skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's an interesting take on the reason to bill hourly, and I know a lot of developers who do that. Personally I've switched to mainly doing fixed-bid contracts.

Rather than selling my time, a fixed-bid contract allows me to sell my expertise -- and that often is more lucrative. For example, a client may need a solution to putting hundreds of documents online and making them searchable. That may only be 40 hours of work, but it's a problem that has been costing the client tens of thousands of dollars in lost productivity each year. As an expert, I can sell them a solution to their problem in a way that saves them money and is still profitable for me.

Beyond that, a well-written fixed bid contract lets everyone know exactly what the costs and expectations are, and what the schedule is. No more having projects drag on and conflicting with other projects I need to be focusing on when we all know that there's a set deadline for the delivery of a specific solution.

Of course, doing this successfully requires knowing what questions to ask to get a detailed spec, understanding how long it'll take you to really do something, and anticipating the gray areas.

I also like to build in "flex time" into fixed-bid contracts. For instance, I might specify that the contract includes "20 hours of revisions" to the requirements once the client has had a chance to review the prototype. I'll price this into the estimate. This way the client knows they'll have a chance to make changes, but they also know there's a limit after which the project cost increases.
Do you mind sharing how you would present this data?
Your wording suggests that maybe you didn't see sama's announcement about the change we made to count more downvotes [1] or any of my recent comments about it.

People can reasonably differ, of course, but I don't agree that barely any negatively scored comments deserve to be there. I look at all the negatively scored comments, and the vast majority are either not substantive, not civil, or both.

It's true, though, that some substantive, civil comments are getting unfairly faded out. We're asking users to give those a corrective upvote when they see them. This is a longstanding HN practice. It usually only takes one or two corrective votes to get a good comment back to par, so every user can make a difference.

Overall, this experiment appears to have succeeded in addressing the epidemic of highly toxic comments. That was our main goal, because those had increasingly been poisoning HN. That doesn't mean, though, that every other effect has been good. If rallying the community to do more corrective upvoting doesn't turn out to be enough, we'll eventually take other measures.

All: please don't add comments complaining about downvotes, though. It just adds noise.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7605973
Elsevier is just a symptom of the disease that is academic publishing. We need to get away entirely from the 17th century approach to disseminating scientific knowledge.

But as long as your chance to get a job in academia is proportional to (number of publications * exp(nobleness of journals)), most scientists will just continue playing the same game, and publishers will continue exploiting them.
Every bug in existence is a story of different software components doing exactly what they were told to.
>> "When you think about scientists, you don't think of them as necessarily being fun or having a creative side..."

Jeez, speak for yourself.
IMs and Emails Support Allegations About the Toxic Culture at GitHub
Critical vulnerability in Amazon’s Cloud IaaS Service
Why is it inappropriate? That's the correct usage isn't it? Bare in mind this is a UK website...
Especially in the case of high level manager leaving voluntary, I would expect him to leave with proper few weeks notice.

Giving company time to shift responsibilities to other people and all that. Spending day or two explaining things to whoever will take his place.

Leaving right now should be nuclear option if you have no other choice or was treated very badly.
Yep, great point. The wikipedia data does seem to be more real-time than the CDC data, which has a typical lag of 7-14 days. Obviously it has its downsides, including lack of localization, basically zero clinical information, no demographic info, etc.

Perhaps one day we will see a real-time API for anonymized influenza reports from electronic medical record data? Then that could be combined with wikipedia data and perhaps other social media data.
I think this is another example of a popular business practice a few commenters have been pointing out a lot recently: "ignoring the considerable power you wield over other people and expecting them to ignore it too." We saw it with that out of touch ceo [0], as well as both Theresa and Tom Preston-Werner.

In other words, they're using PR-speak because they've started believing it.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7639962
Interesting point, they don't have large deserts to drop them in like we do in the western US.
A histogram.
> 14.04 includes nginx 1.4.6 but I'm sure the phusion guys will package 1.6 soon so I can easily upgrade to that.

Yup. We're working on 14.04 packages too.
It's pretty cool that someone who cried about Nikola Tesla as a kid is now running one of the world's most valuable companies.
Implementing SMS for 911 is not simple. First of all, many 911 call centers (PSAPs) still use analog equipment [1]

For those PSAPs that do have NG911 equipment, managing an SMS "call" is tricky because SMS messages are not sent on a persistent connection. Each message requires routing through the wireless network to a selective router which then routes the call to a PSAP, and the PSAP routes the message to a call taker. So somehow subsequent messages need to be able to find their way to the same call taker that handled the first message.

- How do all of the routing points know what "call" each message belongs to?

- How do they know when the call ends?

- What happens when the caller's location changes and the wireless network routes through a new selective router?

- What if a PSAP is busy or offline? Unlike normal SMS, messages need to be re-routed.

