skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There is definitely some demand for consulting, but it depends on a lot of factors.

Caveat: I work at an analytics company, and have interacted with lots of consultants and agencies.

Agencies are by far more common than individual freelance consultants.

The freelance consultants I've interacted with are hyper focused on some specific niche like Google Analytics and/or Adwords.

All the niche focused people tend to have niche certifications, like GA or Omniture. These certifications are good if you only want to target specific customers/tools, but worse than that, in my experience people with these certifications refuse to work outside of the box they are trained in.

Freelance people tend to take a different approach of being the jack-of-all-trades who makes all things better. Improve SEO, improve landing page conversion, improve retention etc... using lots of tools and being quantitative.

I do not know how they market themselves to others, but the few I've interacted with have pretty solid blogs and have built a corpus of what appears to be knowledge of the field.

To external people looking to hire a freelancer this probably looks pretty good.

So, depending on which route you want to go, focused on some specific thing (whether it's the tool, or the vertical), or broader "make everything good" approach, you'll want to do different things.

Your best bet is to find a friend/colleague who needs this service, and offer it to them at a very low rate to let you test the waters, and to validate you. Once you have this, you an start building case studies and showcasing how your work has helped others.
Touch Recognition of Electromechanical Objects [video]
For other readers (I assume you've read it or are aware of it), I really highly recommend at least skimming Progress and Poverty by Henry George [PDF: http://www.henrygeorge.org/pdfs/PandP_Drake.pdf]

It's mindblowing in its simplicity and how obvious it is in retrospect. Essentially that rent, so private land ownership, is the root cause of the persistence of poverty despite huge growth in production and capital. He goes on to make fairly strong (albeit polarizing) ethical arguments for the abolition of private land ownership and so on.

Easy to read, pretty entertaining, and eye opening.
This is probably fair - selection bias on my side as I mostly do numerical algorithms.
I have fond memories from Beijing where random patrons loudly and extensively scolded a clerk for not serving me in my (accented yet understandable) mandarin. Any foreigner who has spent enough time in China has been refused service even when speaking the local tongue and respecting local customs, but I've never heard of anyone else having a crowd of boisterous Beijingers come to their rescue ;)

In Vancouver, Canada, it's not uncommon to hear mainland Chinese refer to locals/non-Chinese as "laowai" among themselves (literally "alien" - an informal or slang term for "foreigner," possibly impolite). Some find a way to not speak survival-level English years after arrival, in spite of school and free education programs for new arrivals.

You may be confusing tolerance of xenophobia with the celebration and institutional support of it.
NASA's Astronaut Job Description
Show HN: A brainfuck compiler (no asm produced, just elf)
I never understood the mocking, either, especially since he’s been proven extremely right about the ill-effects of consuming processed sugars. I suspect it’s rooted in his anti-nuclear and anti-war views and it just grew from there. His views on Vitamin C were just a convenient target.

It’s uncomfortable to those with analytical minds to accept the fact that we know so little about the human body and how it works. Studies are always contradicting each other because the scientific method dictates that studies must be reduced to the minimum of variables. But the body is far too complex for that. Most of what I was taught nutritionally in school as a kid was wrong. Most of the health advice was wrong. We were told butter is evil and we should eat margerine. We were told fat was evil and that cholesterol causes heart disease despite no evidence other than correlation. We don’t know how or even if consumed cholesterol gets turned into cholesterol in the bloodstream. It’s virtually universally believed that salt is bad despite it being an essential nutrient. It’s universally believed that sun is bad and we must slather ourselves with sunscreen and now we all have Vitamin D deficiencies. Read the literature that comes with any prescription drug and there will be a paragraph explaining that they have no idea how the drug works. Many are no more effective than a placebo. There’s a perception that has persisted most of my life that we are always at a point where we have these things figured out, but ten years later they are proven wrong, but we don’t seem to notice that.

There is an almost religious fervor surrounding science when it comes to our health and nutrition. Lots of research in the past few years surrounds gut bacteria, something that wasn’t even on the charts even 10 years ago. Now we are realizing that we not only know nothing, we know less than nothing.

I don’t think Pauling will be vindicated on Vitamin C because this came from a time when it was universally thought that there was a pill or an injecton for anything and we just had to discover it. If you read Pauling’s books, you’ll realize that he never advocated it as a panacea, but part of a complete dietary and mental regimen. His research is compelling and it’s not hard to see how he came to the conclusions that he did.

It’s good to hear I’m not the only one learning from history and realizing the uncomfortable fact that we know so little and this treatment of ulcers is the exception rather than the rule. How did we not discover this was bacterial for so long? It’s not like this is the 19th century after all.
> the property owner is always able to claim all of the surplus from the renter

Not really: this only applies if the demand curve is flat and different cities are not competition with each other.

