skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Knowing what I know about the bill rates for the kind of work we do versus the kind of work you likely do, I'm going to humbly suggest that we're in more demand than you are (not a value judgement, just an observation about scarcity).

We absolutely do respond to RFPs, when they're for projects we want to work on or clients we really want a relationship with. And we always spend serious otherwise-billable time on proposals, even though that's the same speculative work that this article argues against.

It's important to us to be easy to work with, because we want good projects. We don't want to confine ourselves to whatever lands in the margins of "unusually liberal clients"; those clients don't necessarily have the best projects.

I read the other post referenced on this thread, and so I'll add that being able to smoke out the bogus RFPs you shouldn't waste time responding to (because they indicate inept purchasers, or, for instance, because they probably mean the client is in the tank for another vendor) is just one of those things you need to be able to do to succeed as a consultant.
Interesting, great suggestion. I'll look into that. Thank you.
The UK business was registered. Over the internet.
I think the lesson learned from commitment is very important, but I'm not sure that many 22-year-olds are in a position to learn that lesson.

The most valuable lesson I learned in college was in sticking it out and getting my degree even after it became apparent that I'd royally screwed things up and the administration was not going to let me graduate. However, had that lesson come a semester earlier, I would've said "To hell with it" and dropped out, 3.5 years and $100K sunk cost be damned. In fact, I did have a chance to learn that lesson 2 years prior, the first time I failed a physics course and considered dropping the major (and dropping out), and obviously didn't then.

For every person who emerges with their military service or Ph.D saying "It made me a stronger person," there're a bunch more that say "The government fucked me over" or "My liberal arts education made me utterly unemployable" or "I guess I'm just not cut out to be a researcher." You just don't hear about them, or when you do, you say "It's their own damn fault for not following through."

The same goes for military leaders who cut off their own forces' ability to retreat. You hear about the ones where glorious victories were achieved against all odds. You don't hear about the ones where the forces were slaughtered down to a man for nothing. (Or occasionally you do, and point and laugh at their arrogance, eg. Custer's Last Stand.)
Tangentially, it strikes me that a lot of people, including the TSA flack, miss the actual point of the comic. It's not that there are reasonable arguments against TSA policies. It's that trying to argue the policies with the TSA is futile and probably counter-productive.
Hey thx - I'll check it out.
Sorry. Real company. It just apparently can't transact any business, right?
It can but you will not have access to the secondary drbd'd system on the rds service, it is strictly for ha and not for read scaling.
I'm sorry, but what are you talking about?
No publicity is bad publicity!
You do know that there is a companion hands-on lab book for AofE, right? http://www.amazon.com/Art-Electronics-Student-Manual-Exercis...

The ARRL handbook is also a very practical intro text, but quite broad.

[edit] Oh, another decent book that's aimed at technician level students: Electronic Principles by Malvino. I've got an older edition from my high school days, and it's a real easy read with lots of explanation of transistor circuits. http://www.amazon.com/Electronic-Principles-Albert-Malvino/d...
Any pointers on how to identify clients already in tank with another vendor? Being overly specific in the RFP and demanding the exact features a vendor has is a clear giveaway but I am wondering if there are any other signs.

I am new to this RFP business.
And I'll bring a flour bomb on board, and your detectors will never find it. Or I could replace half the batteries on my laptop with a bomb, then seal it so the dog can't smell it, and the searcher will never realize it's there.

You are far overestimating how good detectors and searching is. They are already doing all your suggestions, so I guess you are happy with them.

Profiling is effective. Israel does it. If you are a family traveling with kids, they just ask you some questions. Alone? They check more. Arab an alone? Be prepared for a full search. Arab, but with a family? Not as much of a search.

Yes it sucks for the Arabs, no question about it. But it works. And it would never fly in the US. There are many things that work, but have enough drawbacks they will never be used.

