skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
They had a 5-year (I think) agreement to be exclusive with AT&T.
Find a cheap plant, ask for donations and give them away for free?
You know, I've had serious family problems that preoccupied me to the point where I couldn't work. But at least I had the common decency to tell the client that I had personal problems that would take a while to resolve and gave him the option of transferring the work to someone else and owe me nothing.

No way could I take payment while spewing this list of excuses and feel good about myself!
Copyright Treaty Is Policy Laundering at Its Finest
Since you're in the bay area, you should look into regional meetups for people learning/using rails. There's one at Berkeley the third Tuesday of each month (Nov 17 this month)

http://ruby.meetup.com/81/
I assume you've already talked to the faculty at MIT and they haven't been able to provide any useful contacts for you; have you also tried talking to the security group at the University of Cambridge? They've done a lot of work on breaking smart cards, so they're likely to know some of the right people.
I would argue that when considering a job, most people don't write out and include these sort of benefits in their cost-benefit analysis. I personally consider benefits to be a service that's cost neutral, rather than factoring it into my overall pay. I know that's not accurate, but that's just how my mind works.

Also, any self-respecting teacher (especially new ones) will tell you that short official working hours are a mask for quite decent hours spent preparing for the teaching hours.
Once you get going, you'll want version control to keep track of the editing process.

So what version control software is good for a total novice? (I use git because it is industrial strength, but that may not be the best for biz2hack.)

What version control does: It keeps a record of all the little changes you make as you create your code. If you blow something up, no problem, just revert the latest change. If you want to try a wacky experiment, you can put it in its own little sandbox and ditch it if it doesn't work out. If a bug shows up, you can work back through earlier changes until it disappears: the next change is the one that introduced the bug.
Also see Encyclopedia of Life: http://www.eol.org/
Wired on Singularity University
I'm not sure what you mean by "quite decent", but in general teachers work a little bit less than other full time professionals 9 months out of the year.

The other 3 months they work dramatically less.

http://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2008/03/art4full.pdf
Why the heck is it on there?!
I've had similar thoughts in the past and brought them up on HN here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=625917

Ironically, wmf made the same comment about http://autonomo.us/ then :)
If you're writing entire chapters on 'igon values' then obviously you've never read a single page on the topic. I'm sorry but this is not about forgetting to click 'spell check'.
Presumably because the author of the article found it good enough to write about.
Researcher uses the SSL renegotiation flaw to penetrate the Twitter API
I'd be really interested in hearing how MacHeist has affected your sales, this press included.
To the above poster, I believe you meant debt is the lower cost way to go, not lower risk.
Well, you seem to be both the original author and the HN summarizer, so I guess I can't complaint about misleading titles then.

But it does seem to be all of a kind, all boiling down to a lack of competent people in the profession. Personally I'd consider the "second order effects" to be even more important than the direct effects of getting more skilled teachers in the field; the problem is a culture and that problem must be fixed by culture, and it will never be solved by just importing good people (even were that possible) if the cultural deck gets stacked against them making any changes, whereas even a small number of people could profoundly improve the entire system if the culture chose to let them.
The RJDJ iPhone app referenced towards the end of the article is brilliant: http://www.rjdj.me/
Subtracting shared from resident gives a best case, I think, because the "shared" memory isn't necessarily shared.

The thing that drives me nuts is the people who freak out over Apache's memory usage because they add up the resident size of each worker. Then they go to the trouble of getting FCGI working with nginx or lighttp, all to save, at best a dozen MB or so, and at worst, to use more memory, because they start the fcgi workers in such a way that they don't share memory for things like the PHP opcode cache. Then they evangelize their ignorance.
Yeah, I think this could be a great way for people to learn. Perhaps some of the hackers from the #startups channel can hang there and offer their hacking wisdom.
This seems like it is equivalent to "remote API key" that sites like Friendfeed provide, in that you don't need to give your amazon password to the other site. It's kind of like a disposable credit card number in that respect. It could use a different name and a better explanation, though. Additionally, I can't even list a site where I'd buy something using Amazon's payment gateway where this would be useful -- there just aren't as many as those that use, say, paypal.
I joined for that reason exactly. There's a whole lot of knowledge in #startups, but there are very few beginners. Hopefully the new channel brings in some fresh blood, and we can help them out.
I dunno. It says it's from GigaOm, but I can't find any article about my app on there. The same article is posted on Salon too.