In practice, the demand curve is not flat because there are people that earn more than others, but they will still pay depending on the wage of the marginal/equilibrium person.

Also, cities compete with each other so if e.g. Silicon Valley rents become sky-high because they capture all the value of tech companies, eventually companies will move or be started elsewhere, thus making it possible for employees to live there.
Pretty much all developers I know can't stand Jira. Management loves it though.
Libreboot working to join the GNU project
Transatlantic roundtrip airfare for a family of 4 at a time kids will have off from school is around $5500. That's before you start getting places to sleep for any appreciable amount of time, car rentals or train tickets (which are quite expensive), etc.

Median income in the US is around $50,000. $7-8k is a family car, most of somebody's student loan balance, the entire electronics budget for ~5 years. You want them to piss it all away on a week or two? Fuck no.

International travel is a luxury for the extremely privileged. Hell, I was pretty privileged - my parents made a total of around $110k in a low-cost-of-living city - and $3,500 for New York City was a once-in-a-lifetime treat.

Granted, there are ways to do it outside of the family, like study-abroad programs. But then in addition to the cost of the vacation you're paying full tuition to not take real classes and (if you're in a field like CS) delaying graduation by a semester or more because you're not making any progress on your major.

Analysts say current airline prices are hilariously, unsustainably low. It's only going to get far, far worse.

EDIT: I should say that vacations are important and we do take them. We drive 10-15 hours and stay at AirBnbs in other 3rd-string US cities that, while pleasant, are not high-end tourist destinations. Nashville, Lawrence, Raleigh-Durham, Cape Cod, far-flung D.C. suburbs, etc. With a Prius and more than 2 people, driving far is cheaper than flying pretty much everywhere in the continental US.
Show HN: Alpha Bet, our 48h project for the NKO2015
A linked list of levels reminds me of Binomial Heaps
Alongside Windows 95 Plus!, it was also in Windows NT 4, which incorporated most of the 95 Plus! stuff.

Which is kinda ironic given it's a business OS. Office workers get Pinball free, home users have to pay extra!
3 Timeless Rules for Making Tough Decisions
For those interested in a minimal data flow JavaScript Engine see my project dflow: https://www.npmjs.com/package/dflow
Study Shows Non-Religious Kids Are More Generous Than Religious Ones
Like they say, the two fundamentally difficult problems in CS are cache invalidation, naming things, and off by one errors.
No hard evidence champagne can prevent dementia
Thank you for writing out such a detailed and insightful reply. This makes consider social prospect that I was completely ignoring before.
How could multiple legislatures design a treaty together?

You have the same problem, it can't be done. Each legislature has different rules and completely different cultures. What would happen is each legislature would appoint individual legislators to negotiate for them and you'd have exactly the same system you have now, except with the negotiators being members of the legislative branch instead of the executive branch.

Even on the microscale, the US House and the US Senate have the same problem, for which they invented conference committees, which is where the House and the Senate appoint a couple representatives and senators to negotiate for their interests. [1] The results of the committee are sent to both houses for an up-or-down no-amendments vote.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_congressional_co...
It is an exception and was a source for many jokes and lots of drama in literature, wasn't it?
Oh, I'd love to see those emails if you can dig them up, thank you! If I'm confident that it's a public street, I'm going to go hang out on that street.
> I dispute "often". I honestly can't think of cases other than certain scientific calculations where they are more appropriate than fixed-point numbers.

But fixed point numbers have many similar issues, require more thought to find a reasonable significand, and are useful over a far narrower range of values.
> The problem is a file system isn't a database

Except that, that's exactly what it is.
This reminds me of the guy who was caught a few years ago for putting homemade UPC stickers over the printed UPC symbol for expensive LEGO sets so that they'd ring up as inexpensive LEGO sets.

After the felony fraud charges, he would have been better off just shoplifting the sets instead.
"If I dump a 2-year-old on the street, they'll be roadkill within the hour. Caring more about children isn't any more unique to this time period than it is to this species."

OTOH, evolutionary, if you die, that 2-year-old and its siblings do not have a bright future, either. If that 2-year-old dies its sibling may survive. Even if it is your only child, you may be able to bring another child into the world.