You can say profiling has too many drawbacks, and I'll agree with you. But don't say it's not effective.
Got it. Booted my Mac into a 64-bit kernel. Win 7 64 bit ran painfully slow. Rebooted to a 32-bit kernel. Win 7 64 bit ran as good or better than it did on 2.0., but it still took forever to get going the first time while it updated VMWare Tools. It was fine after that.

So woop-de-doo for 64-bit host support. Pointless if it's so slow.

The VM environment is now split from the UI. Force-quit the UI and your VM still runs in the background. Start the UI again, and you can access the machine once more. This means that to kill an errant VM, you need to do it from Activity Manager or the command prompt.

UI in the menu bar is a welcome update. In full-screen mode, there is now a little bar on the top of the screen to access VMWare from the virtual machine. No more pop-over system menu.

Unity is still slow compared to coherence on Parallels, but Parallels doesn't support multi-monitors properly in Coherence mode, so VMWare still wins here. XP is probably better due to accelerated GDI+. I'm guessing the Windows 7 video drivers are still WDM 1.0.

If you are expecting a boost in performance, you probably won't get it. I sure don't notice one.
Different markets lead to different practices.

I would imagine that good clients in security/pentesting fields probably have well-written RFPs, so an RFP in a market like this would be a positive indicator for a client.

In contrast, for web and iPhone projects (what I've been doing lately), RFPs are a very strong negative indicator. I have yet to find a well-written iPhone RFP.
See this for example: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=905867
Our approach is to respond to RFPs with a fixed-rate proposal development fee.

Anyone that's good enough to be in demand should do the same. Clients that expect you to do work for free will probably turn out to be difficult people to work with in the long term.
amichail likes to post philosophical questions, but many of them attract no discussion.

http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=amichail
Indeed. If the Ltd company is valid, which it should be, it will have a Certificate of Incorporation and a UK business address - even if said is only a virtual address. Visit England, pop into your bank and set up a business account. Though the intricacies of this seem a little convoluted so maybe Apple won't pay to that because it's not the account stated when you first signed up?

I definitely think you need to come to England in person and sit down with the bank manager of your personal branch, at least.
On the "DNA is a code" metaphor
Dude, you'll come up with a better idea tomorrow anyhow. Selling a percentage of your app's revenues in order to gain access to enough capital to survive is a smart move. You've already got a record of sales, so it should be easy to attach a valuation to your apps as a multiple of revenues/earnings. This is the smartest move.

Also, it might not be a bad idea to raise enough money to both feed yourself and another person or two, and go from being just another small-time hobbyist (who will eventually get run over at some point or another - app developer lifecycles are shorter than ever) to running a business that can scale.

You've got the attention of many people, including those with capital -- use it. There's always a silver lining...
We get on the phone before we respond to expensive RFPs, and there are questions you can ask (incumbent vendors, past experience with vendors, is there a formal requirement for the RFP, or do they genuinely want real proposals, etc).

On "real" RFPs, especially if you have a good shot, you'll find the purchaser you talk to is accomodating; they'll set aside time for calls to answer questions, and they'll do a good job with your Q&A submission (as a general rule, real RFPs have Q&A phases, though note that you never know whether your Q's are going to other vendors too).

There is an old negotiating trick a bizdev guy taught me once, which is, if you want to figure out whether a deal is real or whether the other side is just wanking, figure out a reason to schedule a meeting on a Saturday. If the deal is big and the other side is serious, they'll do it. Similar idea here, although less aggressive.

If your firm's way of handling the RFP process is to simply pick up the forms off some website, mail them in, and hope, then yes, I can see how the RFP process would upset you.
It's more that as you start doing things of greater complexity, the number of possible things to debate explodes exponentially, and you have to prune away fruitless discussions to avoid getting overwhelmed. Most topics have far more depth to them than is apparent at first glance, and once you start getting into them, you'll find there's a lot of interest just within a narrow specialty. If you tried to apply that same level of depth to everything that might possibly be of interest, your brain would just get overwhelmed.

