skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Even if the following seems extremely client focused, I am a fellow freelancer.

First acknowledge that a client pays you to produce something, he finds valuable. He does NOT pay you to spend x hours programming... (even if you bill by the hour).

The milestone based payment is for your benefit (so that you have a steady cashflow, and that your risk of him not paying goes down towards completion).

The client really only cares about one of the milestones... the last.. (or at most a few, that enables him to do stuff with the software he wanted).

That you completed 50% of the milestones might be either something useful to him, or not. Even if he has access to the source code you already wrote, chances are, that any new contractor wants to start over from scratch (I would).

So from his perspective, he paid you 3,000 dollars and you delivered nothing (worthy to him). No wonder he is unhappy. 3k$ may be pocket change for him, or it may have killed his project forever..

As for options. First of all, don't run from him, that only makes stuff worse.
If possible, set up a meeting in person (that is gonna suck for you, but it really makes a difference).

Tell him, honestly, what went wrong.
As for the expanding requirements, try to agree to share the blame for that. Most of the other stuff is on your shoulders only, and you have to accept the blame for that.

Apologize unconditionally, except for the expanding requirements.

Now, it is time to look forward.

Offer him to complete the project, or offer him some refund if he won't let you complete it. Ideally you should offer him close to a full refund, but you probably don't have cash for that.

If the project is completed by somebody else and you cannot pay anything back, offer him to do something else as a freebie...

And most important of all, learn from the experience. As much as you depend on the clients to pay you on time, the clients depend of you to deliver something useful.

For most clients (especially not steady businesses) they have allocated something like three-quarters of all their money to you, and they probably cannot raise more...

Don't take on project you know will be hard/impossible to finish due to time or skill constraints WITHOUT being frank about it...

I know it probably looks bleak now, but if you are any good you will have a long career in front of you. The soft skills (negotiations, keeping your word etc) matters as much as the hard skills (programming or what ever).

Especially your word, do what you can to keep it! and if you are in risk of not keeping it, tell the client up front. You client might accept a slightly reduced version to hit an important date and then get the final version slightly later - but you don't know if you don't communicate..
Fortunately - and this is something I see many smart people around me not realizing - we live in the day and age where it's trivial to identify and get the very best books humanity has produced about any given topic. That is, as long as you can read English.
People have been saying that for the entire 6 years I've been reading HN.
It depends, generally I think it's a good idea for communicating what is acceptable in the community, but for single-purpose trolling accounts it might not help as much.
Several of the questions have good discussions that can be found using search. Overall, I'd say that your questions have had above average responses relative to the volume of submissions that arrive at Hacker News, the topics the ask about and the total number submitted.

Generally, questions where it seems that the topic is important to the author personally and the topic is one on which HN can bring expertise rather than preformed arguments will tend to do better.
I agree with you but find it hard to use social media for that, because people mix personal news with politics, religion, jokes etc...

The worse being twitter, a lot of people retweet so much junk.

The best being reddit, because by picking subreddits you can read about specific topics with a very low noise ratio.

What we need is a social media that is only about personal news.
The problem complicating re-reading "the best" book is how do you know which one is the best? Reading a new one has a non-zero chance of reading a better one. A variation on the secretary problem where interviewing can have a negative cost.

As for a book a day being overkill - you're right, I'm not going to keep this up next year. Normally I read ~80 books but last year I was unemployed for several months and ended up reading >200 even though I was busy looking for work (which involves a lot travel and waiting around which is when I got religious about using my deadtime rather than "killing" time with HN) and I thought fuck it, I'll give it a go at which point I got hired within a month but wanted to see if I can keep going. It's getting really busy with deadlines but I'm confident I can catch up during christmas. For people wondering: yes, I have no family.
Methane is a carbon compound.
> As far as I can see, we could do the same to system calls: if an executable can enumerate all the system calls it needs, we can compile a kernel that will accept only these system calls, which should be a small subset of all available Linux syscalls.

That is what pledge essentially does at runtime

http://man.openbsd.org/pledge
> Social media weakens this skill because it’s engineered to be addictive.

Might as well add (modern?) gaming to the list—it has the exact same property.
It sounds to me like the author of this post is going for quantity over quality. In the realm of book-reading, that's almost always a losing proposition.

Here's an approach that has worked better for me: pick a complex question and try to answer it. For example, "Why did the Great Depression happen?" It turns out there isn't actually a simple answer (that everyone can agree on).
Who are the nerdiest investors in the world?
Although tech investors are nerdy per definition, there must be the ones that stand out with their extreme interest in science. If they would invest externally, Elon Musk and Xerox with its Palo Alto Research Center (at least in the 60’s & 70’s) would be some good examples.
Not universally true. I have seem some crossings in Texas and elsewhere where the light is solely for pedestrian crossing and will change (after a short delay) on command. On intersections that are sensor-controlled they will also change the light if there is no cross traffic to change it for you.

