skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I am asking for a rough ball-park. I'm looking for a range that people are making from "Oh, my God, they got screwed and will be eating ramen for months." to "I can't she had the balls to ask for that rate." [...] If this is a taboo subject.... my bad.

It's not taboo, it's a great question. Several answers already posted are excellent, but I'll add another. In the market I work in, for independent contractors:

"Oh, my God, they got screwed" => anything less than $40/hr

"I can't [believe?] she had the balls to ask for that rate." => $150/hr or higher

Of course it depends, blah blah blah, but you did say ballpark.

For deciding what you should ask, Jerry Weinberg has a great piece of advice: set your rate so that you're happy either way. That is, not so low that you're unhappy if they say yes, and not so high that you're unhappy if they say no.

Now that I think of it, get Weinberg's Secrets of Consulting and read it. It may save you all kinds of trouble. In case you don't know him, Weinberg was part of the very first generation of programmers, and later became known for his work on human factors on software projects. A lot of his stuff is good, but Secrets of Consulting is a must-read, I think, for any hacker who wants to do consulting work to pay the bills.

Good luck!
Huh. I think I stand corrected.
I agree. I'm not suggesting splitting a method that exceeds an arbitrary number of lines. Instead, I'm asking about the cyclomatic complexity (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclomatic_complexity)

My point being that while the original article was quite ridiculously reductionist, it should be possible to have some concrete metrics that serve as good guidelines (and which naturally could be superceded by programmer judgment on occasion.)
Dual-licensing: revoking the GPL
Trevor: I hope it has hit it's peak.
This is one of those situations where a few paragraphs on methodology would make the graphic a whole lot more valuable.
Didn't Riya(now like.com) try something along these lines when they started out? The other I believe is NevenVision which google bought.
I messed with something neat about 2 1/2 years ago for Flickr. I saw it surface again recently:

http://labs.systemone.at/retrievr/
"LISP has a partially justified reputation of being more based on theory than most computer languages, presumably stemming from its functional form, its use of lambda notation and basing the interpreter on a universal function."

- John McCarthy, LISP - notes on its past and future (Page 1)

Conference on LISP and Functional Programming archive
Proceedings of the 1980 ACM conference on LISP and functional programming table of contents
Stanford University, California, United States
Pages: .5 - viii
Year of Publication: 1980

http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=802782&dl=ACM&...
This is exactly why I have urged people to learn Matlab (on this forum and others). Specifically, I'm sick of seeing hundreds of lines of code written in Java that are essentially a poor (slow) implementation of a one liner in Matlab that uses a 20 year old fortran library. I have to go back all of 8 days to find the following quote in response to my plea:

"...and I question the usefulness of learning MATLAB unless you actually need it."

The problem is, most people don't realize they need it and just plod along writing hundreds of lines of python, perl, ruby, java, etc. implementing a decade old numerical computation.
Why You Must Be In Silicon Valley
You should definitely put those files to use in the contest :-)
Nice poster. Where's yc?
Peter Cooper (like, RubyInside Peter Cooper?) only costs $100 an hour?

Noted.
There are technical AI classes here that are required for a CS major. This one is an elective called "Can Machines Think? Can Machines Feel?". We read famous AI papers (including McCarthy's "Ascribing Mental Qualities to Machines") and talk about what's possible and what's not.
Considering the amount of growth they are seeing, and the scaling issues they are dealing with, I think this is pretty darn impressive.
On some levels, I'd like to knock a day off the work week and live like its 1948, but then again, when I'm headed in for laparoscopic surgery, I'm really glad all of those people put in the extra hours instead of "playing ping-pong for hours on end."

Humanity in the 21st century is a little like a startup. We have huge problems to solve and the outcome is tenuous at best. So we work our asses off. Some of it is on stupid stuff but some not. We're learning the difference. When we "get over the hump", get ourselves into space, get some of the big killers cured in medicine, and work out how lo live in peace with abundance for all of the people on earth, then maybe we'll have earned a break.
When you write a lot of matlab it becomes a different way of thinking. Instead of the for loops multiple levels deep you can write it all as operations to multi-dimensional matrices.

