skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I was in technical sales till a couple of months back.
What does he consider a reasonable 'largest size' for a computer software system, and is there any limit on this?

Should one person be able to hold the overall design in their head?

Examples: Operating systems, office software, languages.
Electrical engineer - doing circuit design and firmware...

other coding projects on nights/weekends
Another question is: How do you even find consulting gigs?
Or as someone commented on Friendfeed, "I don't read Techcrunch, the ENTIRE INTERNET reads it to me."
How to Hire Insanely Great Employees
I've done consulting on the microsoft stack and I got between $50/hr and $75/hr on short term gigs. I was also considered on the cheap side by the people who hired me. I think price is greatly determined by whether you're coming from a company or you're an individual. Customers will pay a consulting firm $150-$200/hr or more because they are also buying someone to blame if the project goes wrong. An individual is not going to see that amount. My advice would be to market yourself as a consulting company, even if that is just some of your friends loosely affiliating yourselves with one another. You will get higher rates that way. Another way to higher rates is to have a business domain(s) that you can be considered knowledgeable in. Domain knowledge will separate you from the pack when someone is price shopping, and that knowledge or experience really does make you much more valuable and efficient.
Pick how much you wish to earn, and set your rate based on that. Then see if you can sell at that rate and adjust accordingly
Wow. That's a pretty large file. Might I suggest mirroring it or creating a torrent?

Good effort though. I shall download later when I'm home and have a look.
Sure, but IMHO forum posts (ASK YC:) etc, are not really links. They're forum posts - I'm not sure of the value added by lumping them in with news stories/links/articles. By doing this, the forum posts don't seem to get the attention they actually deserve.

Personally I think separating it and having a specific forum for startup topics would really improve things.
Not to sound blunt, but you can charge whatever you feel you're worth. I've never had a client blink when I told them what my hourly rate was. They do a calculation in their head, but it is not "Is this too expensive?" but it is "Do I think this guy is worth it?" Chances are if you yourself feel that you're worth that amount, they will too.

That said, DB consultants generally make a bit more because of the fragility and messiness of what they deal with. I've done some Oracle consulting at $100/hr and that, I realize now, was a very low rate.
Mechanical Engineer, but on software related tasks,

and "as usual" :) coding on nights and weekends for a web startup
This is something that I've debated a lot personally. I've thought of setting up an arrangement similar in spirit to the FreeQt agreement between KDE e.V. and Trolltech (http://www.kde.org/whatiskde/kdefreeqtfoundation.php). On the one hand, it gives customers some assurance that in the case of integrating with your product and it going belly-up that they've still got a means of using the technology; on the other it means that some of your own customers would be rooting for you to fail.
Feature requests should go here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=363
The Fox Knows Many Things, but the Hedgehog Knows One Big Thing
see also http://www.jimcollins.com/lab/hedgehog/
Sorry, you are not going to get away with it that easy. This is like going up to that hot girl you have been eyeballing and saying "I really want to go through the whole dating process because I really don't understand it, can we just skip all that and get straight to serious relationship?"

This question is nearly impossible to answer and a very personal decision. Nobody here can tell you how much you are worth. For example, am I doomed to crap rates just because I live in the Philippines? No (sorry danohuiginn!)

Figure out how much money you want to make and how many hours you want to work. Remember that you cannot get eight billable hours out of an eight hour day.

As a "consultant" you are running a business. Asking other people how much your rates should be is not a business question, that is a programmers question. You are asking like this is some sort of algorithm you can plug into your code. You need to tweak your mindset a bit.

Edit: How to get consulting work.

Build your brand and visibility. Pick a community (get a bonus for picking one frequented by paying clients) and establish yourself as an authority. Create an open source project which you can point to which shows you know what you are doing.

Network! The area in which I am has more work than there are people available yet there is likely no shortage of people who would love to break in. The reason for this paradox is that I only work with people in my network.

All the freelancers I know are overworked. Often any one of them need help and I can't help them because I am overworked as well. Get to know other developers who are freelancing and ask them if they know anyone who needs a hand.

It's all about that recognizable and trusted brand!
Nonsense. There has been plenty of progress for AI research. The explanation usually given is that once a solution to a "ai" problem has been implemented, it is no longer considered an "ai" problem. e.g voice recognition, facial recognition, compilers, chess master slayers, etc...
Make Your Next Technology Move 10x Easier
Ask YC feedback: Simply create a single URL from multiple URLs
I created Fuseurl to simplify sharing multiple URLs. Instead of posting or emailing 10 different URLs, you can just create a single URL and share it. I got the idea when I wanted to text message someone multiple URLs. The site can also be used to create a quick reference to your favorite websites.