- 911 calls need to be recorded. Who is responsible for storing the SMS conversations? Sometimes PSAPs are required by a state to record conversations. If the SMS solution is a web-hosted application, state laws may need amending to allow the application provider to record the SMS conversation.

The wireless network, selective router, and PSAP equipment may each be managed by a different entity, so it requires new laws, standards and equipment to coordinate a 911 SMS conversation correctly compared to normal SMS calls where the number that is being sent to maps to a single subscriber.

[1] http://www.911.gov/ng911_law/whatisng911.html
The article evokes some doubts - particularly statement "JPL... first government-sponsored rocket lab in history". According to article, that happened in "late 1930-s", but already in 1933 in USSR rocket groups GIRD and GDL were combined into a research institute.

A highly recommended "Ignition!" (http://www.sciencemadness.org/library/books/ignition.pdf) - a history of liquid propellant research by John Clark briefly describes genesis of JPL, mentioning Malina and Theodor von Karman. According to that, GALCIT was "Malina's group" (if I remember correctly).
Moves is pretty much the only location sharing app I use. Their summaries are the killer feature.

Congrats to the moves team.
Oh, I see what you mean. Yes, when users see a bad comment (i.e., either not substantive or not civil), it's ok to give feedback about why. Sama described that here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7605973.

Thanks!
Unity announced they will support exporting to HTML5/WebGL, so it will be possible to do a direct comparison of the original HTML5 version of this game with one written in Unity and then exported to HTML5.

http://unity3d.com/5
Is this actually easier for an island nation than, say, floating solar panels in the surrounding waters? I assume Japan must see some benefit to space, but I'm having trouble working out just what it is.
Why do you think it would be better/more meaningful?
I don't care for Epic. It is painful watching my physician and pediatrician use their software. Their market is extremely ripe for disruption, but the barrier to entry is very high (not because of cost, but because of politics, both in the business/enterprise of medical practice and actual politics).
Agree on this, and also most of the production apps don't require the same modules.
Woops, there it goes again. This time the page says "Bummer." No files overwritten or..?!

Edit a minute later: and back.
Generally: don't trust anything from the outside world or anything that can transit untrusted infrastructure, that means check types and sanitize values before passing along. Break loudly and quickly to get attention for a fix. Keep the codebase as tiny as possible too.

Ruby: recompile with minimized OpenSSL 1.0.1+ (LibreSSL when possible) and with patches that improve Ruby's default OpenSSL security.

https://gist.github.com/steakknife/8228264

https://gist.github.com/steakknife/10092587

https://gist.github.com/steakknife/10096008

For Rails apps: use brakeman as one part of security audit strategy

For gem authors, sign them (please!): I wrote waxseal to make it dead simple

[sudo] gem cert --add <(curl -L https://gist.github.com/steakknife/5333881/raw/gem-public_cert.pem) # adds my cert (do once)
[sudo] gem install waxseal --trust-policy HighSecurity

For gem users, find which aren't signed

Add this to ~/.gemrc gem line:

--trust-policy MediumSecurity

or just if there's no gem: .... already:

gem: --trust-policy MediumSecurity

For anyone using git, sign your tags (git tag -s ...) and commits (git commit -S ...) por favor
Just a handful, and most of them are pretty vague:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_phone_tracking

Quote: "Using the SIM in GSM and UMTS handsets, it is possible to obtain raw radio measurements from the handset.[6][7] The measurements that are available can include the serving Cell ID, round-trip time, and signal strength. "

http://wrongfulconvictionsblog.org/2012/06/01/cell-tower-tri...

Quote: "Within each sector, the tower can make a measurement of how far away the transmitting cell phone is. This is done by measuring signal strength and the round-trip signal time."

Neither of the above references is very specific, but I recently read a paper that went into great detail, and showed graphs of the areas with the greatest accuracy, all based on arrival time measurements. Some of it may have been speculative based on future improvements in the system. But I can't locate that specific paper.

Here's another reference:

http://www.cnet.com/news/feds-push-for-tracking-cell-phones/

Quote: "T-Mobile, for instance, uses a GSM technology called Uplink Time Difference of Arrival, or U-TDOA, which calculates a position based on precisely how long it takes signals to reach towers. A company called TruePosition, which provides U-TDOA services to T-Mobile, boasts of "accuracy to under 50 meters" that's available "for start-of-call, midcall, or when idle.""

You know, now that I've read these articles, it sounds more like a future technology than something that's in place right now, except for a few networks.
Your reply infuriates me. The PM, at a minimum, should be collecting the information needed to credit the appropriate team/ICs, circulate status of dependencies, and communicate upwards. Methodology(agile) and tools (SP/Jira) are supposed to be ways to think and optimize communications...

It really peeves me to see PMs get away with doing spreadsheet management and wear teflon suits...