WebWorkerDaily posts the article and it's in the GigaOm "network", but I saw the same article on some random obscure blog this morning and thought nothing of it.

I wonder if this means I can put a NYTimes logo on my page and have it link to the article, or if that would be sleazy?
You wanna enter your Amazon account information on a third party website?
Reminds me of a comment I read here, when an engineer says "I'm leaving now", management hears "I'm ready to negotiate seriously".

Pity so few managers truly grasp this.
the NYT tech section shows articles from a few tech blogs like GigaOm, ReadWriteWeb, etc. this article was originally on Web Worker Daily (GigaOm) I believe:

http://webworkerdaily.com/2009/11/16/shovebox-for-the-mac-an...
Have you looked at these? I warn you, they are expensive.

http://www-03.ibm.com/security/cryptocards/pcicc/overview.sh...
http://iss.thalesgroup.com/en/Products/Hardware%20Security%2...
http://www.cputech.com/acalis/
Congratulations - when you've got an app that's useful, effective and solves a real pain, people are gonna write about it...

I wonder if this type of publicity will start to nudge ShoveBox into the 'tipping point' of success...
I love tracking things like this:

ShoveBox gets released to MacHeist which got covered by the AppleBlog which gets covered by WebWorkerDaily both of which are owned by Gigaom who has a publishing deal with the New York Times.
No, I would want the third-party site to redirect me to Amazon where I would enter my account information. Besides, if this silly phrase is equivalent then I wouldn't want to enter it into a third-party site either.
The said link: http://www.wonderwarp.com/shovebox/
For the curios:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacHeist#MacHeist_nanoBundle
Put that database in memory
Thanks!

It actually desperately needs a ton of work. I want to get v1.8 (free upgrade) and v2.0 (paid upgrade) out as soon as possible. The baseline level of sales has been dwindling gradually. The MacHeist spike is an anomaly.

But I'm really busy now with my next app which may or may not pay the rent the way ShoveBox does.

It's weird actually feeling overwhelmed with my own business for once. Maybe I should do the next one with a cofounder.
Actually only a pretty minor boost to Mac sales.

Nice windfall of iPhone app sales to the people who got the Mac app though. Ended up selling about $5500 of the iPhone app over the past week (usually only sell <= $400/month of the iPhone app itself). This will probably be the first month where iPhone revenue is more than Mac revenue.

Support has been kinda rough lately, hopefully it will die down. Sometimes I look at these MacHeist sort of things as kind of a Faustian bargain. But I think it'll have been well worth it. I'm looking forward to sending a limited, tasteful email campaign to those 300K people when my next product/version 2 launches.
Foursquare API is Live
Tweeting at the Speed of Scale
Actually the Pro Bowl thing might not be bad.

Am I missing something or is Gladwell not taking in account the fact that higher draft pick QBs play on worse teams then QBs taken later in the round? Also, QBs taken later in the round will probably be allowed a season to learn and mature as opposed to first round picks who will play right away because of the large salary.
Seliger cites a study showing that GRE scores for education graduate school students are 27 out of 28 disciplines. The only discipline with worse scores is public administration.
Free Technology Academy now taking registrations
I wonder if this means I can put a NYTimes logo on my page and have it link to the article, or if that would be sleazy?

I think your concern that it is sleazy is based off of the reflexive engineer disdain of marketing. You may wish to carefully examine whether you have a rational basis for that disdain.

"As seen in the New York Times" is 100% factual and a valuable trust signal (which will make a measurable difference in conversion rates -- A/B test if you don't believe me), because it lets you mooch off the Gray Lady's 100+ year reputation for crusading liberal journalism.