I appreciate any feedbacks you have.
Though there may be too many stories about Yahoo, there's a simpler explanation for the average submitter who's bummed because his stuff didn't get a lot of votes: it wasn't as interesting to everyone else as it was to him.

I don't see what you mean about disappearing within seconds of submission, though. The 30th story on the new page is currently 5 hours old. That gives submissions plenty of time to get voted up.
Community: From Little Things, Big Things Grow
Understanding Model-View-Controller
My immediate response is - is there an ulterior motive for this post? Investors screwing around with Ning?
Get Rid of IE7 and Search from Address Bar - Default Search Engine Live Search
If humans can perform simple arithmetic operations, does that mean calculators are a solution to another "AI problem"? So are voice/face recognition systems (which, in fact, never gave satisfactory results so you can't even call them "solved").
While it may be okay for small companies with high-end employees to allow developers to interview, corporations should not let people interview prospective peers. Unless they are very confident in themselves, there will be a tendency to prefer poor quality co-workers, for competitive reasons.
The Gospel of Consumption
You could be more creative when displaying multiple pages.How about tabs instead of putting one under another?

Widgets and Firefox extensions spring into mind, given the concept.

Useful app nonetheless.
That's a statement that's not as true as it used to be. Objective-C 2.0 introduced garbage collection, There are many novice programmers that are now jumping to ObjC because of the iPhone SDK hoopla.
"Remember that you cannot get eight billable hours out of an eight hour day."

This is an extremely important point. When I was freelancing, I was surprised by just how much non-billable overhead time I had (at least 5-10 hours a week when working with 3 clients). To reduce overhead, work with as few clients as possible. But you'll run into dead time that way, since jobs don't start on a dime.

I know a guy who has freelanced for 5 years and kept meticulous records. He knows what he's doing, but says every year he tops out at about 60% of his time being billable. Make sure you factor that into your rate.

It's really easy to take your rate and multiply by 40, thinking that's your weekly salary. This is pretty much never the case.

Also, don't forget taxes.
I like how yesterday is was "ZOMG 15% !!!11", and today it's "only 15%". Seems like it would take a truly insane person like Jim Cramer to play the market full-time.
> I'd also love to hear what DB consultants are making as well.

I used to be consulted out at 2000 Euros per day.
Augh. Frames.
Now that's the kind of hardware problem you don't hear about every day. Yikes.
I love this quote from the story. "Apple calls these songs “iTunes Plus”, because it sounds so much better than calling everything else “iTunes Minus.”"
This is one of many examples of a company that has grown so big that they could care less about their customers and the user experience.

Who are Microsoft's customers, and why do they continue to tolerate this sort of thing? Do they just not know any better?
Building high performance websites (slides from web2.0 expo)
Mac OS 10.5.2 = Apple Vista?
Do not forget to put time in the equation. A consulting job of one month has a higher price per hour than a contract of three months. That is because a one month contract solves your money problem for one month, but then you may spend another month finding your next job.
I agree with the tabs. Would make it a lot easier to navigate. Other than that, I disagree. I can't see this being very useful IMO.
As a boring freelance Oracle consultant, I can bill 450-500 GBP/day... interesting LAMP and Web based roles seem to be around half that.
Nice simple idea. This is surely useful when you want to send several URLs to someone. For me, this is rather an edge usecase during my web-activities. So I'm not sure if this has potential to be monetized somehow.
You should consider reading some of Alan Weiss' consulting books. He really advocates project/value based fees instead of time based fees.

Million Dollar Consulting:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=...

Getting Started In Consulting:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=...

Value Based Fees:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=...

I'd recommend these three books and check out his website @ http://www.summitconsulting.com/
Depending on how long you plan to spend developing the program...

..if you're just relying on Core Animation for a few animations, you can write those yourself. And if you're not going to use Obj-C 2.0 GC for performance reasons, strike that off.

You can easily put Leopard-specific features/hacks in, too. I developed ShoveBox for Tiger, but I've had to add in some logic around how the app works with Spaces.

...but if, by the time you're done, the target audience of your app will have already gotten Leopard, it might be useful to just target it. There are a lot of useful enhancements all around the API that will save you time.
Thinking of buying yahoo? why it's not a bargain
When I played basketball in High School, we spent a lot of time talking about the NBA.
I think these stories are of interest because hopefully, some of you will be sitting there with your own deal from MS in your hands someday, or with scaling issues of your own due to the incredible popularity of your site. Hopefully, at those points the insight regarding Yahoo and Twitter will become extremely relevant.
Google holds Verizon’s feet to fire on 700MHz open access
You should also create a link to an example page, already populated with multiple urls choosen by you, just to demonstraste the service.
Ok I can't edit the old post but they are basically just reinventing mailing lists. Anyway, poling is fine if it's initiated by a user action or it's a vary limited number of systems but if you have a few million users you can't uses it per user. As to reading old log's that's a trivially parallizable problem see database replication for some hints. So you separate the active messaging that automatically adds new Tweets to a user’s cell phone from the way users read old messages with the webpage and your home free.