I used to want to discuss anything and everything too, when I was in high school. In many ways I miss that, but I also think it was largely because my life was so much more sheltered and less rich than it is now. I just wasn't exposed to all the depth in the topics I was discussing, so I needed to discuss more of them to fill up my brain.

Part of the price of growing up, I guess, and one of the reasons why adults are more boring than children.
We're trying to get bloggers.
www.offyourfacelook.com
Let's make the math a little more favorable. If the TSA caught 99% of liquids people try to bring through and then randomly tested 5% of them, the terrorist faces a 1% chance of success in each attempt, and a 4.95% chance of arrest. Assuming they repeat upon the most likely (liquids confiscate and not tested) outcome, they face an overall 16.81% probability of eventually getting the liquids through, and a 83.19% probability of arrest. Now, a 16.81% failure rate ain't great (and my assumptions are probably favorable), but that's why we need a layered security system.

On the other hand, if the TSA tests 0% of the liquids, the probability of eventual success jumps to 100%...
I doubt anybody has empirically compared anything with regard to persistence hunting.

Might as well talk about meat yields of diving for shellfish. Some people think this was a major human activity.

It's all supposition.
I don't know, and that's a good question. Most security research proposals I've seen are crap, too. But then, in competitive proposal situations, we tend to win. So I'm an advocate of competitive proposal situations, be they formal RFPs or otherwise. =)
That's good to hear. Linux doesn't scare me at all. It's Linux on a laptop that scares me. I'm a command line kind of guy, but not a hardware kind of guy. I just want to spend time being productive, not chasing down info in forums. Last time I had Linux on a laptop (a long time ago) it took literally a PhD to help me get it done.
> That's not true for any other sport.

Cyclists have their best years in their late twenties and into their early thirties. Lance was still competitive at the Tour last year, at 37 years old.

Road racing is also very much a long distance sort of sport where endurance is as much if not more important than raw power.

I agree with the premise that we're meant for 'cruising'. I feel best when I go out for long, not particularly fast rides. My favorite thing on a sunny day is to go out for 5 or 6 hours - you feel really good when you're done.
Great suggestion! Thanks for the heads up on this.
I do have an english LTD. I cannot sit down with the bank, because it is a private account. I cannot make a business account because the english ltd is not recognized.
Not a bug. Feature. GMail ignores periods in email addresses.
http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/1-awesome-gmail-tip-you-dont-kn...

It isn't possible for the accounts michael.laccetti@gma.. and michaellaccetti@gma.. to belong to different users, as far as Google is concerned it's the same user.
Don't people accumulate life experience as they age thus potentially making philosophical debate more interesting?
Sorry but you made the mistake. And then you made another one in trying to fix the first one.

The only sound approach is to have your corporation, which owns the money (not you), open a bank account that belongs to the corporation. It will have to be in the UK.

Is that a problem because you don't live in the UK? Maybe you should have thought about it before you chose to create a company in the UK. Why create a company if you can't create a bank account at the same time? How did you expect to have the company make money?

If you thought you could just use a bogus company front and cash the checks on your personal account with no records, well, you don't deserve much help.
Still, it's self interest. And not the enlightened kind.
I would suggest a solid course in small business operation before making that jump again though, the way it went up to now is not how it's done.
Is it just me, or wasn't this sort of quick point and shoot data transfer extremely common back in the days of PalmOS, thanks to IrDA?
Not in the slightest, but it's not really "poisonous material" such as politics or economics, so it's probably less likely to attract bozos who want to Promote Their Agenda.
You can't setup a business bank account with an english ltd if one of the directors does not live in england. I checked that option already, england is not too far.
To test 5% of confiscated liquids, the TSA would have to detain tens of thousands of passengers.
The app I've been working on doesn't use replicas for read scaling, just cache-money (ergo, activerecord). We're partitioning for write scaling but no slaves (well, we're doing master/master replication but not for read capacity).

