skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Do not look where the market is now nor even at where your competitors are now. Now is interesting, but it's also largely irrelevant. Look instead at where the market will be when you can get your product out.

Do not accept what your customers want now as your future goal. That now will be history when you ship.

Listen with caution to your existing customers that either don't or haven't yet purchased the flagship upgrade from the leading vendor in the market. They probably won't buy your stuff in any quantity, either.

Existing customers will almost never tell you they want to buy an upgrade.

There are other potential schemes - such as parallel product release streams for 10.4 Tiger and for 10.5 Leopard - though these should be approached with caution and particularly with an eye toward the added expenses that will be incurred. These tend to be feasible in larger software products, when there are established revenue streams and customer bases and with the requisite source code management skills and tools present.
How Little Do Users Read?
A Security Kernel Based on the Lambda Calculus
> but as we all know, no progress has been made in this field since Lisp came out.

Although I totally disagree with this, I think it would be a great question for McCarthy.

Also, if I were to meet with McCarthy, I would ask him about his fascinating opus on the sustainability of human development. (Summary: A: Nuclear power will be the future B: With huge amounts of energy, humanity can do anything)

http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/progress/
Just the thought of that happening makes me want to use cloud computing for everything..
Network, network, network, network, network! (Sorry, I cannot overemphasize this.) You are your own marketing department. All the time. No, you don't have to be one of those Amway pests, but don't be afraid to say what you do and to volunteer your opinion about something computer related. You're not doing it to get business; you're doing it because that's who you are. Even if nothing happens now, it could 6 months later. You never stop networking, no matter how busy you are now.

A few examples:

- Hung out with the same guy at Tuesday night Bible study for 3 years. One day he said, "I heard you tell someone you know something about computers. My company needs software for our factory. Do you know anything about that?" Turned into 50K over the next 6 months.

- Went to an industry dinner/speaker event. The stranger next to me asked what I did. I told him. He asked if I ever did <xyz>. Before I could answer, my partner joked, "That's how we made our first million." The stranger said, "How'd you like to make your second million?" We talked all night and started work 2 days later. 20K in 2 months. All from a joke.

- A contractor friend got a great full time job. She asked me to "take over" her maintenance accounts (3 of them). Many thousands part time over the next 3 years.

- Had another friend who I met for lunch once a month for years. She always talked about her job. One day, she suddenly had to move out of state for personal reasons. I emailed her employer, telling what I did (which was exactly what they had her doing). Turned into 4 years of work.

- Met my aunt's next door neighbor while sitting on her porch. My aunt said, "Eddie's into computers." He said he had a friend who owned a pawn shop with a computer running Windows that "froze" every day at 3:00, their busiest hour. He was going nuts. (Licking my chops), I said I could look into it. A 6 month gig with all new cool software (not Windows).

- Went to a Monday Night Football party. A friend of a friend who owned a small distribution company said the bank wouldn't lend them any more money until they computerized their inventory. After 3 months of me (for $20K), they were able to borrow $300K. Pretty good deal for everyone.

- A friend was offered a 6 month gig in Detroit for $60/hour. He didn't want to move to Detroit. I took it. Got an efficiency for $400/month, drove my own car there, and dialed in to my other clients. 6 months later, moved home. Not a bad deal.

- Had another friend who owned a small software house. (Didn't know it until I knew him for over a year). He coded everything with linked lists because he didn't know anything about databases. I converted all his software to DBMS over a 6 month period. Again, everyone happy.

I could go on and on, but you kinda get the picture. And I haven't even touched on the web stuff.

The demand still far outweighs the supply for good software. If you know what you're doing (a big assumption), there's millions of people who need what you do. So get out there and talk to them!
"every year he tops out at about 60% of his time being billable"

Another general guideline is to estimate 1,000 hours of billable work (which makes it easy to calculate an hourly rate for some amount of desired annual earnings).

"Also, don't forget taxes."

Definitely don't forget the taxes, especially estimated payments. Consider that 40% of that money, once deposited, isn't yours and is untouchable, and you'll be better off.
Programming and some system administration.

I avoid using computers on the weekend.
In practice this is almost always easy to determine. For any given day, you log the hours against a client that you did something for the client. "Something" doesn't always equal coding - it could be meetings, setting stuff up, responding to e-mails, etc. For any given hour you bill, just ask yourself "If a contractor charged me for this hour of activity, would it make me - as a customer - freak out?" If the answer is yes, don't bill.