PS: Text is cheep EX: Slashdot is running off of ~4 computers. And bandwidth is not a scaling issue until you need a single system to handle more than ~1GB of bandwidth per second. (Saturating an OC-3 line costs a lot of money but you don't need to change your architecture to do so.)
CommunityEngine: Social network-ize your Web 2.0 Rails App!
I see that you've rediscovered trails and incorporated it into URL shortening service which uses frames to navigate through the trail. As the author of uggc.cgi ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=177441 ), I might be biased, but I like it. You may want to get a .se domain to make the URL shorter. You may want to map resource IDs to letters for easier typing on mobile telephones.
Top 10 Reasons You Suck at Twitter (don’t be a tweetard)
This list should help you out if you're stuck on how to succeed at Twitter.
Bonus points if it involves downforeveryoneorjustme.com and validator.w3.org ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=153995 ), uggc.cgi ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=177478 ) and y.soho.lt
Considering that's > $1000 per day (probably closer to $1500 -- haven't dared to check the exchange rate these days), and $500/day for a LAMP project ... hey, that's not bad.
How Not to Make a Deal
I think pg is right that the problem isn't the algorithm, but people's interests. I do share lux's dissatisfaction with what everybody else likes, though.

Here's what interests me most:

1. Things startups have actually done to improve their product or service.
2. Things startups have actually done to understand customers better.
3. Things startups have actually done to increase market share.

I respect that other people are interested in mergers, acquisitions, VC funding, dividing equity, etc. These are valid startup topics. I'm just not as interested.

I'm especially disinterested in abstract language/framework wars that aren't tied to any particular application. I never feel like I've learned anything from those discussions. I would be interested in a specific example of how language X worked well for doing Y.

If somebody would keep up with the new page and comment on every story about things startups have actually done, I would follow their comments and vote up those stories.
Bravo!! I absolutely agree with Marc, and kudos to the google guys, since they had the foresight to do this.

I don't like the idea of public companies pandering to so called shareholders. No one is putting a gun to anyone's head and asking them to buy a public company stock.

Having a dual class structure will hopefully, help structure the right incentives for people running public companies and will make sure they don't do things just to boost stock prices or do things in the short term to make their quarterly numbers.
Just curious since I haven't done freelancing yet... how do you determine what is billable vs. non-billable? If 60% of your time is billable then what constitutes the other 40%? I know part of it is looking for new work. What else?
> First dibs on Ning IPO in a couple year!

How do they make enough revenue to justify their valuation? In the current climate, you need a rock-solid revenue model to actually go public.

If Ning has that, I've managed to completely miss it.
He really advocates project/value based fees instead of time based fees.

This guy is not a software consultant. So beware, beware, beware this advice, because that little detail matters a lot.

It's easy to charge project based fees when you (a) are an expert negotiator and speaker and (b) your project is not built of either hardware or software. If the deliverable is a paper report, a Powerpoint presentation, or a new org chart, it is relatively easy to work around or gloss over any problems that arise and still deliver on time and make the client happy. You have a ton of flexibility. Unless you're drafting legal documents, editing the English or changing the color of a graphic has no wide-ranging ramifications.

If the deliverable is a working machine, you're up against the laws of nature:

For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled. -- Richard Feynman

You'll end up running three weeks late because the client makes a "trivial" reinterpretation of the spec at the last minute, and the old library won't meet the new spec, but the new version of the library will, so you upgrade, but the new version has a different API, and one of those new API calls has a bug...

[UPDATE: This link, recommended elsewhere on the page, has a succinct summary of the argument in favor of time-based fees: http://30sleeps.com/blog/2007/09/27/set-your-hourly-rate/ ]
The proper link to the KohanaPHP project is: http://kohanaphp.com. I've been using Kohana for the past few months and it is major improvement over other PHP MVC frameworks. It utilizes the OOP functionality in PHP5 to make structured PHP web development much easier and elegant. If you are looking for a new PHP framework, you should definitely consider Kohana. You could even integrate with Zend Framework classes if needed.
Do YC companies use dual-class structure? If not PG & Co, should make it the norm and set the standard.
Also, as a further point.