After having had to contend with replication lag, lots of instances spinning and related headaches for years I'm pretty convinced that scaling reads with binlogs is in my past for good; it's way more expensive than having a good write-through cache.
Very Creative!
Tail Call Amputation
Ask HN: Reattempting Failed Startup/Project for Second Time?
In general, is it a bad idea to reattempt a failed start-up or project? (after learning the mistakes from first round and taking a different approach of course). To be clear, the project failed in it's technical aspect before getting chance to test it's business aspect / launching.

In my case, the latest project to die in my hands can be attributed trying to do too much too quickly (the tech stack was way too complex and a few bad technical decisions on my part), on top the team was too fragmented with a wide commitment mismatches.

I still believe the the business model and the goal of the project are still very sound (the project was killed before putting the business aspect to the test). Plus at the moment, the problem I was attacking is still fresh on my mind and have a good understanding of the direction to take this time, so things will hopefully be faster and successful this time around.

Anyone else walked this path? Thoughts? (be brutally honest)
whoever first owns the data from all link aggregators (digg, reddit, mixx, etc) and all URL shorteners (bit.ly, tinyurl, ad nauseum), and weighs those results more heavily is going to have an awesome search engine... albeit better for entertainment than productivity.

i will humbly disagree. i think folks who browse the web are different from those who search the web. search is what gets you the most relevant results, therefore more opportunity for ad money.
Did anyone try any d3d games on it? Maybe the latest valve shooter or something like it?
Cofound with a suit. Don't let her look at your code. Don't look at her marketing.
Do people tend to actually pay you to develop proposals? Or is that just your way of turning down RFPs?

I make this same observation every time the spec-work argument comes up (if you haven't picked up on it, I'm also not against spec-work):

When we were just getting started, lawyers from WSGR and another firm spent literally hours on the phone with us, for zero money and no promise of ever being compensated, presumably because the fact that they're willing to be that cool to work with costs them very little and makes them incredibly attractive in the long run.

I want to be like them.
Most consultancy firms that don't respond to RFPs eventually die. Of those firms that survive, they could be viewed as a collective of successful freelancers. There typically is not enough revenue to grow the company beyond the founding consultants because the project budgets that they deal with are typically $15K to $50K. You can definitely get away with not responding to RFPs if you're only ever dealing with budgets of tens of thousands of dollars. Also, an RFP is a way for customers to weed out the "I just quit my day job at an agency and started my own consulting company" firms. These customers want to deal with bigger firms because they expect these companies to be around for a while and provide support years down the road. A bigger company can afford to devote a few employees for a couple of weeks to address an RFP properly.
> More importantly, jQuery is much much faster and less error-prone to develop with that Javascript alone.

This is certainly true, but it also applies to all the other major JavaScript libraries.
I just finished installing Karmic Koala on an old D610. A while ago, I went ahead and slapped 2 gigs of ram in it, up from the like 512 it came with, and under Karmic this thing runs like a champ. Give it a try, it breathed new life into my old clunker.
This is a great example of a new product pitch. Brilliant in the Jobs sort of way. Great find!
I thought we put a lot of effort into RFPs, but wow, 2 employees 2 weeks is crazy. For us, it's more like 1-2 days.
Meme-tracking and the Dynamics of the News Cycle
Actually, most of the time they do a trace chemical wipe of the container if you bring saline or other liquid meds through the security line.
If you think the idea is still good, or could do better this time, go for it.

You should read The Dip by Seth Godin.
So, here's the thing - Every AppStore developer I run into that posts a story that may go memetic, almost _always_ identifies themselves, and their App. If umpteen million people are about to read your story, that's a potential many hundreds of thousands of dollars of revenue.

Ask any AppStore developer that's been in the game for a while, going public is what it's _all_ about.

