skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you've been successfully freelancing for 7 years, then it's likely that you already know much of what I'm about to write. I'd say scrap partnerships and salespeople, and focus on what sales channels are best for you, online or local, whatever works. The two most important lessons I've learned in consulting so far are:

(1) It's really all about trust. The client wants someone who can reliably solve their problem, and tooting your own horn has a very limited effectiveness in building that credibility. Trust heavily impacts what projects people will give you, and how much you can charge. It's common that a company will somehow find 2-3x budget to hire a partner who they know will get the job done.

(2) Referrals and good deeds are the fastest way to build trust. When you come well-recommended by a prospect's trusted friend or partner, then a good amount of that trust gets instantly transferred to you. This transitivity of trust is key to building a good referral network that will consistently send work your way. If you don't have this, then you have somewhat of a cold start problem. In this case, providing value to people on a regular basis could really help with establishing your credibility. I don't mean doing projects for free, but more like offering people free 30-minute consultations about how to build their things, or sending them resources (articles or books) on a consistent basis that would really benefit them. This demonstrates that you can already deliver value, and makes it more convincing that you would do much more of that if you actually got paid for it.

Here are some more resources that could help someone get a start:

[1] Getting Started in Consulting by Alan Weiss is a little antiquated, but talks about what's important in getting your firm going and how to think about your work's impact on your client. (https://www.amazon.com/Getting-Started-Consulting-Alan-Weiss...)

[2] Book Yourself Solid by Micheal Port talks about the best ways to build these client relationships that will result in trust. (https://www.amazon.com/Book-Yourself-Solid-Reliable-Marketin...)

[3] Double Your Freelancing by Brennan Dunn actually has very good information about the tactics of pricing and the business side of project management. It's pricey. The accompanying podcast has good information for free.
(https://doubleyourfreelancing.com/)

There are thousands of different info products online about this stuff, but this bundle should give you the most core knowledge for your money.
Inevitably certain quarters will use this story to confirm their view that universities are packed with lefties and communists.

In addition to the other commenter pointing out the context, also worth noting Soas is known for being very left wing.
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If we live in a simulated universe and cant tell that the universe is simulated then what bearing does the question have when we can't answer it. The person that wrote this article is conflating the idea of VR technology and mixing it with the brain in a jar .
Here are some things to consider about consulting:

Sales/Selling is the last thing on your list and salesperson is only a maybe. Reverse all of your priorities because selling and relationships are the most difficult things to master for a consulting company and you will die without those skills.

In consulting, tech talent < sales/relationship talent. In fact, if you're great at the latter go ahead and get started now because there are lots of great tech people who don't want to do it and will come work for you on a nice contract rate.

To give you an example of this I once worked with a consultant who was a technical rock star, and another consultant who was supposed to be technical but was actually pretty below average. The below average guy was more successful because he was great when talking with the customers and they loved him. He knew enough to talk through problems at a high level, explained things well, and made them feel comfortable that things we're on the right track. If he didn't know something, no problem, he just went and found someone with the answer.

Besides those soft skills he knew how to set and manage expectations. You may be used to the best results winning, but if you don't manage and then exceed expectations it doesn't matter. People love you when they expect 80 out of 100 and you deliver 88. They will not be happy and often fire you if expecting 100 out of 100 and you deliver 92. You will wonder how you just lost to a competitor who is not "as good" as you.

Even if you have pretty good soft skills, do you want to spend time constantly using them? I thought you liked the tech side? If you like both then great because someone has to spends tons of time doing it to sell, maintain, and expand the work and your success depends on how good they are at it.

For many people this will all be hard to believe, or they think it's exaggerated, or that it's easy to just hire someone to do it. That's fine, I hope you have great success. Drop me a line in a couple years to say how things turned out.
Meta answer:

apropos and man (these are for Unix-like systems, a.k.a POSIX systems (loosely speaking). But you may find them on Windows too, via Cygwin and its ilk (e.g. MKS Toolkit (still exists?), UWin, and maybe a few others) and nowadays the Windows Subsystem for Linux too (WSL - maybe). IIRC that last one is Windows 10 only, though.

This is because the apropos command lets me find commands for some purpose (apropos some_word) and the man command then lets me learn how to use them. [1]. (Of course you can look up books and the Internet too, but the man command is online on the same system you are working on.) Apropos may not work for every word you try it with, but even with the commands that it works for (not all may be in its database), it is useful, and enough to be going on with for a long time, in terms of learning and exploring. You can learn about the existence of a lot of new (to you) commands using apropos, and then try them out, and use them regularly if it makes sense for your needs.