Their sole purpose in life is dictating what the reasonably well informed person should know about, and now they are saying that the reasonably well informed person should know about you.

Granted, in this particular instance you've gotten past the gatekeepers not due to the vaunted internal checks at the NYT but because they're syndicating cheap content from an outside blog network to get all the bang from their brand without having to pay for the journalism. That suggests to me that they won't have a brand to speak of in a few years because they can't live on previously accumulated goodwill forever but, hey, it isn't your job to conserve their brand equity.
Given the current news on iLike, I have a little bit of a problem with someone from Facebook complaining about Apple.

Apple has a lot to answer for, but I am wondering if the price a developer pays ($99 a year) is too low and if Palm's pay per app ($99 year + $50 per app) a more realistic model to pay for more people to review apps?
The client that enables this behavior for 2.5 years is worse than the procrastinating contractor.
Between the CSS-less format and Lee's writing style, that was a much more enjoyable read than many of the other YC interview recaps that have been floating around. A good application of the List of N Things template.
Exactly. I see no difference between one set of creds that can purchase stuff with my Amazon info and another. I'd prefer something Paypal-ish.
Nathan Myhrvold hires 15 people to create a 1,500 page...cookbook?
You should stay for the sprints.
Ask HN: Do many people use PRWeb.com? Is it effective?
I'm thinking of promoting my startup via PRWeb, and have heard plenty of rave reviews about it, but remain somewhat skeptical. Anyone here used it? Is it effective, and what did you see as a result?
I'm a little sad that my best friend, the mind map, was not mentioned. Wouldn't have been too useful in that interview anyway.

But as a writer, I have thought about this a lot. I call it "describing the surrounding things." When I try to describe hard-to-describe things, I can see the thing as a fuzzy hologram that looks different from different angles. You can look at the hologram with different lenses as well. You can describe the "arms" and "lenses" that you are viewing the hologram (idea... object) from. But it is hard to find a satisfying description of the hologram itself.

That is why mind maps feel so organic to me. You have the hologram in the center, and connected to it are the arms and lenses.

Ideas are not simple. In fact, I have come to the conclusion that you cannot hold an idea in your mind as a single object. It is all a landscape. Think about how Umberto Eco describes a painter framing a piece of a landscape.

Mind maps serve the same functions as nesting (thanks c1sc0 for bringing that up), but they are easier to play with. And are, of course, translatable to nests.

This is the first time I've written out my thoughts on lists like this; this interview really made me smile. So I really hope that my description here helps some of you visualize what Umberto is talking about.

*E: Some of you may be wondering why lists are so important, and I've gone through my post a couple of times and I really don't think it does lists justice. I'm going to have to come back to this....
My reading of the situation is Verizon is probably trying to talk Apple down from their hefty iPhone hardware margins. Verizon doesn't want to subsidize a $600+ device. They would much rather subsidize it at $400 and make more money for themselves. Verizon's public support of Android is a way for them to test the waters. If Android sales are good and begin to impact the iPhone's sales in the next few months Verizon could very likely get a compromise from Apple -- at least they'd have a shot at it. If Android fails to captivate and doesn't stop customers jumping to AT&T they will have to accept Apple's terms. Most likely the two parties compromise somewhere in the middle because both parties will benefit greatly.

If Verizon & Apple can't work out a deal I do think Sprint is a very good possibility. I don't think Apple has to sell all that many CDMA iPhones to make it a profitable move. The other possibility is Apple will go the vindictive route and simply sell an unlocked CDMA iPhone directly at the same subsidized price Verizon wanted in the first place. This way Apple still makes a good hardware profit, reaches customers outside of AT&T's 3G coverage, and still sticks it to Verizon a little. Verizon would certainly benefit from this also but not as much. The hardware subsidy is secondary to the lucrative 2 year up-sold contract requirement Verizon would be missing out on. How many folks would jump ship from AT&T and get an iPhone as data-only on Verizon? or voice only and use wifi? Lots I think. That hurts AT&T, it hurts Verizon, but not Apple.
The percentages are probably a rhetorical tool: "success is 30% risk taking? That means that if I don't take risks in life, even with perfect ability and technique I can only accomplish 70%! That's a C-!"
10 blogs to make you think
Microsoft Co-founder Allen Diagnosed with Cancer
Towards Software that Improves on Index Cards
Just how spiky is your traffic?
I was just beginning to warm up to Mixergy. I liked the Noah Kagan interview, which was also popular here. Gambit seemed like a really great company, and they both kept mentioned how much they liked the food at Chipotle.

