skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Is it a good idea to ask a recruiter to switch from SDET to SDE?
I just got through the second round of phone interviews for a SDET position. However, I am more interested in SDE. Can I ask the recruiter to put me on SDE recruitment track?
Ahh.. you have an expectation. Is that conducive to an experimental process?
It's a curious visualization / fact in light of some of the explanations I've heard for the rise of post-medieval European science vs Chinese science. Specifically, that competition among politically distinct European states drove innovation beyond what a stable monoculture empire could.

In looking at this, it's like the Greek isles were a petri dish for the same phenomenon.
I only jumped ship when I had my full-time job and had 3 clients already on the side. I think the right time to do it is when you're too stressed out working full time and you already have clients. At least if you have 0 savings.

If you have 6 months savings, then you're good to go and can take more of a leap. At the same time, I would have at least one on the side so you're sure you like it.

Additionally, there's a ton of client management and communication issues I'm working on constantly optimizing. I wish I would have worked at an agency for at least a year to see how a professional, larger agency handles it so that I'm not learning from scratch essentially. If you're only in-house now and not client facing, there are some serious skills to learn and practice on that side.

Avg monthly income for awhile was about $7k, which nicely replaced my full time, then it's creeped up over the last 18 mos to about $14k gross/$12k net.

I do have a part time contractor now working for me 10 hours a week, which is probably the best thing I've done so far since starting consulting (freelancing).

If you haven't already, consume everything on doubleyourfreelancing.com to have the correct mindset, which is 30% of it.
Unlocked: An Oral History of Haden’s Syndrome
Actually the mix has stayed fairly steady over the years. If anything the technical posts have upticked a bit. Sometimes when this comes up I pick a random date and look in the Internet Archive for the front page that day to see what sort of differences leap out. Maybe I'll do that again.

Edit: ok, I randomly went to http://web.archive.org/web/20120823000341/http://news.ycombi..., which makes the point clearly, maybe too clearly—it almost seems like too strong an example the other way.
Homage to Catalonia deserves a mention here.

https://libcom.org/files/Homage%20to%20Catalonia%20-%20Georg...
You can use your keyboard, the middle row maps to the white keys and the upper row maps to black keys. Works better than a mouse for tempo, IMO.
Things like http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2003/01/27/honest-decent-w... are worth reading too.
If you were affected by it I'd strongly recommend you read the ragged trousered philanthropists. Unfortunately it seems like not much has changed in the 100 years since it was written.
The problem is people can be an "asshole" with no repercussions and completely no way Google can stop them. Almost all business models rely on receiving payment before delivering product, simply because of the fact we can all revert to being assholes quite easily.

So Google and other companies that largely depend on online ads just have to accept the fact that some people are going to disable them. They have complete ability to do so and simply no way it can be stopped. It's inevitable.

If ad blocking becomes so rampant that businesses start to collapse, we'll likely see the internet really ramp up subscription models.
The last paragraph mentions that apparently child protective services took the baby after a day because the father was alleged to have a history of domestic violence.

I was shocked when I read that. Does that actually happen? Is it common in the US that the authorities take newborn babies from their mother?
It has, almost, pretty close.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/02/googl...
Bill Gates Wants to Tax Robots Just Like Humans
Woohoo, I've been using lld instead of GNU ld and gold for a while now and I'd love to have everyone who builds my code do the same.
I'm not sure this is so. Presumably this is offset by tax increases- which means no new money is injected into the system. Instead, it's a literal redistribution lf existing money.

While there might be some inflation as the supply of money available to those with low- to median income increase spending, I don't think it would be sufficient to offset the base change.

On the other hand you would need to significantly increase taxes on upper-middle+ brackets to ensure no new money is introduced. After all they receive BI under this system too, which they'd effectively have to pay back and then some....
But does it do all of the link-time optimizations that gold can do?
There was a whole school of economic thought around the idea of widely distributed ownership and the family (as the organic, root institution of sustainability) that died in the conflagration of WW2, called Distributism:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributism

This, along with populism (Texas-style, pre-1900) and Georgism are historical economic movements with interesting things to say about the world today that have sadly been largely memory-holed.
My first credit card in college was from Capital One. I personally thought they were great. They gave me my cashback rewards right away instead of quarterly, and the one time I forgot to make a payment on time (before I set up autopay), they forgave it and initiated the payment over the phone. After that I just never carried a balance and never had to worry about their fees and rates. Also never ran into any "gotchas".
To play devils advocate many other publishers must publicly acknowledge who they are and who owns them - why should the internet be diferent.