Of course there are more in that meta category too, such as find (powerful tool to find files matching various criteria in the file system - combine it with xargs), awk and sed (multipurpose little languages which integrate beautifully with the shell), and so on.

Related to the man command: Here is a simple utility to help with creating and reading man pages for topics - coincidentally I had blogged about it a few days ago, after I mentioned it to a consulting client:

m, a Unix shell utility to save cleaned-up man pages as text:

https://jugad2.blogspot.in/2017/03/m-unix-shell-utility-to-s...

Mentioning it to him made me think of blogging about it, although I first wrote it many years ago on a Unix box. It will work on any Unix variant that has the shell (sh / ksh / bash), the man command (and the corresponding man pages installed) and the col command. May work on other shells such as fish, tcsh or zsh too, but I haven't checked. If not working directly, it probably can be easily ported to them.

So, taking the examples of the commands mentioned above, this is the first command to run, using m:

m apropos man

which will generate in ~/man, the man pages (in text format) for the apropos and man commands, and then:

m find xargs awk sed

which will do the same for those other commands, all of which are powerful and frequently used in Unix systems.
Power grids are big. Using hydro for mining means more fossil fuel must be burned elsewhere to make up for inability to import hydro.

To give an example of just how big: Los Angeles metro imports power from Washington and Oregon via a HVDC line.
From the mundane to the divine, some of the best-designed products of all time
I think a rough estimate of the cost of 500MWh/year is $500 million per year. That doesn't include cooling, hardware, real-estate, staff and other operating expenses. I guess the majority of this cost is ultimately paid for by speculators who buy Bitcoins off of the miners.
Pr process tabs seems to be the core reason why, as this allows the Chrome UI to be "responsive" even if one of the tab processes keep chugging the cycles like it a drunk during happy hour. This in turn because we now have 4+ cores that can do 2+ threads each in an effect to keep the marketing interpretation of Moore's law valid.
Tell you what else is plaguing mobile users: the staunchly non-responsive design of the linked article's page. Is it a mobile article aimed at desktop users?
Have you ported LLDB so that I can debug my Turing complete type system unit tests?

Methinks you are defending pointless complexity. How did we ever write unit tests before this awesomeness was sprung upon us?
> I think it's just that Apple in this case has complete control over the ecosystem so they can mandate screen reader support

I don't believe they mandate it (how would that work for games?), but Apple provides excellent tooling and support throughout the system and it's built into all native controls so adding it to an application requires relatively little effort. See joshaidan's comment above: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13846160
Ask HN: Pre-order strategies/stories for SaaS (targeting consumers)?
I'm in the process of doing a pre-order for my one person SaaS (selling to consumers, not businesses i.e. B2C)- Just wanted to get some ideas.

I was thinking of doing something like this with a 1 week expiry (my target is 100 users):
- $X for lifetime membership (20 available)
- $Y/mo locked in rate (80 available)

Can you share your successful/failed strategies with this?
If you have a SaaS business, what is your SaaS and how did you actually do your pre-orders? What channels did you advertise your pre-order deals to?
> I have periodically seen ideas for logging systems that use a 100BT (not Gigabit) Ethernet connection with the Tx pair cut

That would only work with unidirectional protocols. Scratch TCP/IP and probably even UDP since it would need to figure out the MAC address of the other side.

If you're going to do this you essentially have a one-way high speed serial link without the ability to error-correct.
I encounter this situation constantly. The economics of outsourcing doesn't always work out for every project. As a consultant, you'll be charging 2-3x the hourly rate of an employee, and the company is giving up the benefit of having in-house expertise on their own product.

If you're okay with working for one client full time for the duration of a contract, my advice would be to work with a few recruiters. They'll take a 30% cut, but as they know about some of the best contracts it is often worth your while. Their clients are using contractors to deal with spikes in their workload, or for projects where they don't expect to need you in 6 months.

Another route is in finding clients who want you to manage the full project. Things like building MVPs or building Version 1 of an app. Usually they have a limited budget and aren't looking to take on the risk of an employee. These clients don't generally have any in-house technical expertise. In order to bag this type of client, I have found that having a solid project template to work from and speed up development is a must. It took me almost 2 months to fully set up my build pipeline and get a start project up and running just the way I like it (don't hate my just because I'm a perfectionist.) But now I can kick off projects with a running start. Deliver a fully functioning app in under a week, albeit with only the first couple features, and your client will be happy to pay your rate for the duration of the project.

