skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Any tips for hiring a freelance programmer?
Hey guys,

Traditionally I've done all of the programming on my personal business projects. However, I'm getting to the point where I'd like to start out-sourcing some of the work to freelance programmers.

How do you guys go about finding programmers? My project and budget aren't large enough to warrant the hiring of a software development shop. I'm really just looking for one or two developers to put do 50 to 100 hours of work.

Any tips would be greatly appreciated.
"I hope I'm not beating up a straw man here, but I have seen many claim that REST is a good solution that scales well because the web is built on the REST philosophy. The principles of REST are why the web is a success, and so if we use REST, we can attain the same benefits."

I don't think this is correct. REST piggybacks on the web's architecture, but I wouldn't say that the web is built on the REST philosophy, in part because REST postdates the web's initial growth. The web was a success almost in spite of itself, but REST wins by cherry-picking the good bits.

"If this is the case, is there any good example of REST?"

There is an interesting discussion of this and HATEOAS here: http://www.suryasuravarapu.com/2009/03/restful-api-and-hateo.... The examples given are Amazon S3 and the NetFlix API.

"The only examples I know of where HATEOAS is satisfied are HTML forms, as I mentioned, Atom feeds, and OpenSearchDescription."

A plain GET link can be an embodiment of HATEOAS. Remember, it's application state, not resource state that's key here.

"I think HTML forms are a perfect example of REST, since they supply the client with all necessary information to build the next request, and URLs do not need to be constructed manually."

Some are, some aren't. It depends what HTTP method you're using and what the server does with the request that makes it RESTful (or not). From that perspective, plain links are just as RESTful as forms - provided they're treated correctly.

"The way 302s are used to redirect to the newly-created resource makes web browsers behave more RESTfully, since they prevent reloads from resubmitting POST requests"

Preventing resubmissions is more about interface design than REST, though. From REST's point of view it's not wrong to repeat a POST. I'd argue that strictly speaking either a 201 or a 302 might be correct, depending on what you're POSTing. If you've just POSTed to a collection URI, then a 201 response with a list of collection member resources would be just as correct as a 302 with the address of the newly created resource. The latter is more conventional, but as I say, that's a UI concern, not because one is more RESTful than the other. There are other ways to protect the server from resubmission problems, but they involve more work for the developer.

If you're PUTting, I'd argue that a 201 should always be correct, but given that browsers don't support PUTs directly anyway, that's not relevant here.

"All I'm trying to do is show that there are at least two codes, 201 and 302, that properly RESTful services might return, to support my argument that response codes are not uniform across all REST services."

I hope I've shown that it's not in any way inconsistent to support both.
The conclusion that Gawker comes to as a result of this CnD is a logical fallacy. Specifically, an Appeal to Probability http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_probability (regarding the following quote):

Sure, it could be a note protesting the scavenger hunt in principle, speaking to any and all confidential knowledge of any unreleased Apple product, but this scavenger hunt is purely for Tablet evidence. And, do companies send C&Ds for non existent devices? Not in our experience.
Those actually do broadcast back up to the satellite with a radio. I think the bandwidth is extremely limited though.

Prices would probably be around $5 per megabyte. Nothing the average chinese would be able to afford, and there's no way Google would be able to recoup that:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellite_Internet_access#Porta...
I also lack this elusive "Third World Perspective" but considering the alarming regularity with which earthquakes shuffle several hundred thousands of their friends, family and neighbours off this mortal coil, perhaps those citizens should, in fact, start encouraging their governments to make building codes and disaster preparation more of a priority.
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Would it be appropriate to create an open source community project which would keep the current simple interface of google docs but support more users and perhaps store info such as blog links/HN links to posts along with a standardized location?
Do you really think people renew an 37signal-product account because they got that nice little present of cute-new-feature each month? (Hint: Maybe they use software to solve an ongoing business-problem, not to play 'diskbox.)
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Teej has an excellent memory for offhand remarks on my blog, and that incident was a great example of what not to do.

Issue: Many customers email me to ask "Can I access the cards I create at home from school?", "Can I print the cards I create at home from school?", etc etc. The cards exist as files on their hard disk but a significant portion of my customers cannot reliably locate files they have saved, as evidenced by email.