That said, on intersections where the lights are purely timed or where there are always cars waiting in both directions, it pretty much is a "beg button". At that point, there is no way to allow on-demand pedestrian crossing without making the roads useless to cars. In fact, some places like NYC don't even have buttons because they are pointless and possibly counterproductive.
I use Google/FB just for the IM. I rarely ever read status updates.

But when I get frustrated on a problem or am knee deep in technical debt, you can be I'll flip over to Hacker News.
They make money if you use Linux or Windows on azure.

For years the Mac has been popular with developers because it has a Unix command line. Cygwin has been around for a long time but it is not playing to win -- so the Linux subsystem is something Microsoft can do to win mindshare; apple is just as stuck on phones as Microsoft is on the PC so Microsoft can grab turf for creatives.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from physical reality.
Uh, yeah, right-wing extremists murdering people is pretty much what I posted about.
At only a book a week, you'll easily hit > 200 in 4 years. No need to complete one in a day. Except for technical text books, most books can be "got through" in well under 4 hours. For most people, if they simply read instead of zoning out in front of the TV, (or being obsessed with social media!), that will yield >20 hours/week!
While your point about objective function is correct, optimizing compilers still manage just fine with imperfect objective function, and superoptimizers do better. So "as good as objective function" is good enough.

This work proves functional equivalence, so no test suite is necessary.
..and movies, books and TV?
Even better, the showers will sometimes be free, on the condition that you buy so-and-so many gallons of diesel, or eat a meal at the restaurant.
Shame this is being downvoted. Non-UK EU countries have some pretty shitty universities given how rich they are. Of the top 40 in the Shanghai Rankings, two are non-UK EU and five are in the UK. Cost-to-user in the UK isn't free but it's pretty cheap when compared to the American competition.
Cool tool, but for learning we need some focus and fuel. http://talkproductivity.xyz/
It's kind of funny how much front-end tech stack we bring in to get back to server-side rendering that was the norm before modern JS apps.

I do think Vue.js, Riot.js 2.0, etc are interesting additions to the front-end landscape. Here I like the simplicity of defining routes from file names but it seems to break down quickly with any sort of customization. As an anecdote I thought this was something the Vue team was working on.
nice can i customise speed of loader?
Thanks for sharing that article. We just covered moderation approaches in one of my clinical psych courses and they really can be very effective.

One interesting finding is that the sense of self-efficacy gained through moderation makes dealing with relapses or setbacks easier when compared to the all or nothing approaches.
It's dangerous to go alone. Take this: https://news.ycombinator.com/best
I'm talking about trolling because you're using a throwaway account. That's a bright red-flag if I've ever seen one.

That said, is he professional at work? If he does his job and doesn't discuss shit at work, that's his business. I'm not going to fire someone because of personal beliefs. Yes, that's an extreme example but I'm not going to play arbiter of beliefs because we are quickly going to get into a slippery slope of defining where a line is, who decides, etc. Hell, if half the folks on Facebook had it their way I might not have a job simply because I prefer Trump to Hillary. You see where I'm going with this?
> For me, for a new field, I never know which is the "best" book.

Solution for that is pretty simple for very many fields:

Google:

- best books on <field X>

- best books on <field X> reddit

Read a few lists from sites, especially those frequented by people in that field. See which books tend to appear often in those lists. There, you have quite probably just identified the very best books for the <field X> the human race has to offer.
> some facs seems to be
> doing pretty good

3 in the top hundred for a country with France's intellectual and cultural pedigree is a disgrace.
Carbon neutral is essentially shorthand for doesn't contribute to climate change. Methane (a) contains carbon and (b) is a much more potent greenhouse gas than CO2.
Doesn't look like they are really actively working on it:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=889230

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1205323

Which is weird because FF devs are active in spec discussion for web components. Maybe they are working on some lower-level infrastructure stuff before they can tackle these, I'm not sure.
And yet if they'd proposed putting a 9% rate of income tax above £21000 there would have been riots in the Tory party. It's a tax on people born after 1980 who want to have professional jobs, not all graduates. Ironically, this hugely favours immigrants from EU countries with free or cheap education systems.

And I do think some people are put off by the debt-ness of it, but that's very tricky to measure.
Methane does not smell. To quote wikipedia:

"At room temperature and standard pressure, methane is a colorless, odorless gas. The familiar smell of natural gas as used in homes is achieved by the addition of an odorant, usually blends containing tert-butylthiol, as a safety measure."
Always post anonymously on Internet. Nobody wants you to succeed.
Every decent woodworker eventually builds a woodworking bench. Having the top flat is critical, it becomes a reference surface. You put a warped board down on it and you instantly know that it is warped (obvious but I didn't get it until I had a flat bench).

