate-RDB or schema-free-db. Its not really about no-sql.
Ray Kurzweil on How to Combat Aging
Everyday the biggest databases on the internet talk to each other. Did someone forget about DNS ? I enjoy the 2.0 apps and technologies being developed, some are being called disrupted others revolutionary, If you weren't around 1.0 I can see how that's possible. PubSub looks like it could help make communication between apps/server less complicated, not a changer.
It's the difference between -telling- me how to do it and -showing- me how to do it.
If those contrary opinions potentially affect me because they persuade people to take the other side and stop progress I'm hoping to see, then hell yes I want to punish their livelihood before they punish mine.

There's a difference between having a different opinion, and actively pushing that agenda. I don't care what he believes personally, but putting an editorial in a major paper is not having an opinion, it's actively advocating one; you are no longer a civilian in a sense, you've become a solder for that agenda and you should expect retribution from those who disagree and will be negatively affected should your agenda succeed.
This is cool for the technology, but part of the appeal of burning man was its isolation. You were there and nowhere else. You were concentrating on your surroundings and immersing yourself in the art and the culture and the environment.

Of course another part of the appeal was that no one was watching. With these technologies, that's no longer the case. The isolation is gone. The appeal is waning.
Dude, that would be awesome. Let us know what J.tv channel you're broadcasting from, and we'll setup a weebly page so that everyone can watch from everywhere, with a common chatbox.
NOD32 login update 26/08/09
> I am so 100% certain that the federal government should be running a health insurance company (or blowing up Iraq, or legalizing oil-drilling in Alaska) that I want you to lose your livelihood for ever expressing an opinion to the contrary

That is not at all what is says. What it really says is this

> I am so 100% certain that the federal government should be running a health insurance company (or blowing up Iraq, or legalizing oil-drilling in Alaska) that I will not voluntarily support you with my hard earned cash for expressing an opinion to the contrary
I have mixed feelings but I still contributed a couple of apps :P