Solution: I'll let them save files to the clooooooooooooud (technically, just my server, via a simple web service) and then all they have to do is open up their copy of BCC at school and, boom, there are the cards they were working on.

Why This Belly Flopped: I launched the online version of my software prior to launching this feature and my customers who had previously had problems with distributed file management took to it like ducks to something ducks like a whole lot. Additionally, the feature was an abstraction customers were not used to -- it doesn't work by hitting the Save button like every other piece of Windows/Mac software they have ever used. (By comparison, saving in the online version is so easy customers don't even realize it is happening.)

What It Cost Me: Probably 12 hours of development time to marginally increase satisfaction of 20 paying customers and add 0 sales. By way of comparison, the next major pair of features added to the software took 4.5 hours and have been used by thousands of people, and an A/B test I wrote Monday night in 15 minutes has already done more for my business.
but who decides if it's noteworthy? is it just the fact that the release was made, or that some cool new innovations went into the release?
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I believe by "voting power" he means the voting power if everyone turned up to vote. That's a shitload a stock, huh?
I agree, but one techie may not have all the tech skills he/she needs. Front-end expert needs back-end expert (and vice versa). Being an expert in both worlds is not as common. That's true for practically everything in life. But sure, given that you have your tech requirement satisfied, you'll be more well-rounded with a business guy too.
Has anyone else checked out the main page of the site?

http://bryanwoods4e.com/

Be sure to view the HTML code to see the "hail satan" comment. This guy has some personality thats for sure....

Another of his sites linked from the main page:

http://www.howtousetwitterformarketingandpr.com/
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My guess is the hardest place for the founder is step 2,
the transition phase where the role of the founder has to
change from startup to small company mentality..
I have no interests in "nationhood" and "collective consciousness", or "political will".

I am an individualist anarchist, and is naturally drawn to non-statist paradigm of organization and especially evidence for or against possible non-statist systems.

In any case, your opinion is highly valuable. I now have more information regarding what Somalian think of the situation and society in Somalia, which is often mentioned as a case of real world anarchy.

If there is no law system, then there's no anarchy, and thus only chaos. I found that hard to believe when I hear reports of rising standard of living in Somalia, as well capital investment, among other things.

I was only expressing my belief that there seem to be no alternative system of organization in Haiti would be comparable to Somalia's, thus no hope.

EDIT: this is not to say that there are no civil strides. It would seem to me that foreign interferences from other countries destroy possibilities of peace in the region.
I'm clueless about CLOS and just learning Clojure. Corrections solicited, grain of salt, yadda yadda:

1. Clojure already provides multimethods, which can dispatch CLOS-style, based on number/type of their arguments, or by an arbitrary predicate.

2. To use your wording, while CLOS separates methods from "everything", Clojure multimethods are even separated from classes. Other than being type-aware enough to do dispatch, multimethods are conceptually just functions with some extra testing on the front end.

3. Implementation-wise, things seem to be different. Perusing the links below, it seems the new functionality is intended to preserve dynamism/performance when Java and Clojure objects interact.

4. Grouping functions into logical chunks seems to be the other idea behind protocols.
sometimes.
Neat and all, but why is this written in JS? CSS selector support is great in html parsers (nokogiri, for instance.) Seems like a hassle to add the script tag, onload, etc. just for a run-once-and-only-in-dev kind of script.
Right. But at least with one general knowledge techie and one general knowledge biz guy you can get a good read on tech issues/requirements and market opportunity. Thus once you get to this point you know what you need more of and more importantly you know what you don't know.
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A good example of a founder that knew for the company to survive and growth in the future another step was required and he was not interested in that position. A smart guy.
Be sure to read Woz's comment attached to the story, explaining how he still has two iPhones and buys a lot of the newest gadgets.
pg made a similar comment in Undergraduation (http://www.paulgraham.com/college.html):

> My mother, who has the same [thermostat], diligently spent a day reading the user's manual to learn how to operate hers. She assumed the problem was with her. But I can think to myself "If someone with a PhD in computer science can't understand this thermostat, it must be badly designed."
Actually I use the text on the URL to generate semantic classifications. A single title in itself may be too small produce meaningful classification.
tags/area-of-interest of some sort. Eg:

Fashion, e-commerce, education.