As do public companies.
I think we're mostly in violent agreement that there's a pretty steep learning curve. That is also true for some other tools. I'm questioning the link between steep curve and powerful; it is true that many powerful tools have steep learning curves; but one can easily think of tools that have steep learning curves but are not powerful. So, the question is: is git's CLI just weird, or does it need to be weird in order to be successful as an SCM? (I think it's the former.)
Imaginary News
Yep, in the US at least, I consider this a big flaw in the legal system, since "reasonable" people really don't exist in this country. The recent election is proof of this. We need a legal standard that doesn't rely on something that's fictional.
Zuckerberg redacts quote on monitoring private messages from Facebook manifesto
Not a freelancer now, but did a lot of contracting.

Key is to price using a WEEKLY RATE. Break your work into chunks of weeks.

Do not do hourly work.

If the client is looking for less than a week, then its possible to do a daily rate, at a higher average, but the moment you have to break up your tasks as hourly jobs or pay-per-task, you are creating the opportunity to absorb unexpected costs from the client.
Didn't Obama give complete control of ICANN to the United Nations recently? Was he just feeling super generous to other countries because I suse wasn't on board with that idea. :(
First of all, I am from The Netherlands. My feedback is based on the Dutch market.

- Average monthly income?

Hard to say what the average is, since last year I took a break for 7 months and needed another 2 months to find a new opportunity. But when I am working the average gross income would be somewhere above 10.000 EUR ex. VAT. I'm working 40 hours a week. I usually try to work for big clients for at least a year or so.

- If in the same spot would you do the move again?

Definitely. I wish I made the move years earlier (I started freelancing at 32 years old). I really appreciate the feeling of freedom and the idea that I am taking control of my own life to the biggest extent possible.

- How long did it take to get a regular stream of work?

Usually I can get work really, really quick - let's say just a couple of weeks. Last year was a bit problematic due to some issues with Dutch law, making potential clients more hesitant to hire freelancers. For mobile dev I am sure one can find many opportunities every single month and should never be long without work. For front-end work I imagine the situation is much the same.

- Any other advice or tips you could offer.

If you freelance, save some money for your future. I'd say ideally you tried to spread risk as much as possible. You could put some money in a tax deductible pension plan, some money in index funds and use some money to pay of your mortgage ASAP. Make sure you keep enough savings to survive at least a couple of months. If you manage to lower your costs of living, you will be able to survive much longer with the same amount of money.

If you don't want to bother yourself to look for jobs, you could just let recruiters contact you. I get most of my jobs through recruiters on LinkedIn and Monsterboard, because I can't really be bothered to search for myself. Of course, they will take a cut of your pay check, but as long as I am able to make over 10k a month gross, I'm still quite happy. Just make sure that on your profiles you mention you are a freelancer.

When you tell your rate, always start bidding a bit higher than your absolute minimum. So if the lowest pay you'd accept would be 65 EUR / hour (ex. VAT), start bidding at 80 EUR / hour.

Some companies that deal with recruiters have some sort of insurance that you will get paid, regardless if the client pays the recruiter or not. At least ComputerFutures and Progressive Recruitment make these promises and such an arrangement can be nice if you like a bit more security with regards to payment.
MuleSoft files for IPO
Yes - retainers and contracts are gold! Less time on the treadmill of one-time projects. You may need one-time projects to start, but try to convert it to retainer soon after.

For one-time projects have them always pay 50% down and milestones for the rest. Don't start until they pay.

And if you can help it, don't bill hourly. Everyone who's been down that route advises against it. If clients don't fully understand what you're doing, they're going to try to manage the only thing they know - your hours.

This is a great resource/podcast for developers on getting paid and not billing hourly - http://www.ditchinghourly.com/
Feel free to put the squeeze on the next time you think someone won't be able to deliver.
Short selling can't really be banned without mangling the right to enter contracts. There's too easy of an effective substitute - start writing contracts that have the payments to the same parties as shorting a stock.
That's not the reason why C/C++ code that uses a linked list is "unsafe". It's "unsafe" because it doesn't protect the use. In other words, because the client code is itself "unsafe". If the use was protected (whether dynamically with a lock or statically by some Rust-like language extension, I don't care), there was no more of an issue than in Rust.

And if the linked list is itself broken, Rust can't help you either.

So I still don't see a causal relationship. Is it because I'm drunk?
> Regulators in the US are taking interest in the large sums collectively kept on stored value cards and the associated mobile apps. “The money stored on these cards – and any similar stored value accounts – are effectively the same as bank deposits and as the total value now exceeds the deposits at smaller US banks, regulators are seeing a need to apply oversight,” O’Brien says.