If you model this, I expect that you can make either strategy optimal, depending on small twists to your model's parameters (increase family ties a bit, and chances are that 2 year old will get adopted; increase child mortality, and that 2-year-old may only count as half a 10-year-old in terms of expected number of surviving children, even if its parents stay around to care for it)
I think whether prototyping is engineering or not depends on the degree to which it is directed towards answering specific questions, or with a reasonable (reasonable as in based on rational arguments) expectation of working. Writing something in the hope that it can eventually be made to work is not engineering (these are, of course, points on a continuum, not the horns of a dichotomy.)
The difference is that the government has put in place systems to deal with these higher polluting vehicles. It taxes them more, to discourage people from owning them. By lying about the pollution levels, the engineers are encouraging people to own more polluting engines. Not only is this obviously unethical since it involves lying with the purpose of breaking a law, but this law also happens to be designed to try and reduce the deadly effects of pollution. So such behaviour is, I say again, obviously indirectly linked to more people dying.
My favorite page on the internet about the regularity (or lack thereof) of English orthography; oldie but a goodie: Hou tu pranownse Inglish.

http://zompist.com/spell.html
Use PostgreSQL JSON Types in Python
Rather than changing a million regulations that give status to spouses to also include partners, why not just change the definition of a spouse?
If I also have column that is called "Active" that is True or False what does that mean? I have to look somewhere else for that information. You seem to want to ascribe more pain to nulls than makes sense relative to other values.

NULL means I couldn't store a valid value in that column. Why? Well that depends on the system, just like the contents of every other column.
Read a little more into the second part of your sentence, especially the word "maintain."
> Well, it was his "welcome to the company, here are a few things that will be helpful as you settle in, and here's the scoop on where to go for orientation" email...

You could have said welcome and provide helpful advice at any time during the first day, as long as there was someone ready to great him first time in the morning. The same person could have taken him to the place where orientation will take place. If you are big enough to have structured orientation, you are big enough to delegate the reception of new employees.

I want to say I am not judging you or your work style. I simply notice that you have shared candidly and think you may appreciate a comment with an outsider's perspective.

===

By the way, there was an asterisk in my first post. I was going to say that I am somewhat biased because my current boss prefers to write untimely emails first thing in the morning. I know he's a family guy and has to wake up pretty early to check and respond email before setting the kids up for school. I find his style very refreshing, specially in comparison with the archetypical past-midnight workaholic messages (which I confess to indulge in sometimes).
Important bit: "It could be available within three years."

So it might be available in 10 years or so.
Without even getting into money - try taking 2 or 3 weeks off work and see if you still have your job in most places... taking time off is a rarity in the U.S for anything short of maternity leave. Meanwhile many other countries have mandatory time off. As in "you better take off at least 21 days this year."

Seriously, just take a look at this. [0] United States has 0 days off. Over half the list is >15 days. Those people have time off to go on a 2 week vacation.

You might note that US workers can "earn" up to 20 days. Taking off those days is usually looked down upon and can hurt chances of promotions. Being fired shortly after returning from an "extended leave" is not unheard of.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_statutory_minimum_empl...
Any code reviews, pull requests or bug reports are welcome!
> For example, my experience in Denver is that wages are below national average, but cost of living is much higher. The consensus that gets spouted here is that the opportunity to live near the mountains is great enough to offset whatever monetary discrepancy there is.

While I don't know if that's actually true of Denver, its quite plausible that vacation destinations (like Denver's mountains) would drive up local real estate and consumables prices with competition for transient uses, while much of the economic activity associated with the vacationing uses would materialize elsewhere (with people buying nonconsumable supplies), driving up the cost of living more than they provide direct local economic activity.
I feel the entire point is whether torture can work. Because if it cannot, there's no point to making people suffer. If we can get the information in some other way, then those should be tried instead. Bribing could work. Offering them a safe place to live for them and their family could work. A lot of things other than making them suffer could work.
The leak helped, how would letting himself go through the shit that Chelsea Manning is going through, help?
I can see how someone might have asked that question in 1995.

Gay marriage is now legal in the UK. Are you suggesting that it would make "more sense" now to abolish gay marriage and try to adjust 100s of other laws and regulations to prevent any disadvantage to gay people? Surely this must be a disingenuous suggestion.
But it used to be on bootstrap themes and WordPress templates and everywhere. Now It is only Microsoft.
Can someone "explain like I'm five" why calculating a hash and comparing those isn't good enough?

Is it to protect against bruteforcing? What if the hash is made expensive to compute?
Unless you are these fellas:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCMrKscEv_Ri1pvlRsLxsqJQ
This paradox sounds like what my Canadian friends describe Vancouver BC as.

The house prices on the west part of Vancouver are more than $1.5M CAD for a single family home, but the average salary is around $60-70k. There is almost no real industry in Vancouver, except for tourism, and some people that work in HQ for mining companies, etc, so there isn't enough actual high-wage earners to afford paying those preposterous prices.

And yet the house prices keep going up. Everyone says it's mainland Chinese coming in a driving up the prices, but that's what they've been saying since the 1980s, so it can't be true.
Pixel's Law? what s that? can' t find it on google...
I wanted to ask this same question. I know the public market is very important to our economy, but I feel like for so many companies, going public optimizes them for the wrong things.
The point is we don't, except for cursory checks, since we expect and know that anyone going near it has some consciousness of self-responsibility.
What about listing what you think it misses so an actual discussion can be had? Much better than dismissing someone's work in a stupid way.
Good question.