I would agree that many problems people spend time on can be found as single commands in matlab.
I do. If you want to make your name, write or do something great. Broadcasting your own name suggests that there isn't enough substance to speak for itself. This strategy only works (if it does) until people realize you're doing it, at which point they lose respect for you. That doesn't seem like subtle or effective marketing to me.
Ask YC: Why should I care about Twitter?
Are many of our news.YC users also Twitter users? What do you find that you like about Twitter?
Basque and Briton are minoritary too. (BTW, it's very funny that Basque is listed without a heading, but it's very true. It's related to nothing else, and nobody knows where it comes from.)

It seems that where more than one language share one territory, the area is colored with the language that is more 'traditional' or specific to it, even if other ('invading') languages have demographic majority nowadays.

With that criteria, they could have expanded the area for Franco-Provençal quite a bit. Also, I think Astur-Leonese would deserve its own color rather than being incorporated into the Castillian group.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astur-Leonese_language

And just to nitpick, since the map notices small pockets in some zones:

- there are pockets of speakers of Galizan-Portuguese languages in Extremadura,

- there is this small region that Spain conquered in 1801 from Portugal, which still speaks Portuguese:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olivenza

- and there is a small pocket of speakers of the Catalan family of languages in Corsica.

A more officialist take on the current situation is:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_languages

This is more realistic in assessing majorities and more politically orthodox, but not any more correct IMO. Ignoring minoritary languages altogether is no less of a lie than presenting them as if they were predominant. The map sticks to political frontiers rather than language areas. Also, I don't know why it doesn't recognize Asturianu, a language co-official with Castillian, while it does recognize Basque, which is minoritary and co-official too.

In that map we see that the Building Nation efforts in France and Great Britain have been more 'successful' than in Spain. So, while it's common in colloquial settings to use the name "Spanish" to refer to Castillian (even the academy of the language calls it "Lengua Española"), it's an aberration in a technical document. It would make more sense to call English Unitedkingdomish.
"Replying, "you wouldn't know; you're an imperative programmer" is moot"

That's obviously not what I said. My reply was, "If you believe all of the features listed above are useless in a real world development situation, I'm not capable of convincing you otherwise, as we're going to be speaking very different languages". I think there is a difference, though I can see how it comes off as arrogant. It wasn't really intended that way--I'm not a great programmer, and never claimed to be. But I know what makes me (as an adventurous, but not necessarily brilliant, hacker) more productive is good tools. And first class functions, closures, and a great set of libraries (like that found in Perl, Python, and to a lesser degree Ruby), are the tools save me lots of time. When I develop in PHP, and I do so pretty frequently, I miss all of those features constantly and my code is longer, less readable, and harder to maintain.

My point was if you haven't worked with a language that has those features you wouldn't be aware of how much time, and how many lines of code, they can save you. I'm not a smug lisp weenie pushing the blub paradigm (though there is definitely something to the argument) or implying that imperative developers are the scum of the earth. I'm a pragmatic sort of fellow...if it works, use it. But if something works better, why not use it instead?

That said, one of the places where PHP is a perfectly valid language is web applications. Some of the largest applications in the world run on PHP--Facebook, many Yahoo sites, etc. But they also have lots of languages doing the non-frontend work, because PHP is really horrible at a lot of backend tasks. Data and systems management, for example, where Perl and Python, or Java (depending on scale and performance requirements and existence of libraries), would be a better choice.
Windows XP Service Pack 3 Released
as we all know, no progress has been made in [AI research] since Lisp came out

You may have some unorthodox views on what "AI research" constitutes or how much progress had been made, but prefixing your comment with "as we all know..." is obnoxious. The consensus view is certainly not that no progress at all in AI has been made since 1958.
Why Apple is more expensive than Amazon
I have watched in both amusement and horror at what's developed below my post from earlier today. Didn't know where else to put this observation, so I thought I'd hang it here if you don't mind, astine.