Finally, the last route I know of is to specialize in a hot technology. AngularJS seems to be popular in my area. A lot projects were started with the thinking that Angular would do all the hard work for them, and now they are neck deep in spaghetti written by a junior. If you can market yourself as an Angular expert, they will be willing to pay higher rates as well as put up with the fact you aren't sticking around. But you need to have a hard-to-find talent for this power dynamic to exist. A friend of mine is a Haskell freelancer and finds it gives him good leverage.
I use a 2x E5-2665 v2 machine (S2600CP4) for building stuff. It's in very small, very cramped 2S Supermicro case (2U, less than 60 cm deep). Fun machine. ing loud as hell, uses stacked 40 mm fans... :)
People love stories about "political correctness gone mad." Why rain on their parade.
almost as if it's a fun hobby project!
If you suffer from depression, you should thoroughly research LSD and then make your fully informed personal decision.

On the negative side, this substance may become one of the reasons the pharmaceutical industry will lose recurrent revenues from disappearing dependency on expensive anti-depressants.
Ad-blockers seem to be able to identify them pretty reliably.
What are you trying to build?
I've read this, and it's very good.

I had never studied business before (at any level), but found myself in a position where I was managing software projects, and dealing with MBA's from our client companies every single day.

I wouldn't say this is a replacement for going to business school, but for me -- it helped me understand the world my clients were coming from, and how they were incentivized.

So yes -- very practical book, easy to get through, and highly recommended. Gives a broad overview of the field, so you can at least speak the lingo.
Yea, it works when you want to trade cognition for action. If I don't need to make any tricky decisions, and would benefit from just moving a bunch of items forward, that's when sleep deprivation (all nighters) can work for me.
I knew I couldn't be the only person with this thought. Solar powered Bitcoin mining will eventually be economically viable :).
This is not a very good article.

SF authors have explored these fascinating concepts without falling into such holes in logic: such as presuming that a technology capable of simulating an incomprehensible volume of intelligence was simultaneously too lazy to leverage that intelligence to not cut corners in the simulation.

That said, I do subscribe to the school that says we must conclude one of the following:

a) civilization in the abstract generally does not progress to the point of being able to simulate itself, or

b) we are the the first civilization ever, or

c) we are a simulation
Totally agree. Wordpress is approachable to most users who want to have a web site for their business, but not super tech savvy.

I still think we can improve the status quo by adopting performance and security benefits that comes with static sites. If you are interested, I wrote elaborative post introducing the solution I'm building www.laktek.com/2016/11/29/introducing-pragma/
This case is a targeted breach of confidentiality not unlike a phone wire tap, still not allowing bulk surveillance. Not bad altogether.
I noticed that stupid jokes and stuff seem much funnier to me when I am sleep deprived. One time I pulled an all nighter and then looked at some meme subreddits. I was laughing incredibly hard to stuff I wouldn't even normally find amusing.

This seems to be a well known phenomenon. There's a whole subreddit called 3am jokes (https://www.reddit.com/r/3amjokes/) for this.
Thanks for authoring this!
Recent versions of Firefox have been pushing out pr tab process support (it has been called different things at different stages of development, i think the current label is e10s). There has been some controversy around this, as such support has in part been responsible for the removal of extensions in their traditional form.
> He doesn't believe in owning phones, but he'll gladly use someone else's who has decided to make that tradeoff.

Makes sense. I don't eat meat, but I'll eat the meat of someone else who's decided to make that tradeoff.
iPhones are an absolute joke. I am not paying 100s of dollars for the privilege of developing software for my own hardware.
Thanks for sharing this!

It's not easy to admit one's weaknesses and grow from them.

Glad you were able to and doubly glad you were able to share the story :)
Google's canary test also does regular ECDH requiring it to be broken as well
The man who saved the Resurrection (2011)
Personally I doubt most VCs provide better returns than Buffett, in fact as a class I'd be surprised if they are significantly better than the stock market. But their model is that they need 10x return investments to pay for all the 0x return investments they make. A 3x return is viewed as a disappointment from that perspective.
I figured as much. My complaint is that I have to read up on some obscure disease as well as a certain Barry Minkow just to start getting an idea of why/how Sam Altar is still running cons.

But yeah, fair enough, maybe that's what I should've written then :)
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> she'd say "your not listening?" and I'd repeat verbatim everything she said and then she'd get annoyed because listening and listening are different things.

Happens to me all the time :)
On the bright side, you're allowed to quote your company. Have a thought for poor people like me who are not.
Why losing a dog can be harder than losing a relative or friend
Emirates Says Bookings to the U.S. Fell by 35% After the First Travel Ban
Your plan is nice, but you'll never get to 5. You will most probably get stuck in doing client work with that strategy.

I would rather continue in your current position and prepare everything to not "Switch from contract work to our products gradually" but switch from a known and secure context to your new product. Either gradually or abruptly if you have enough cash.

Haven't replied to the other questions due to blocking point 5. But mentor and coaches are great to have an external point of view : try to use them wisely.