Let's not forget that S&P was down ~40% in 2008. So you are correct that long term average is ~6%, but then you have years like that, kind of makes the long term average meaningless. Don't forget your financial adviser took a cut on your losses in 08 as well.

At $600 a year is pretty cheap in comparison to what other trading tools. (news letters, chat rooms). This isn't necessarily for people looking a retirement fund.

I'm also marketing something cheaper http://www.strategic-options.com/trade/alerts but this is for people who trade semi-regularly. I'm not sure if you fit in that marketing demographic. However, you can see from the website some stocks like Amazon have return far greater amount than the $600 initial cost.

This new ETF / index strategy is nice, I working on a portfolio that would only trade ETFs. That would charge only 1.25% of AUM. But that's still in the works...
I've been trying to find patterns (http://newsp.in). I dont believe its an exact science yet, but its always fun to try.
Atlassian People Page Overwhelmed
> I wonder if the gamma bursts from nuclear testing are discernible from the solar noise? It would reduce the distance to about about 60 light years.

Maybe. It's a given a civilization more advanced than ours would be able to observe the Solar System with better resolution than we currently can observe our neighbors, but that's a very narrow time window to watch. We no longer do test blasts. Any alien species would have to be incredibly lucky to be watching us at the precise decades we would be visible. While any seriously alien-life seeking advanced civilization would have tons of telescopes all over the spectrum looking at everything interesting they have the resources watch, as well as a couple probes on their way to promising targets, there are literally billions of places to examine.
No, F-1, because they're a foreign company.
The most awesome of the awesomest companies: " An application has been made to list our Class A ordinary shares on the NASDAQ Global Market under the symbol "TEAM"."

Only Atlassian could ask to be listen as "TEAM".

Is there a "quiet period"? I can't find the date of IPO on the document either.

Does an IPO introductory price usually match the last round of funding? It seems on page 10, they mention $2.23 for Class A shares and $0.51 for Class B shares, which makes a total valuation of $148m. Last round valuation was $3.15bn [1]. It means those shares have been bought 21 times higher at the last round than the price mentioned in this document. Did I read it correctly?

Page 62, chart: For $1 initial purchase, customers end up spending $8 in additional users, renewals and other products.

It's my first time reading an F-1/S-1, it's awesome, there's plenty of information! Sales per continent, page 71! Marketing expenses page 80! That's awesome!

[1] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/atlassian
There's also "The location of the current gate to the Ridge is on state-owned property, and because of the width of the road and lack of adequate turnaround space" from

https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:g9QMap...
I got my hand on the "extended" version less than a couple years ago (one with some part of the story "on earth" that was removed in the first published version) and went through it pretty recently.

I re-iterate that IMO the author is cherry-picking 2 tiny parts (literally 3 lines) to make their point while the book is filled with counter-examples. It is made abundantly clear during the story that men and women are treated exactly the same, the group of conscripts is equally divided 50/50, sometimes officers are men, sometimes they are women, everyone is forced to follow the schedule of "bed buddy", etc.

I haven't read the other books so no opinion, and I am not contesting the point of the post, but it's a major turn-off for me to misuse an example like that - especially when it's such a great book.
Deep linking is just plumbing
Nope, the death penalty is definitely on the table based on the charges we've heard bandied about.

And the issue isn't that some evidence is classified, but that all evidence Snowden would want to present is classified. Even his motivation is based on works that are claimed to be classified.
There are more datasets than just MaxMinds.

MaxMinds better datasets also cost money, so the options are "pay someone to run a server for you" vs "pay someone to give you data and run your own service using that data".
> I actually quite like adverts in the underground...

Perhaps because they are passive - you choose to view or not simply by looking at them or elsewhere.

Digital media is often a different mechanism - actively choosing to interrupt what you are reading or doing. Which causes the user behavior the publishers are struggling so hard to avoid - abandonment.
The "Top 10 Cities for Social Mobility, Ranked by Affordability" graph suggests that the affordability drop is extremely sharp, but as we can see from the "Percent of Homes Millennials Can Afford vs. Social Mobility" graph, Absolute Mobility remains fairly steady for a number of cities beyond the top 10 cities. Cutting off at the top 10 makes the affordability vs mobility tradeoff seem more severe than it is.
And what a typo it was! Fixed; thank you.
The bridge is a particularly contentious subject since it's funded by tens of millions of pounds of public money. If The City wants an independent bridge, surely it shouldn't be a problem to stump 40 million rather than asking TfL as if this was a major transport project.

Though yes, all the fuss is slightly ironic in the city where most central greenspaces are property of Royal Parks.
The 68k has multiply instructions - but in the beginning he's talking about how the sound chip modifies the volume of sound sample data.

He is however wrong about the 68k not having multiplication when he mentions avoiding it while writing his mod player.