You could find someone with experience or interest in education, read their comments and submissions and get a feel for how they think.

Maybe an 'open for solicitation' checkbox.

Basically that's all I can think of. Some way of finding people by criteria.
I think it's much more important what you choose as a second language. If it is significantly different from the first language in adding new concepts and ways thinking about programming, there is a good chance that between the two of them learning any other new programming language as needed won't seem as daunting. And you will have a wide range of techniques at your disposal regardless of which language you happening to be using in a given project.
I wonder which will be cast as the villain in 100 years when the hip visionaries we'll be looking back on will be Steve Jobs and Bill Gates.
Its incredibly important to web developers to be able to test IE, too. Helium needs a lot of extra work to support the older Internet Explorer browsers to patch around the missing features required. It will get done.

I cannot see why you should develop this for IE. This tool is no going to be used by end users. Developers are going to have Chrome/Safari or Firefox installed in their machines. Are there so many IE CSS hacks used in websites?
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Perhaps links to other profiles, people most commenting on/with, friends, etc.
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Technology has surely made the world a global village. Single phone chat lines are an example of technology at your fingertip.
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Because IE has "special needs". Very often different stylesheets or even different markup is served for IE. This could be circumvented by faking IE with the user-agent string but ideally it would just support IE out of the box.
I imagine it does the parse up-front rather than a separate interpretation step during execution.
This is a nice tool. Waiting for the XML sitemaps support.
The equivalent salary for a top-notch engineer in China is about 12-25% of the US rate, however.
I've used Mozy for a while and I agree with you. I have to have local backup plan apart from Mozy.

Now I'm trying out CrashPlan. It supports local network backup as well as remote network backup.
What would be really awesome if this tool could run in the background somehow and log selector usage. The reason for that is that on dynamic pages, the original HTML served doesn't really reflect all the selectors that are actually used on the page.
The best teams have well rounded/varying skills. Look at Ideo.com (company that invents stuff) - they look for well rounded individuals with passion. So while a team with more techies will produce better tech - not necessarily something that will be successful, a team that's more rounded has a higher chance to produce something that will succeed with inferior technology. That being said, web companies do not fail these days due to a lack of tech. So I implore those who know tech to look for people with differing skill sets and vice versa.
Use Groovy/Grails if you must develop a Web app on the JVM or reuse existing Java code.

J2EE was a disaster (I have 6+ years experience with it). So much wasted talent and time.
What I wonder about IE is how sites or access points set cookie without there even being a browser window open. When I go to certain coffee shops, I'll see the 'this and this site is trying to set a cookie' popup (since I have IE set not to accept cookies) and I don't even have IE open!
I wrote a browser one too http://skulpt.org/

I'm not sure if it's better to write in real Python or just know that you're using JS with different syntax ala pyscript. Emulating all the bizarre Python attribute access behaviour in JS (e.g. __get__) is quite complex.
You're welcome! I know I'm scratching not just my own itch, but helping others too .. it's a great feeling. Obviously I got lucky too .. it's not like I coded Google Docs. A reminder that despite all our technical and business talent - luck remain an important part of our endeavor. We can however work to maximize our odds and exposure to luck!
That does not necessarily imply that Chinese vulnerability researchers are proportionally cheaper... yet.
I guess you are correct. It is incredibly painful to know that even tiny developer tools should support IE.
hilarious :D
Not exactly a lovable loony underdog dying destitute and alone in a hotel in that pairing. Both are obscenely rich and successful.
Look, I'm sorry to be the one to break this to you, but if you have difficulty with any programming concept, you must not be a supergenius. You're just an ordinary genius at best. I'm sorry. Life isn't always fair.

Of course, I say this as someone who hasn't yet tried to learn Haskell. On the other hand, I know someone who competes at the national level and I never saw him have trouble with anything including Haskell, so...

The sad truth is that there are some people for whom programming comes as naturally as thinking, with code formed as easily as thoughts; and if it takes an effort to understand any aspect of programming, you have just learned that you are not one of those people. Alas.
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You might like SpiderOak: It includes a "Keep your own copy" option for all the encrypted data blocks. You can specify a local folder, or a SSH/SFTP server as the target.