As one who takes something away from this board every day, I was excited to contribute something from personal experience. Interestingly, this was also the #1 question posed to me over Startup School weekend.

I included these examples (my aunt's front porch, the dinner, and yes, Bible study) to show that business can come from anywhere, anyplace, and at any time, even when you least expect it. As I entered these examples, I wondered what, if any, discussion would ensue. Little did I know...

So today I got 2 big surprises, this thread and a little number deep inside a nested iteration that's been spewing bad data for 2 1/2 years now. What a day.

[Hate to disappoint, but the most interesting thing about the pawn shop project was converting their old data without knowledge of the original author's 25 year old compression algorithm. A subject for another day, I suppose...]
In theory, the ISPs could block anything. In practice, very doubtful. So no.
I've done lots of Matlab development, and this is too true.

Python is going to replace Matlab, but the pattern in the same.

People aren't really used to thinking about matrices and vectors as primitive types and operations.

By the way, this is an excellent resource for learning Matlab.
http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/course/16-720/handouts.html

Look at the "working with images" section. If you manually touch every pixel in an image, you're doing something wrong. You code will be 5X as long, and 100X as slow.
Care to show anything that we use in everyday life and that evolved from the AI science as a result of its 50-year existence? Ok, except CAPTCHA maybe (just kidding).
amrithk, what type of website are you thinking of building ? Your question gives me as little clue as, "what language should I use to write software???
Yes, I know people that never negotiate their price, and it seems to work for them. But if I get a job that lasts for 3 months I am willing to cut on my price, since it means that I have to spend less time getting new gigs. And at an hourly rate of $100 it will still make me $16.000 a month which I think is pretty decent.
its a non-intrusive way of sharing statuses.
Unless, of course, he only works for 30 minutes a day.
nit: "couldn't care less". Saying "could care less" implies that you, well, could care less.

As to your point, no, they don't know any better.
Laptops and Lab Manuals
It seems ISPs could inject ads or replace ads in webpages (ie google ads) which could threaten income of many sites out there.
I liked the graphic as well, It reminded me of how suds and bubbles that are smashed together look in cross-section. (I enjoyed the tie-in to the economic 'bubble' in that regard)
Cray Supercomputers going to use Intel chips?
It's a nice feature but I doubt it'll get used much. For sharing to happen you need to first create a space where people enjoy hanging out with their friends, and that's not really what Google Reader is.
It is not subtle.
Then you've broken your self-imposed limit of a cyclomatic complexity of 15.
Ugric and turkic languages in the part of Russia, that is shown, are minorities as well. At best, part of locals are bilingua.
The status updates are sent to your phone/mobile device, though. Here you are, reading news.YC, and buzz... Stephanie doesn't like what she just had for lunch. That's not a little bit intrusive?
Whenever I hear strong opinions about coding styles I politely nod, agree and then launch into a series of questions designed to understand the background of whoever is articulating the opinion.

Yes, coding style is shaped by personal preferences (where do YOU put your curly braces?), cultural affiliation (Microsofties and Hungarian notation) and a variety of other minor factors. However these are secondary to the main issue of how programmers build an underlying structure of the code. Structure is somewhat of an elusive concept, but use of object oriented programming (proper use) certainly leads to structural changes in the code. Along the same lines, use of recursion leads to a different structure than use of procedural style and so on. In short, structure for me is the underlying mathematical solution to the problem addressed by the code, regardless of the specific programming language.

So going back to the issue of the coding style, I find that the background of the programmer is so important because it shapes their thinking about typical code structures. Someone with a background of writing payroll or other corporate financial systems (like many Thoughtworkers) falls naturally into a habit of thinking about code as a close approximation, if not a one-to-one representation of real worlds objects. Others with a systems background, who excel at using Nth order pointers to save 5Kb of RAM in a device driver care less about the real worlds objects than about differences in x86 parallel processing instruction semantics.