There is zero chance the new administration is going to make new regulations that are unfriendly to financial institutions.
Computing must be focused on precision, because you need exact addressing to have data structures and branches. You could maybe let data structures slide, but if you don't have branching (or something equivalent) then you don't have "universal" computation.
Man, hit-boxes in Valve have been wonky since HL1DM.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eAP7JqyJwOc

LEAD DANG IT LEAD!
Would it have killed the author of this post to name the essays he's quoting?

"... good prose is like a windowpane." - Why I write, 1946

"Political language — and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists — is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind." - Politics and the English Language, 1946

Etc
You Can’t Depend on Antivirus Software Anymore
Interesting. Now that I think of it, for the last few months FB has been relentlessly trying to get me to associate my phone number with my account - and they even display it in Firefox (which was surprising that a browser could pull a phone number). After what you said, I wouldn't be surprised if they associated it anyway.
> Perhaps an effective technique against this is to make sure there's copyrighted music playing in your livestream.

You committing a copyright violation isn't going to stop news organizations from doing something that is textbook fair use, except by getting your content pulled from the distribution platform for the violation before the news organizations sees it.
Right now, it doesn't work at all. Would be great to test and iterate on it a bit and to have some sense to the answers before exposing it to the world.
SQL Server on Linux: Mission-Critical HADR with Always on Availability Groups
Deleting your Yahoo email account? Yeah, good luck with that
14€/h, but I do a lot
Either a duress passcode or different profiles, depending on whether I think I'll get my phone back.
Thanks for the open discussion!

As eslaught pointed out, it's not about the obvious mistakes.

Unfortunately, the navigation is very fragmented. There's a left menu, which should be the primary one, but it changes all the time depending on the context.

The top menu is very inconsistent, presented in multiple layers, with different styles for each level, using very low contrast text with no other visual aid. There are no dropdowns or other ways to get to frequented pages faster. Being aligned to center also prevents me from memorizing the UI spatially (YMMV).

And there's also the issue with minimalistic buttons acting like links.

It is my humble opinion that rewriting the frontend in Vue will not, by itself, alleviate the matter; however, fixing this part of the UX will make GitHub and Atlassian really run for their money.
Well. How about that.
the issue here is that your resume might be too good
I like the taxonomy of French and Raven's bases of power:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_and_Raven's_bases_of_po...

In this framework, I tend to associate charisma with referent power, which deals with power through identification, admiration, and respect. This could be Bill Clinton's ability to feel your pain or Donald Trump's ability to tap into a sense of nationalism.

To answer your question more directly, the answer is no. Referent power is one kind of power. There are many others. Certainly, this is all debatable and not cut and dried, but I do like the bases of power linked to above as a way to create a vocabulary to talk about it.
Surely you realize that drivers are not the only people who benefit from driving infrastructure. This seems about as fair as calling the post office a subsidy to the paper industry.
NBA VR on Daydream
If there were a regulation that would make it impossible to do business(the war on drugs) and society would like that business to continue (the revenue of cocaine sales were approximately 9 times that of Microsoft last year), then they'll live without the regulation (sweet where do I buy?)
Freelance is a lot of different things to a lot of different people. I've done short jobs in the past, but don't really like that. Now I'm doing longer contracts, with full time engagement and I like it a lot more.

After doing a couple of startups in various positions (as employee and as founder), I decided to do some contract work for a while. I'm on my second contract now. The contracts I've been doing both started out as 2-3 month full time, but were then extended. I'm billing roughly x2.5 of my best salary as a perm. I've been raising my wage each time, and I suspect I can raise it another 20% from where I'm now. Possibly more.

So far I've been getting work through network. I've been working as a developer for a while now, so I have a well sized rolodex, but I've been talking to a lot of recruiters - some of which had interesting contracts, so I might be getting my next job that way.

I've been billing by the hour btw., but in both cases, my employer didn't really care how much time I chose to work. In fact - the more, the better, from their perspective. They are large, established companies, so they have deep pockets and my boss isn't paying out of his own salary. From my perspective, billing by the hour means I'm getting paid for overtime, which is a good thing.
I've never found `if err != nil {` to be a problem; on the contrary, it draws my eye right to the error-handling logic in any function. OTOH, exceptions tend to obscure this (in the best case you have checked exceptions and you are only unsure about which function is raising the exception; at worst you have something like Python where you have no idea what exceptions could be thrown or if they're handled properly), and Rust's `try!` tends to blend in too well with its surroundings (this is a special case of Rust's density making it hard to read). YMMV.
Of course that may change as people could be expanding its training through their interactions with it.
This just feels to me like one of those things that seems great on paper, then in practice requires a lot of things to line up to work as intended (like Communism?).