Only a week later, Michael Arrington broke the story on how Gambit is one of the companies that got banned by Facebook for running scam offers.

Then, just this evening, I went to the new Chipotle restaurant that just opened in my town, and it sucks! Cold and dry meat, slopped together with some sauce and barely any fresh veggies.

I'm pretty disappointed in Andrew Warner, and I'm going back to staying away from his interviews. (Yes, I take my food pretty seriously)
Thanks. I'm usually pretty good at getting past the "reflexive engineer disdain of marketing", but I still have a lot of hangups over stuff like that.

I'm gonna do a marketing push in a month or so around version 1.8. It's gonna have a redesigned page for the app, with a screencast video, and giant-ass unmissable download/buy buttons. And a huge, throbbing NYTimes logo. :-D
Watching Planet Earth I always wished there were something like this, but now that it exists I realize I don't have enough patience and interest.
>>If you're writing entire chapters on 'igon values'

Pinker's review says thatthe book "quotes an expert speaking about an 'igon value' (that’s eigenvalue,.."

I haven't read the book.

Are you sure that Pinker was downplaying the "igon value" issue and that Gladwell really wrote "entire chapters on 'igon values'" ?

Which entire chapters are about "igon values" ?
Anyone tried matching people through scent? It's well known there are scent preferences that map directly to genetic diversity.
Slow pace, right, you're not in China. You know how fast we develop, even in this direction.

Even the sterilization is happening here. That's why we Chinese will one day control the world! Perhaps not the 'we' part, but still, some Chinese will control the world!
Verizon insulted the iPhone. I would imagine this would make Jobs a little madder then when ATI revealed information before a keynote. The dangerous thing about Jobs is that he will do things that are not profit-based.

Profit wise, why would Apple give up margin for market share? The name of the game is profit and increased market share brings its own problems (support, regulators). There is a good % of market share and Apple can get there without Verizon.

Verizon really doesn't have any bargaining power with Apple. It will cost Apple money to make a phone to work with Verizon and Apple could instantly boost one of the other carriers.

Most people don't really travel all that much. Really, most common people want a phone that works in their area. AT&T works great in my area (no dropped calls in MN), but crappy in other parts of the US. Adding T-Mobile or Sprint will add a lot of service area.
The first paragraph or two of this reminded me of Goodhart's Law: as soon as a metric becomes a goal, it tends to lose value as a metric. My pet analogy is taking an overheating car, and trying to fix the thermometer instead of the engine. Incentivization always has this problem, and it's a hard one to fix: how to you ensure the behavior you're rewarding from other people is the behavior that benefits you? Especially with something as large, convoluted, and ultimately nebulous as corporate governance, I don't see an easy solution.
Not if you put it in a "<x app> in the news!" and sound excited about it. What's wrong with being excited about a little publicity?
Announcing Markdoc
Thank you for saying that better than I would have.
The Arms Race Between Teenagers And Parents Continues
When he spends a whole essay refuting less than a third of a sentence in the original criticism the impact is diluted to very little indeed. The fact that he doesn't respond to any of the other factual assertions is more telling to me.
Iraq's Marshlands: Resurrecting Eden
Unemployment Benefits Extensions are Extending the Recession?
Magician Harrogate
Frederic Sharp is a table magician available in the Harrogate area. You can hire him for your wedding, Christmas Party, corporate event or as an after-dinner entertainer.
Candy sweet with Inspiron Zino HD
Well that took a surprisingly long time. Considering the relative hostility Apple has had to iPhone app developers, and their "if you aren't making us money you can go stick it" response to simple developer requests...