However, if you put a systems dev guy and a corporate dev guy in a room together and make them talk to each other about programming they'll happily argue for days about how the corporate dev guy is a loser for not saving memory through pointer arithmetic and the systems guy is an idiot for not "getting it" about object oriented programming.

So, to make the long story short, conversations about how <insert programming paradigm here> rocks/sucks are pretty much useless unless one first understands the target audience for the paradigm.
wat the buck?
Wow. Just...Wow. Man, that's really funny, you made my afternoon, thank you.
This is a familiar story, regardless of technology.

The more you work, the less you appear to have.

The efficiency paradox.
You are El Gringo,

Regarding the message in your edit, thanks for your post--this is (mostly) a helpful discussion. Just search for the dollar signs (norcalgrrl had a good response, as did a few others).

And good luck with your freelance career!
Short version : "Price fixing is how."
Windows XP SP3 released
"Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away."
-Antoine de Saint Exupéry
Carry Small, Game Large: Big Shared Screen Multiplayer Gaming
An interesting take on aggregation
Bulletin board material.
With respect to Eastern Europe the map is complete BS. If they are claiming that East Ukraine speaks Ukrainian, they should mark Northern Ireland as speaking Irish.
The article seems to have two messages: one that it's better to fully comprehend the problem before you start coding; the other that learning a powerful library will save you pages of code. Both well rehearsed truths of computer programming.

As for myself I often find that I have to fully explore the problem on my own terms before I can maturely optimize my source.
My 6 year old neighbor keeps getting in trouble for asking questions in school. His dad asked the teacher, "aren't you supposed to ask questions?" The teacher's response: "I don't like being questioned."
Ummm...Do you use twitter? That is wrong. If you want updates on your phone then you can turn them on. If you don't then it is trivially easy to turn off all phone updates or set it up so that you only get updates on your phone during certain hours. That doesn't sound intrusive to me.
Not so much a distribution problem, but a platform problem - I cannot get Ruby to compile on an Itanium HP-UX box - even the HPUX ports site says it won't work :-(

If anyone has got it to work please let me know!
I personally don't think you should. I myself find 'social networking' to be a large waste of time.

people like to play silly games, and change things like mood, or the music they are playing.

the social notice I want? was the phone call I got a 7am a few weeks ago a friend telling me her fiance and my former room-mate had died.

or how about a text saying, "wanna meet for lunch?"

I haven't used twitter, but the whole social thing seems a waste of time. I have better things to be doing, like building a business, or school, or finding a job to help me pay the bills in the mean time.
Nice idea for a poster, but I think it might be a little out of date. Where's Google?
I think the deeper idea to take away from this is that knowing more theory is always a good thing
SMS updates to your phone is optional besides as I once "tweeted" - "brevity is the soul of tWITter"
I've never seen anything like this. Usually when we hire people we have more work than people; new hires never jeopardize old timers. Also working with smart people is a lot more fun and when they leave you get a smart friend who may already work in a better place.
I have it posted at my desk in a nameplate frame. I try to adhere to it. I often fail.
Nice and simple. Open All is nice (except that (tabs) doesn't work.) Good support for back/forward.

Take a look at Trailfire ( http://www.trailfire.com ). They do some interesting stuff with the same idea, but allow comments in places and stuff.
The comments here on Matlab have me intrigued. I'm ignorant and have a few newb questions. How does it compare to the APL family of vector languages (J/K/Q)? How does it compare to Mathematica? What roughly are the licensing terms for commercial use (i.e. if you want to build a product with it)?
but not by Apple
Yup. This reminds me of when Microsoft decided to copy Apple's "Designed by Apple in California" packaging label with an uglier kitschy copy: "Hello from Seattle". http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/10/05.html This unknown name broadcasting is the equivalent of having to wear off-brand clothing labels. When I was a kid and wanted Nike stuff but my parents could only afford some store brand, I'd rather not have had the label than the dumb Nike-wannabe logo that was on the shirt. Putting the off-brand label just made everything cheesy even if the shirt itself was of similar quality to the real deal.
if most peoples work actually focused on those issues, I would totally agree, but most people work on ways to "keep consumers dissatisfied" by inventing/producing/marketing all kinds of useless stuff for people to want. This has created a massive problem, the cost of having every choice under the sun is straining our planet and we are consuming our way to disaster.