To be fair, i've been on a team where the engineers passed the buck towards me also, so i had to push towards written follow ups and detailed documents but that was isolated from the entire team..

Framework filled resumes go straight to the trash or get tossed a cluster f* in an interview to see how they structure the problem and build out a path towards a more productive structure.. most have failed because they all respond with some rendition of 'call a meeting with the team and their supervisor'..
Phusion Passenger author here.

Use passenger-memory-stats. It measures the Private Dirty RSS which is a more accurate measure of the actual memory usage because it takes shared memory into amount.
We use this at a contractor site for testing. Assembly of electronics has already happened, so no need for a high grade clean room environment, but still has to be relatively dust free. We call it a "flow bench".
I worked for NASA for several years and found everyone I met to be rather ordinary. There are no worms in that can.
Show HN: 4-player air hockey WebGL game
My final year project.

Let me know what you think!
Interestingly enough, that was an Amiga event that paid him who knows how many dollars to edit an image of Harry for the press. From what I've heard he wasn't into digital art at all. The images from this article are from the same deal, Amiga paying him to commission work to show off their new PC.

I just saw that Buzz Aldrin is now the spokesperson for Avaya. I hope kids in the future don't remember him for being into phones in his later years. I'm sure he doesn't give two shits about phones. This is also why my astronaut mancrush is for Neil Armstrong. He seemed to keep a private life which just feels so much more endearing to me. There's something cheap about constantly using one's celebrity for a quick paycheck and touting words like "leader," and "visionary" and other marketing junk.

Are all celebrities destined to shill some product they're not really interested in? Seems to be the case.
very well written.
Why Combinator?
How the startup landscape has changed for the “Non-Coder” since the inception of Y Combinator’s incubator program in 2005. And 9 years later what other effective options are available?
> So you just magically assume that there are no bad governments? That doesn't seem very reasonable to me. Nor does your claim that this is something governments are somehow magically good at. They're not.

No. I didn't say that. There are bad people in the world. And I walk down street all the time, not taking into consideration that every person I met today might attempt to murder me horrifically if they intended it.

Taking worse scenario in this case, isn't prudent. I'm talking how a government should behave and a lot of government, don't behave as you state. For example UK, Canadian and a lot of EU have socialized medicine and it works rather nice for them.

True, some probably had a fair share of mismanagement and probably some abuse. That doesn't detract from my point that it's possible to have decent government.

> If that were actually true, people would behave very differently than they do. Any behavior that, on average, reduces your life expectancy, is irrational under your assumption. And since most behaviors do that, your assumption leads to the conclusion that people should not do most of the things they in fact do.

You are constructing a strawman there. It won't work. I'm talking about immediate life altering changes.
Not some, you'll die if you smoked bacon. Or hot dogs. You need a heart in seven days or you are good as dead. You are given option:

A) pay X+30 amount of dollars and survive
B) go online, research the prices, try to find same procedure for amount X, then argue with current hospital to transfer to a new hospital, transport there taking large amount of risk and pay X dollars but a bigger chance that you'll die.

Usually, you'll go for option X+30 since it's less risky and those 30 bucks well, you can't spend them if you are dead anyway, right?
Next step X becomes X+30, repeat ad nauseam.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qSjGouBmo0M
Wow, i thought it was appalling!

"he expected he’d have to make a choice between becoming an academic and building a company. Choosing the former would mean giving up the opportunity to become the inventor of widely used applications. But building a company would force him to deal with people in a way he didn’t enjoy."

How overly simplistic and descriptive that is. Going academic, would, in it's most 2014'ish, pop-cultaral-way, mean that you probably wouldn't go on to make any cool apps.
I mean, yeah, obviously? And how weird it is to have such a big life choice distilled down to the possibility of creating popular apps or not. Such black and white-ification with the intention of creating a conflict heavy narrative, with a healthy dose of current tech mindset splashed onto it.

And that whole "Page is the Jobs of Google" section was entirely grasping at reader-revelations, without actually creating any. It's lazy thinking to compare two iconic tech heads, especially if one of them is Jobs. Another one in the long row of heirs (cook, ive, musk etc etc).

"Forty-one years after those words were published, in 1985, a 12-year-old in Michigan finished reading Tesla's biography and cried.

This was Larry Page."

If you manage to get through the introductory number slalom, it reads like the script for a trailer to a new action flick!

I appreciated the info in the article, but the writing was so sloppy.
Any plans for download integration? I'd love to see ifttt rules like "when I add a YouTube video to Watch Later, download it to my device next time I'm on Wifi".
It seems like the article discusses the challenges of building large structures in space.

Maybe the large-scale building techniques developed for this application would be useful for building large space stations. Space would be a lot cheaper if our spacecraft didn't have to use huge amounts of fuel to get out of earth's gravity well, which logically implies production [1] and refueling facilities in space using resources that don't have to be brought from Earth.