There isn't really a good way to accurately flatten a surface that larger other than a plane. Here's some notes on my bench: http://www.mcvoy.com/lm/bitmover/lm/wood/bench/
Not if the simulation container evolved spontaneously in its own universe.
Most likely a reaction to how dominant AA recovery programs are for those without means to afford one-on-one counseling combined with the religious overtones.
I don't understand why I'm being downvoted, can you explain?

Public transport loses money in the evenings, across the world they get shut down unless subsidised.
How can you trust someone about social media who said they never own a social media?
Minor nit: writing ≠ editing. One could argue that the ease of editing could result in more concise pieces as it's easier to refactor what's already been written. Editing does take effort, though.
If you feel like sharing, does the number 300 hundred hold a special meaning to you for any reason? Your handle, the title of the post, I see a patter, Watson :)
Isis started in Iraq as Al Qaeda in Iraq, and is primarily led by former officers of Sadam Hussein's military. They certainly took advantage of the chaos in Syria, but it was the Iraq war that led to the formation of Isis. Syria just added fuel to the fire.
I have quit FB a few times but the reality is that FB Messenger is the main IM platform for many because it works so well going from mobile and computer. I don't use or care for any other features of Facebook.

I also don't bother with Twitter anymore. I still have an account but don't ever open it. Instagram and Snapchat are rather boring for me also.

So while I like social I don't really care for the media.
No: all of those are "single use" items, i.e. you typically only consume them once.

Games and social media, OTOH, are designed for continuous consumption without end. Here, "being addictive" is basically the only thing that matters (and in fact, is the only variable companies actually measure).
Ask HN: Why do you hire H1-B workers instead of natives?
Why do you companies not exercise your duty to your own country and hire foreign nationals for American jobs?
holy shit you two are embarrassing as hell. absolutely cringeworthy. I'd half consider migrating to Azure since it seems they're the only adult in the room... too bad it's such a terrible service;)
> optimizing compilers still manage just fine with imperfect objective function,

Imperfect or not, optimizing compilers do not require an objective function at all. The majority of computer programs do not have an objective function.
Come on. I'm simply saying that the statement "laws of physics are universal - the same everywhere, at any time" is an axiom. It's something we can't prove. We assume it for the sake of our sanity, and the assumption seems to be holding pretty well so far.
On the other side the SSD is very fast (rumors say 2.2GB/s, that is not so far from DDR2) so at least swapping will be seamless...
This is actually pretty cool. I last worked with satellite data from GOES 8 and 9 in '98. I remember satellite images were sent sent every 3 hours and full disk images were 12 hours. I worked in a weather office where they had one pc running DOS that received the data from Satellite and saved the data where various HP-UX servers manipulated the data.

Last i remember, all data transmitted by these satellites are not encrypted, anyone can build a receiver to gather the data to generate satellite images.

One day I hope to have time to do this myself.
Why was the correct punctuation of the original headline replaced with a comma splice?

Can we get someone to restore the correct punctuation?
I'm French, I'm not always proud of my country, but today I am!
At a bar it's most probably voluntary. There are some toilets where you have to pay after your visit but normally they put a sign on it, if it's mandatory. I only know it if there is a funfair or some kind of it. Like this: http://www.kem-zelte.de/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/1-IMAG017...

I'd say it's a good habit to always throw 50 Ct on the table - except if the person is as agressive/unfriendly as you describe. ;)
This blog is the best resource for anything related to the kernel/hw boundary. Better than any book I've seen.
I'm a little concerned by the 653 KB file size. Is that due to assets?
http://www.mcvoy.com/lm/bitmover/lm/wood/bench/

Note the leg design, I swiped that from someone else, very simple, easy to tighten up, doesn't rock back and forth like a lot of other designs.
> Godlike power is a function of technology and what the universe allows.

Your comment reminded me of Author C. Clarke's third law:

3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke's_three_laws
> I am of the opinion that a Pro machine does not need to be the thinnest available model.

the "pro" in pro just means "professional", as in "connected to one's profession". It does not mean "professional computer-user" or "professional computer programmer"; it does not mean "this is the most powerful thing on the market", it means "you can stake your livelihood on the reliability and versatility of this tool".

A lot of professionals use their laptop every single day for work, and they commute with it every single day. Lightening the load in your bag matters to a lot of professionals. Making sure you can get through an entire day of meetings on a single charge matters to a lot of professionals.

Anyway, if this sounds like apple fanboy apologism: I'm not buying a new MBP. I've even gone as far as turning down a free one from my employer. It offers me nothing over my existing MBP, which will in all likelihood be the last Apple laptop I ever buy.

The point is: this computer is not designed for programmers, and that's ok.
Just stay logged into messenger and don't ever open facebook except to post a few pictures so people know you're still alive.
This is just the sort of thing we're happy to help with if you email us at hn@ycombinator.com.
Malls are generally private property and have security that stops some people from entering.
> I'm not sure why it would improve things without also setting up a spam filter?