Apple is going to have to work hard to turn this boat around, at this point their only real choice might be to open the platform.
I've seen first hand that this is true.

My former room mate / business partner (see: iStoleYourStartup) was laid off of his iPhone game dev job and started collecting unemployment (while illegally trying to bootstrap iZenStudent).

They extended his unemployment benefits, so he continued to not look for a job and continued not tell the Texas Workforce Commission that he was trying to run his own business.

I had half a mind to turn him in because my tax dollars was funding his "start up."
Even though they haven't publicly addressed the problem, I'm sure they knew that the current model was proving unsustainable well before any of us. You have to imagine that for every 100,000 apps their small review team has accepted, they must have also rejected 100,000 more. Apple doesn't admit when things are shitty until after they've fixed the problem. They're smart like that.

As far as solutions, I like the pay-per-app model the best. The signal-to-noise ratio in the app store is way too high (low?). It doesn't need to be too expensive to publish an app, it just needs to deter the kinds of publishers that are writing one app and rebranding it hundreds of times (per sports team, per state, etc). You even have people taking public domain novels and throwing thousands of them up as $0.99 ebooks, just on the chance that the sheer volume of them will make a profit. There are of course thousands of great apps, too, but the chances of stumbling across any of them are becoming smaller and smaller.
Poker isn’t really a game of chance, in even remotely the same way that Settlers is.

Settlers doesn’t really require much deep thinking to master, or allow particularly hidden strategies.
Support has been kinda rough lately

Let me take a stab in the dark: you've found that folks who pay less for your application have higher expectations for it, are unwilling to read the documentation, are ruder, and cause many more support requests per customer than your customers who paid full price do? How'd I do?

This phenomenon is very common with shareware developers. Higher prices tend to scare away many of the pathological customers.
Yes, I used it. Can't say if it is effective or not but looks legit to me, not like other spammy PR distribution websites/
Yeah, kinda. There are quite a few wackos like that (I've seen it all in the past week), but overall it's not too bad considering I have 300K new "customers."

I had no qualms today about raising the price of the iPhone app back up, now that it's fallen off the top 10 charts. It's kind of a support intensive piece of the app (e.g. it requires wifi to sync, and a lot of people have shitty wifi).

I did release an update right before MacHeist that fixed some edge cases in the syncing (see my presentation here: http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=899656). That seemed to help somewhat.

I've found the difficulty of the support load can be better quantified by the number of unique requests rather than the number of requests.

I hired someone to help a few months ago to do support. I felt felt very lazy/extravagent/unresourceful doing so, but it's been a huge help, especially with MacHeist. She can't troubleshoot every issue, but that's perfectly fine, because she does a great job weeding out the riff raff. And she has a way thicker skin than I do dealing with customers.

I also launched a fancy new support section for my site at the same time as the MacHeist thing.

Also, there's a special box for MacHeist visitors at the top of every page that kinda tries to get them to buzz off:

http://files.dangrover.com/macheistbox.png
Congrats Dan! Oh and I'd just like to add that WriteRoom is ridiculously awesome. Got it from MacHeist and have been using it ever since.
Extensible, Statically Typed Pratt Parser in C#
I thought it was ironic that the beginning of this article shows that specific Matrix scene.

It simply comes down to choice - would you want the URL, or not?

38 years after the advent of C, programmers use it everyday (well, at least I do). Back to URLs - web developers still use URL construction as access to resources (REST).

It simply comes down to choice - what knowledge do we want/need to have control over?

URLs are still useful, and they will be because the internet is still maturing.

Phone numbers, on the other hand, could propose a more convincing argument. But this is only recently becoming a reality over 130 years later.
Qaddaffi to Italian Women: convert
Thanks! I like WriteRoom too. The guy who runs Hog Bay is a badass with way more class than I'll ever have.
I smell movie coming out of this.