(I founded SpiderOak in '06)
If someone forced me to do a startup in the finance industry it would be a loan company requiring the person to update their financials semi-annually. With the loan risk being continually updated the loans could be packaged and syndicated without the need for the heavy insurance and rating companies manipulation that goes on now. All done on the net.
Is ?: really not right-associative in JavaScript? I thought PHP was the only language that messed that one up...
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Crystal Tower may be great, but it's a total eyesore for everyone else in the area. Anyone know why it was allowed to be 2-3x taller than the other buildings in the vicinity?
Though Tesla himself made a "mint" selling his AC patents to Westinghouse in the 1890s, according to the article, then proceeded to squander his fortune thereafter.
That's why your developer CMS/framework/tool-chain should just generate that script take for -DDEBUG builds of your web app (#+debug in my case ;-)

I already do that with Firebug Lite, to make IE suck less.
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I upvoted because this is a good question that other folks will have, and I wanted to provide my motivations.

Finding the unused css selectors among several stylesheets among dozens of pages is tough. Before I wrote Helium, I tried many other attempts. This included:

Google Pagespeed exports: There's a cool feature of this Firefox extension that lets you export a json-encoded file showing all kinds of stats about the page. This includes a section of unused css selectors. The problem is that there is no way(currently) to pass it a list of urls to load, check, and produce a final report. At one point, I exported over 40 individual reports and struggled for several days to write a Python script to parse the results out. While this was a perfectly valid way to solve the problem, one of the big issues I found was the amount of time it took to generate the reports. It was a vary manual process.

Cross-browser support: There were only 2 projects that I found that came close to the kind of data exports that I needed, Pagespeed and DustMe Selectors. They were both Firefox-only tools, and don't help when trying to analyze any other browsers. It will only take a minimal amount of work and testing to get it running in IE8, so that's next. It will eventually also work in older IE versions, but that is going to take more work.

Existing solutions just don't work(at least for me): In particular, I'm talking about DustMe Selectors. I monkeyed with this tool for 2 full days and could never get it to work correctly. The absolutely vital component I needed was the ability to get reports on many different pages. Once I figured out how to get it to read a sitemap XML formatted file of my links, I could never get it to finish a full report. I let it run all night and came back the next day and it was just hung up. I spent a 2nd day and each test would just hang, no matter what I did. I really wish it had worked as advertised, because it would have saved me a lot of time.

Client-side tool: I thought about this problem for a long time. Yes, there are server-side tools like the ones you mentioned. However, to be truly accurate a tool like this needs to be able to analyze pages as they are actually rendered in the browser.

So these are the main reasons that I built Helium.
I wrapped it with parentheses out of habit. updated
A parser implemented in a scripting language

What's a "scripting language"?

Won't that be rather slow?

Firefox is implemented in JavaScript. It's pretty fast, and a little more complicated than a parser.
That's a relief :)
I think he's probably referring to changes on the carry-on luggage policy in response to the Christmas bomber. I don't know why they bothered, the bomb was in his underwear anyway.
Wow, it sounds like a cult.
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I think you should question the strength of your analysis when you appear to be comparing Haiti to not just a First world country, but a G-7 Nation.

"Let me tell you what would happen to the mayor of a Japanese town if he let this happen and then just shrugged his shoulders and claimed there was "no-one to blame".
"
I really wish people could just abstain from using the built-in class abstractions in their C++, instead of switching wholesale to C and losing all of C++'s other niceties (templates, exceptions, less cruft on portability of primitives, etc.) C++-without-classes is a really nice medium-level language, one that's a lot better at being C than C is, and it'd be nice if more things could be written in it. It would be perfect for the Linux kernel and GNOME, for example.

However, as you've said, C++ encourages you to use its badly-thought-out class abstractions, and that's what most people who "code C++" tend to know how to do. Linus, I believe, disallowed C++ specifically because people would gradually write the kernel into a maintainability corner, by modeling things as hierarchies of classes without understanding the implications.
Even if he needed to invoke Greenspun's Law in the process...

The question is whether that always happens for a complex system. Because if it does, then every sufficiently advanced programmer is a lisp programmer.