Maybe if we slowed down a bit, worked a bit less, bought less, and used less, we would enjoy more and not kill our planet as quickly. Its all a bit idealistic but i can see no reason why it would not work.
Twitter has an extremely low barrier of entry and it's so off-the-cuff that it's a great place to non-blog without cluttering your blog with stuff that's less topically relevant or more random. I find that valuable, though I could live without.

It's not terribly "social" for me yet as only one friend also has an account. People have remarked before that if you live in the valley or work in certain types of companies or communities then you'll get more activity (and, potentially, more disturbance as well).
The best description I've read of Twitter..

"ShoeMoney: Sure you follow people you care what they say and then are alerted when they say something. Its a great cross between a instant messenger and a blog."
Not bad, Opera is a nice browser and this thing is way overdue, but it's good.

Safari users can enter the following in Terminal (and restarting Safari) to enable the Web Inspector and other stuff available in Safari:

defaults write com.apple.Safari IncludeDebugMenu 1

It's a good tool. Definitely comparable to Firebug.
OK, I misunderstood.

Presenting a lower price is not the same as presenting your customary price and then reducing it after a negotiation.
i've been using twitter for a while now. I mainly use it to quickly mine my friends for information, 'anyone know a good designer for cheap?', 'having problems invoking a ruby method from a cron job', 'in LA, need good tacos, and fast'.
I just don't get twitter. I saw some idiot who wrote an article using twitter. So of course each paragraph was 140 characters or less.

Just because you can use a tool to do something, doesn't mean you should.

IMHO, IM/IRC/email/blog all work far better for communication.
I'd comment on your argument, but I can't hear it over Bach's composition and Gould's performance. +1 for that. Thank you.
I've found Twitter to be a great aid to me w/ networking. For the most part, I add people I try to add people I meet at business networking events. I've gotten to know several people in the Seattle startup scene by going to real networking events and then continuing to follow up and build the relationships through Twitter.

Speaking of lunch, I've used it for that as well. Once your friends start using Twitter enough, it's easy to shoot them a message and ask if they want to grab lunch especially if they're in the same area.
Jangl, VoIP company, may soon be sold
Comcast Abandons P2P Bill of Rights
For the first few "lessons" I thought he was making an analogy to computers, with the students as individual bits.

Great, we're trained to be automatons.
in terms of interface, it has more in common with mathematica (both good and bad) than do the APL style languages, basically the language semantics are C style with dynamic shape checking for array operations and a nice syntax for many different linear algebraic operations.

It'd be nice if there was a nice type system to aid in getting comfortable with matlab's semantics, in my opinion
Twitter is well suited to certain kinds of lifestyles, and pretty much useless for others. I don't use it because none of my friends use it, and I find it more cumbersome and limiting than other services, but if you run with a crowd with which it's reached a critical mass it can be a useful tool for quick-hit communication.
And you would monetize that how?
We're using twitter as a microblog for the latest info about priceadvance (http://twitter.com/priceadvance). The twitter widget is sitting on priceadvance.com. Easy way to keep users up to date without installing wp or something custom.
Not personally a huge fan of the Public School system. Whether they are intentionally meant to turn students into sheep is one question I don't have the answer to, but I don't think that a centralized system can ever work to create an independent and informed citizenry.

Personally, I've always taken issue with the approach that the government should be directly responsible for the formation of its citizens rather than the reverse.