I also really dislike the fact that the language used would be very hard to a non-native English speaker, which makes me question how useful it is at solving the problems it is obviously addressing (cultural differences, social norms, etc.).
Xorg seems to agree.
WordPress 4.7.2 post mortem
>We solve this dilemma in one of two ways. Blood and fire until 'they' are gone or learning to live together despite having differing moral structures.

The first method is the only workable one. The second is impossible: many peoples' morality absolutely requires that they impose their moral values on everyone around them. So "learning to live together" would require living by the moral codes of people you fundamentally disagree with.

Just as an example from your list: abortion. The pro-choice people would be perfectly happy to have legal access to abortions, and for anti-abortion people to simply not get any. That won't work for anti-abortion people, who will insist on legislatively banning all abortions (to varying degrees, to be fair). The only way to live peacefully with anti-abortion people is to simply give up and let them ban abortion. This obviously is unacceptable to pro-choice people. I can make similar arguments about many other moral positions, such as whether women should be allowed to drive or not.
Orwell's book reviews are a treasure.
Orwell is great. This article is questionable.

> To the surprise of absolutely no one, George Orwell is everywhere these days. His seven-decade-old dystopian classic, 1984, recently made waves by topping a bunch of bestseller lists. Orwell’s earlier (and arguably greater) allegory, Animal Farm, is also getting its due. That both novels are suddenly on the radar of people who probably haven’t given Orwell a second thought in years is hardly surprising at a time when war refugees are painted as national security threats, white nationalists hold positions of power in the White House and an American president is openly involved in an abusive relationship with the English language.

It isn't surprising. What is surprising is to see anyone lay this at the feet of Trump.

So here is what actually happened: In the wake of 9/11, Bush started legitimizing a strong surveillance state (that to some degree has been with us since WW II). With few exceptions, primarily from 'crazy libertarians' and some liberals, both liberals and conservatives went along with it. Of course, this didn't stop liberals from using it as justification to try to get Republicans out of office later on.

Obama was elected. Since Obama was "their guy", liberals grew mostly silent on the subject (although with a lot more exceptions than before) and conservatives suddenly changed their tune, at least in public: surveillance is bad (but Snowden is still a traitor).

Those liberals who were cool with whatever Obama was doing believed in the myth of "the right people". Meaning, governance isn't a question of political power, sound policies, principled problem solving or anything along those lines. It's just a question of having "the right people" in charge. So whatever powers "the right people" say they need to do their job, since they are "the right people" it must be true and we should give them those powers to Get Things Done. (Note: there are conservative factions that believe this as well.)

Now, those very same liberals are in a panic because (surprise, surprise) Trump (i.e., the wrong person) is in charge and has all those powers that were previously given to "the right people". Of course, the problem isn't the granting of those powers. It's just that the wrong person was voted in by an ignorant public.

So now, in a panic, largely induced by a media which finds itself incapable of straight truth or depth, they flock to buy 1984 so they can 'legitimately' talk and write about this book they've never previously read in order to make tenuous comparisons to Trump's brand new presidency. And they, like conservatives during the Obama years, will cry out against the very same surveillance state that was no problem at all when their guy was in charge.
It reminds me of the last wave of distributed P2P filesharing, c. 2000-2005. First we got Napster, which realized that by taking advantage of the bidirectional nature of TCP/IP, we could distribute copyright infringement so widely that it would become impossible to enforce. Then some techies at NullSoft realized that you don't actually need a central server for discovery at all, you can broadcast the existence of and metadata about files throughout the network for discovery, and put out Gnutella. Lots of excitement followed, with many people of that era believing P2P would be the Next Big Thing (among people working on this were such folks as Travis Kalanick of Red Swoosh -> Uber, Mark Zuckerburg of WireHog -> Facebook, Friis & Zenstrom of Kazaa -> Skype -> Rdio, and Robert Tappan Morris of Chord -> YCombinator).

And then folks realized that Gnutella was slow. Really slow, because folks on transient dialup connections in Estonia were critical nodes in file discovery. So they created the idea of super-peers, where the protocol was adapted to realize that some nodes are more equal than others and route requests through nodes with known-good connections. Then the next-generation P2P network (BitTorrent) decided that it was easier just to rely on HTTP for metadata exchange and went to centralized trackers, and the ecosystem that grew up around BitTorrent realized branding & centralized search engines were important for non-technical users and we got big torrent search engines like ThePirateBay and Mininova.

Eventually, the market seemed to settle on convenience & performance over distribution, and the real winners in the mass market were DropBox, Google, and Apple. There's probably a lesson in there, but as someone who's been fascinated by P2P technologies since high school and wasted a lot of time thinking about the problem in college, the lesson is pretty depressing. If hierarchy, market concentration, and single points of failure don't already exist, they will be reinvented.
No argument there, or at the very least whole program optimizations