I don't know the rules by which emails are judged, I'm just saying what I've noticed.

Before SRS, I occasionally got legit mail marked as spam.

After that, I don't think I've ever had one marked as spam.

As I said previously: with my own domain, forwarded to my gmail.com address, no spam filtering at all on my side.

Maybe they can tell it's SRS and skipping some penalties?

EDIT: I'm also monitoring my domain at https://postmaster.google.com, but I'm probably not reaching significant traffic thresholds because I've never seen anything other than:

"No data to display at this time. Please come back later.
Postmaster Tools requires that your domain satisfies certain conditions before data is visible for this chart. "
If you look at https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1274159 there's recent activity on Custom Elements.
I would add that it's important to put what you read into action. Also, summarizing what you read makes you think about what you read. Your less likely to forget. I learnt this after many forgotten books.
Lisp critics have heard this argument, and are choosing to continue hating on the parens. It's easy to find a superficial reason to hate things.
Many coffee shops in downtown NYC have the code/key situation.

There are similar regulations in NYC (and I think most of the US, although it is at a local level) that mandate customer bathrooms although they do not sound as strict. For example, small coffee shops (less than ~15 seats) frequently have no customer bathrooms.
Intro to React – project setup, linting, babel, webpack, and gulp
Programmers confess unethical, illegal tasks asked of them
Code by Charles Petzold would be the best in my opinion.

link: https://www.amazon.com/Code-Language-Computer-Hardware-Softw...
I think you'd get a better response if you put some more time / effort into the questions. For example, summarize the research into the topic that you've already done in your question.

Questions that are commonly discussed or too generic "what's your favorite productivity hack?" etc often get glossed over for those reasons.

Try asking something really specific and making it easy to answer, reducing the burden of doing most of the work for a commenter.
Trump has evaded taxes on a massive scale, colluded with a foreign government to impact the election, and sexually assaulted many women. The only reason he wasn't/isn't under investigation himself is that the FBI favors his police state mentality.
Well, sure. Those are the conclusions of people who have already formed their own mental structures. Somehow. That part is not shared. Or maybe they haven't read the books available themselves; there's a shocking number of humans willing to publish their conclusions based on ... sometimes nothing. ("You'll love this book! It's the best! Trust me!") I find that (for me) that the process of forming my own mental structures from the fire-hose to be useful. Partly because what a beginner needs and what an expert recommends often don't line up. Experts have forgotten what it's like to be a beginner.
Plywood is strong in some ways but it's not really suited for a stool with legs attached how he described. Especially 3/4" plywood. As the stool was used the legs would work themselves loose.

A decent hardwood (maple, cherry, walnut, etc) would be a better choice and you'd want 4/4 or even 5/4 stock.
Unfortunately goodreads doesn't offer any kind of meaningful stats. I'm guessing it's 50/50 fact & fiction split but I could be wildly off. What goodreads does tell me is that 1/10 of them I rated 1 star. This is my biggest problem - I have not yet found any reliable way to find recommendations.

I don't know how much time I spend reading, it's almost never exclusive reading time - it's almost always multitasking with something else. I spent at least 4 hours today and it's only mid-afternoon here. Limiting my HN time seems to work and HN is the only social media I'm on. I always have at least two books on the go and one of them is an audiobook so I can keep reading when I'm cycling, doing laundry, etc.
I hope not; the average human can't pass an obstacle at 1-2cm distance safely, a machine could.
Ya, that's how they are able to block websites on your phone. You go through their VPN.
Thank you for recommending Kaze Ni Naru, which I had not heard (of) before.

Also, if your Hacker News activity is any representative proxy, you seem like a pretty cool person [0] in general [1]; I would hope to talk with you some thread, should a suitable post of common interest be submitted.

[0] That is, possessing similar affinities to me.

[1] I hope you will not begrudge such a public declaration, but I do not know of any of your more direct means of contact.
I currently use an SDR to capture ADS-B messages, but it can also be used for satellite images fairly easily:

http://www.rtl-sdr.com/rtl-sdr-tutorial-receiving-noaa-weath...
The "first thing in the morning" idea is pulled from the CAGE assessment for addiction, as the "E" which stands for "eye-opener", the others being "cut down", "annoyance" and "guilt" https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/johns_hopkins_healthcare/dow...

You're right that this one thing alone doesn't spell addiction, but if someone talked about how they should use the bathroom less, felt bad about how many times a day they went, and annoyed everyone by the bathroom constantly being occupied and the person being absent/late due to their use, in addition to using it first thing in the morning, then... maybe they're addicted to social media and using the bathroom as a way to get their fix ;)
Doing something socially objectionable invites social consequences. I bet that Kony 2012 guy got uninvited from speaking engagements too.