Good luck!
Interesting, care to elaborate?
> But if that’s the case, we run into a paradox. The argument for living in a simulation is based on the laws of physics and logic. But if we are living a simulation, we can’t trust those laws, so we have no basis to conclude we are living in a simulation.

This is borderline nonsensical. The "laws of logic" (i.e. law of identity/non-contradiction, or propositional logic), are universal axioms that would not change regardless of whether we're in a simulation or not. The "laws of physics" could change, i.e. certain cosmological variables could be tweaked, but this wouldn't affect our ability to reason about things like this.
What's amazing to me is that this question of a simulated reality would not have even been possible to comprehend 150 years ago.

Without our understanding of computers, networks, and virtual reality, a simulated universe theory would be very difficult to come about (not sure if someone actually did theorize this back then, but even if they did, the vast majority would have no idea what they were talking about).

That being said, what possibilities are we neglecting now due to our limited knowledge? In 200 years, it may be obvious we're living in a totally different type of universe.

In my opinion, we really won't have good idea of what kind of universe we're living in for hundreds, if not thousands of years. There will be many cycles of scientific consensus overthrown in the coming centuries as we discover new layers of reality and technology.
John Gray on the fiction of fascism and what it tells us about Trump
Inpatient wake therapy has been used to treat hospitalized patients to jumpstart the antidepressant. Relapse happens soon after the treatment ends.
Only problem with chromebooks is that the default action is to wipe the system instead of booting. You have to press ctrl d to boot, which the UI does not tell you about.
> 100 gallons of gasoline also creates a ton of CO2 for context.

I thought I understood the Law of Conservation of Mass, but I guess I do not. If 100 gallons of gasoline has a mass of ~283.49 kg [0], how is a ton of carbon dioxide created from this?

[0] Maybe I'm wrong to use the first site that came up, but I used http://www.aqua-calc.com/calculate/volume-to-weight/substanc...
I wonder if it would be possible to make a deformable mirror using a combination of liquid mercury chemically bonded with a ferromagnetic metal (if mercury isn't already magnetic). Then theoretically, you could use an electric current in a coil to shape the liquid into a precise shape.
> In parliamentary systems, you might have a lot of parties in the mix, but they caucus and forms blocs. Same happens here, just upstream through primaries.

In our two party system, the lesser parties normally never get included in the legislative process. (those primaries effectively exclude them) In a parliamentary system any party that gets enough votes will get some seats.

If we adopted that sort of system you'd immediately see some greens and libertarians involved in the legislative process, and presumably you'd see an end to jokey pseudolibertarians in the Republican party, since everyone would just vote for the real thing. The "you're just throwing your vote away" disincentive would no longer exist. (based purely on how often that topic comes up in conversation during elections, I assume you'd see some big changes in the ideological makeup of the legislature)
But names like XYZ1530 are harder to recall and these are name for a class of server
What's stopping you working those hours now? I'm not a morning person so when I had jobs I would have to fight to start at some (to me) civilized hour like 10, but I don't mind working late. I had the impression that early birds had a much easier time of it since nobody is ever accused of being lazy for wanting to start work at 7am.
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We've banned this account. HN is no place for partisan battle.

Please don't create accounts to break HN's guidelines with.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13839925 and marked it off-topic.
Lets say that you're a small start up past the MVP stage. What would be the types of tasks that you would outsource to a consulting firm? Isn't it much more likely that you would try to hire full time and build a team / culture? Does consulting even work for this market segment?
Recently finished http://hackerpixels.com/ - a side project to extract all video links from HN comments (and play with Docker). It's a huge time waster - the videos are very much in sync with the community, which is a good thing.
Yep, Gobolinux.
Interesting, had never heard of that before, though I have Kerala friends.

Calendula tincture or ointment works almost like magic too, for small cuts at least. I remember the first time I used it on a small cut on my finger, I couldn't believe how fast it healed.
Further, think about:

* The length of your expected average contract (days, weeks, months)
* The revenue in that contract
* How many of those contracts you'll need to sustain the team per year
* What percentage of your prospects will sign a contract

So for example, if you need 10 contracts per year to survive, and only 20% of your prospects sign, that means you need at least 50 sales conversations per year.

Marketing is the single biggest problem I see at small consulting shops. They don't get enough leads. Sure, you might believe you can convert a lead into a sale - it's harder than you think - but how are you going to get those leads?

Without leads, you end up groveling for low rate work that you don't really want to do, just to make ends meet. Then, after a year, you've built up a low rate reputation and low rate skills. It's a downhill slide from there to giving up and taking a full time job again. Nothing wrong with full time jobs at all - they're much easier since you don't have to do marketing to find work.