With that said, yeah - there's a good chance this is on the up-and-up, and I'm not suggesting that people not provide advice, or help zoomboy out - just consider your possible downsides prior to sending cash.
and the response to Randall: http://www.tsa.gov/blog/2009/10/response-to-bag-check-cartoo...
Right, but that life experience usually takes the form of greater depth and not greater breadth.

One of the things that most surprised me about growing up is that I don't know more, I know better. When I was a kid, how smart you were was determined by how many facts you could remember, and how broad that knowledge was. Now, how smart I am is largely determined by how effectively I can judge whether a piece of knowledge is relevant to my particular situation. I've found that very few of the things I believed in childhood were wrong, but a great many of them were incomplete. They had little corner cases to watch out for, and situations that they didn't apply to.

An interesting corollary of this is that it explains why adults always seemed so dumb to me. It's not that hard to find a random fact that most of the adults around you don't know. (It was a little depressing how often this happened in the subjects that they were teaching me, but that's another issue.) But that doesn't mean they're dumb: it means that you've stumbled into an area that just isn't that useful for them. They know a lot about their specialties, but the chance that you'd happen to be seriously interested in their specialties was pretty low.

So yeah, philosophical debate is more interesting among experienced people - if you're debating things they have experience about. I think that's why most of your submissions don't get much attention; they just seem rather useless to the things that most of us here want to accomplish.
Ah, indeed. Well, thanks for using reddit and making it awesome. We know it would be a pretty crappy site if only Steve and I were still submitting the links like back on day 0.
Open Source Analytical Database based on MySQL released by Calpont
So all you need is an english director.
You need to stop treating things you read as dogma and start critically evaluating them.
My wife has firstnamelastname@gmail.com and she is constantly getting emails to firstname.lastname@gmail.com intended for someone in another state.

According to http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answe... :
"Gmail doesn't recognize dots as characters within usernames, you can add or remove the dots from a Gmail address without changing the actual destination address; they'll all go to your inbox, and only yours"
It's probably a good idea as long as you know what went wrong the first time.
I think it is time for the OP to come clean about his reasons for doing all this.
I was never in the hole more than $60 plus my own time. Seriously, some days I think being a computer programmer is too darn easy to be legal. We bang away on a keyboard, whammo, value ex nihilo.
Linode having some issues
linode.com and their forum are reasonably slow/offline

Here's a copy of their original post:

http://kovaya.com/linode.html
Scientists discover gene that 'cancer-proofs' rodent's cells
The larger the company the longer it will take to get paid. The worst is the government.
But many people here are attempting startups or hope to in the near future.

Breadth is useful for coming up with a compelling new idea. Depth is useful for refining and implementing it.

And btw, as I have aged, I have lost interest in technical things and have gained interest in more speculative/high level/philosophical matters.
Depends on the project. A lot of website RFPs can be done in a crunch session of 1 to 2 days. I've had to bid on systems that interacted with assembly lines and ones that involved dealing with the government and getting security clearances. These latter two took 2 calendar weeks although the people involved in putting together the RFP were definitely not working full time on it until the last minute. All in all you might have 1-2 days of actual work, 1-2 days spent Q&A attending meetings with the client and other potential vendors, etc. The time can add up.

I have seen one ridiculous "RFP" that a government agency up here put out recently in which they wanted potential vendors to essentially do 6-8 months worth of work and if they landed the project, they'd end up with a long term multi-year contract. We're talking tens of millions of dollars here, but still, that one struck me as quite the lottery and I'm pretty sure the only companies that responded to it were the big names consultancy firms.

EDIT: here's the results of that RFP...whaddaya know look which firms won the bid: http://www.newswire.ca/en/releases/archive/October2009/21/c8...
Los Angeles adopts Google e-mail system for 30,000 city employees
DNA shows Native Americans descended from a single ancestral group
We'll be in Atlanta for PyCon that weekend as it is (and you all should be, too!). This looks like a great way to maximize utility on those travel costs.