If you're going to the trouble of going to a site, copy-pasting all these into a form, clicking a button, then emailing that..

wouldn't you save more time, really, just emailing the list?
"they are also buying someone to blame if the project goes wrong" ^_^ sorry had to say it again...
An ex-colleague from Sao Paulo had virtual hosting in his home city. Sao Paulo is very improverished and so the hosting facility had snipers on the roof to stop the locals stealing the servers.
The goal is to generate more income and not less, so you need to set up a system that provides for that. You can abstract out the core of the project, set a fee for that and tack on hourly rates for things outside the initial scope. You have to be careful in how you do things but it should ultimately lead to more money.

If you're happy making $x/hour or whatever then by all means continue to do so. If you're looking for more, you may want to start exploring other billing models.
Actually, since mod_rails (Phusion Passenger) was released, that's a solved problem for RoR.
Much of this is obvious. Some of it could go either way though. The obvious stuff is regular business tasks such as billing, marketing, distractions (turn off that IM!) dealing with email and things like that. It all really adds up.
tc;dr
Nine Inch Nails' New Album: Free Now, Pay Later
Can't the exact same thing be asked of people who purchase DRMed music from Apple's iTunes Store? What makes Apple less evil than Microsoft?
Thanks for all your comments. Relative to how simple it was to create, I thought it worth to put it out there and see if people like it.

[edit]See how it can also be used. See the second comment: http://digg.com/travel_places/Top_Ten_Transportation_Photos
Well, we have vehicles that drive themselves across deserts, but not machines that will argue with you over whether or not Will Ferrel is the greatest comedian ever. I say that we are making progress, though not as much as some had hoped.
Another Twitter Customer Service Story
I'd say that the algorithms are key in AI, not necessarily the language. You can program neural networks, genetic algorithms, search in Blub.

The early AI programs tended to solve toy problems. No one had thought much then about the implications of the curse of dimensionality: that each entity you add to the problem (say, throw another object into your object-manipulating robot's environment) increases the problem space exponentially (or even factorially).

But you're right, there has been a ton of progress in AI. The initial bias toward ontologies, expert systems, and top-down algorithms has given way to bottom-up systems that are data-driven rather than abstraction-driven.

One major example is using neural networks, SVMs, RBFs to discover implicit features in a data set rather than depending on an expert to code up those features explicitly. Experts don't scale, but data will always be with us. Thus we've seen increasing interest in information retrieval as opposed to ontological knowledge engineering.

But a lot is going on in the field even today. I found this talk very interesting:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2469649805161172416
Christmas tree (Perl obfuscation)
Can anyone explain please, how is the dual-class structure reflected on the stock price? Class B should clearly be more expensive, even though not necessarily 10 times.
Treat your place like your home: welcome people, fix them a drink and make them feel comfortable. Before you know it, your guests will be chatting amongst themselves, the party will be pumping, and people will be making plans together.

So true...
speaking of hosting services to avoid. Techcrunch's host (or former - not sure), MediaTemple, had a really overhyped service. Stay away from their Grid-Service plan. It's slow and it's down every other week.
Well God, I'm surprised you like Yahoo more than Google. If that is the case, why have you been sitting up there in Heaven allowing Yahoo to get trounced all these years instead of performing some miracles and keeping it on top? At least it is finally clear that you dislike microsoft. I had suspected as much, what with your divine torpedoing of Vista and all, but it's always nice to hear it from the deity's mouth.

As for money, while your heavenly spirit may not bow down to it, shareholders definitely do. And obviously even you need money at times, or are all those tax-free offerings for nothing?

> I dont want a predictable world...

Aren't you omniscient? Surely you find it difficult to be surprised. You mind telling us all how this merger will play out?
most of the ground breaking inventions / theories are "discovered" rather than invented. do you feel the same way about lisp ?

another one: lisp and c are both (rightly ?) considered peaks of language design. they both are predicated on widely different underlying philosophies. one modeling the abstract nature of computation, and the other modeling the abstract nature of a machine.

now, given the current state of development, would you consider a middle ground to be most fertile for the next big language ?
EBay v. Craigslist: a tale of secret meetings, "obsessions"
Prototype Framework Tutorial
> A MicroHoo has better long term prospects of competing with Google

To compete with Google they need brilliant engineers and ideas. Merging isn't going to magically produce those. About the only advantage Microsoft offers Yahoo in this is access to their desktop and a huge pile of cash that allows Yahoo to chase crazy strategies with slim chances of huge payoff, assuming Yahoo has some ideas like that. Yahoo offers Microsoft eyeballs.
This is an ongoing issue ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=172701 ) and I've had to hide the file on the borrowed server due to excessive use of bandwidth during business hours. Downloads can resume after 7PM BST. Regardless, some people have obtained the archive in full so mirrors may become available before 7PM.