Which will probably be bigger structures than the ISS, which means the technology to build large structures in space is something which will be useful for reasons beyond solar power.

[1] At first, the spacecraft itself will probably be built on earth, and fuel will be the only thing produced in space.
Because typically when execs leave, they tell their boss first, arrange a transition plan as a team, and then make the announcement after a plan is in place, effectively immediately. What's unfortunate is that this isn't how much resignations work.
To my knowledge, there is no special back channel through which your cell phone will transmit GPS data to the dispatcher when you place a 911 call. The telco will always have access to cell tower triangulation data, which can be shared with 911 services (or law enforcement), but in general they are not being fed GPS or WiFi geolocation from your smartphone OS's location service (unless I just don't know about it).

To get that kind of data from your OS to a 911 dispatcher simply by placing a call would be to concede the ability for that kind of data to be leaked over telephony at all, or otherwise constantly uploaded to telcos/authorities.
It should be possible for IFTTT to send an SMS with the user's number as sender without involving the phone at all. Which might be preferable anyway, as it doesn't rely on your phone being reachable when an event is triggered.

Not sure how much it would cost per message and whether it's feasible for a free service like IFTT, but it can be done.
This can be said of any open source library, but it is unfortunately true that the average Ruby gem seems to be more hobby-grade than enterprise-grade.

The fact of the matter is, if you are developing an application and are integrating 3rd-party code, always pay attention to what that 3rd-party code is, how well-maintained it is, and how the project has responded to bugs and vulnerabilities in the past.
"Performance" can many different things, all of which are useful in different contexts. It could be lower power consumption, faster thread performance, more I/O, lots of things.
Microsoft Q3 Earnings, Starring Satya Nadella
The meteor example isn't bad at all, no.
Musicians are extensively subsidised in nearly all countries that have a functioning economy able to subsidise stuff.
I was at Google during the Eric Schmidt years and thought the author captured it pretty well, including:

* A basically coherent, well-run, thriving place to work; except:

* Lots of executive infighting, especially certain execs; and:

* Larry's eccentric, seemingly bored behavior during high-level reviews.

Larry definitely seemed frustrated and out of touch with the rest of the management team. And Eric seemed to see it as his responsibility to try to manage that dynamic while keeping the ship pointed in a safe direction.

Possibly there is a lot more source material about this phase of Google history for the author to draw from.
Isolation from the things you hate seems likely to be a highly desirable outcome for people who feel that way.
Scientism?
Is ms paying bounties?

I thought they only reward major exploit mitigation bypass.

So I am not sure whose argument this supports, but I think ms pays bottom dollar ($0) for general vulns.
Ask HN: How to promote social startup?
Hi guys, let me make a little intro: we're making a dream contest platform - www.dreamise.com This is a public wishilst where all dreams have a rating, every month we realize top rated dreams. Anyone can post their own wishes, get votes and boos rating and receive what he/she want.

So the main question is what are the best ways to attract users to this kind of startup and how to promote it?
...now renamed to DataScript
https://twitter.com/nikitonsky/status/459403600775876608
It has now been renamed to DataScript.
https://twitter.com/nikitonsky/status/459403600775876608
This post set off the voting ring detector, but I turned it off because we want to see original work on HN.

All: A voting ring is when people get their friends to upvote their posts. This is against the rules—we want stories because they're good, not because they're being promoted. Also, it's not in your interests to do, because even when we restore a post's rank, other penalties for ring-voting still apply.

Also, the OP included a long text description, but those don't show up when the story has a URL. You can post it as a comment in the thread. (tdondich, if you don't have the text handy anymore, email hn@ycombinator.com and I'll send it to you).
Ask HN: Why are WSJ/paywalled links allowed?
Even if the content is interesting, I have absolutely no desire to fork over any money to the Wall Street Journal for the honor of reading their articles online. While I understand that they need to make money too, I can easily find other things on the Internet to read. It's frustrating to click a link that seems interesting, and then get a paywall.

This frustration has been expressed to me by other HN readers in my local area, as well.

Is there a reason for allowing paywalled links? Or a reason for not disallowing them?
Please don't say "market cap" when you mean revenue or market share. (Market capitalization of a stock is the number of shares of the stock multiplied by the price per share.)
Is it possible to license full offline copies of Google Maps - that would be a requirement for sure.
I think that he doesn't rule them out either.

For instance, taking stuff to space is super mega expensive.

It is so expensive that I would argue it would be a lot cheaper to put solar panels into the ocean.

And since I've brought up ocean - the ocean has immense energy and if you don't have land because you are in the middle of ocean, perhaps it would be better to pursue ocean power.
I'm sure someone here will do the math, but short answer is that it wouldn't produce a noticeable shadow. Too small, too high.