Also, I will often not bill some hours for clients that have given me a lot of work over the years.
there's a whole obsessive-compulsive website called realrates.com on exactly this subject.
Why threadjack when you could've created a separate thread? This guy made a post and you totally are trying to threadjack. Make your own"Ask YC" thread and post it there.
"Lisp was meant to be a language for AI research originally": false premise.
Please convince him to comment in Hacker News.
To provide an anecdote the other way: I do small business software and webhosting in the southeastern US, and I have often had prospective clients seem taken aback when I mention my rates, which are nowhere near the rates being bandied about in this thread. If you choose to sell your services to small businesses, be prepared to fit into a reality where the client thinks $80 an hour is a terribly high amount for a 5-10 hour job, and is prepared to just not have the work done instead. Very little is actually required for most small businesses; some of them are still considering upgrading the old machine running Win98 that's been doing invoices for 10 years, and unless it breaks, it's "good enough".
I've used both time-based and value-based and my answer is an unequivocal "It depends on the project." I'm a pretty creative person and I hate to box myself in by saying "Never do it this way", especially when some very smart people have advocated both/multiple ways. I suggest taking a risk-analysis approach towards estimating as well whereupon you figure out what the mean time to complete, best, and worst times. This can give you confidence (after you've done it awhile) in your guesstimates and that confidence allows you to move more into the value-based pricing. I definitely wouldn't suggest value-based pricing for someone who had not had loads of time-based pricing experience.
Cool. Sounds like a good idea. Also, it seems that since this client is web-based it gets past the IRC port blockage that our internal firewall is doing :) So thanks for that too.
I agree 100% with your last sentence.
honestly, i think hard AI (as propounded in various SF genres) will always be next 20 years away. a borg like future with man-machine symbiosis seems more likely i.e use machine to _augument_ human capacities, rather than supplant them.
It is nice - the only thing I would suggest is that if I'm creating a fuse of many pages on one site, all of the links on the top just have the site name and no way to distinguish. For example, this fuse : http://fuseurl.com/2w just has 'news.ycombinator.com|news.ycombinator.com' at the top - a way to manually change the titles to these links would be nice.
For example, rubygems (probably my least favorite ruby
software of all time) basically require that you always try
to load them, because their design stupidly requires that
you know whether a given piece of software is installed via
rubygems or some other mechanism.

Nearly all libraries nowadays are installed via RubyGems. For most of its life, RubyGems has been the "de facto" way to install libraries, but not the 100% officially-sanctioned route. As such, it's necessary to require RubyGems in first, then the libraries you want to load. This takes all of 10 seconds to learn.

The poster has missed the point somewhat when it comes to the use of vendor. "vendor" is used in situations where you have to remain fixed to a certain version of a certain library AND you're not 100% confident that your deployment environment will have that version of the library installed. In this way, it's a better solution than just praying the remote server has a certain library installed or ending up with a script that fails on the library version assertion, as with Perl. Overusing vendor is, however, a lazy way of doing things, and the sloppy programmers this guy has spoken to do not represent the community as a whole.

From the comments:

To me, this is one of the really big things that defines
Perl as a mature language community: Perl people don't do
this nonsense. There's no "vendor," and you're looked at
like you're out of your mind if you distribute copies of
other people's modules with yours instead of declaring
versioned dependencies in your Makefile.PL.

(Good) Ruby people don't do this nonsense either. RubyGems supports you specifying the gem name and required version (or required minimum version) in a similar, or better, way than Perl.

This is an over-rated post telling us about a problem that only exists in the ignorant. It's cut from the same cloth as all the misinformed "Twitter's Dropping Rails!" posts and I'd expect better from the voters on HN.
Could we stop already with the Google worshiping? Google's days as the break-away nerd company with more brains than bucks have been over for a while. A lot of Google's "brilliant ideas" were actually pioneered at Yahoo and then made their way over to Google (this goes for recent things too). Everybody's trying to be Google's baby, but Yahoo's not exactly been a slouch in internet innovation.
Remember that you cannot get eight billable hours out of an eight hour day.

You can (and do) if you go on-site, and you can if you actually work eight hours for a single client in any capacity.

You can't bill for doing your office paperwork, promotion, eating lunch and such, but that's not part of an 8 hour "work" day (like your commute isn't part of your work day either).
I bill at $800 a day in the Ruby space. It's not that often though, because I'd rather work on my own stuff than other people's!

From my experience, this is not on the high side, though perhaps slightly above average.
If it were public, yeah, but usually class B shares are not tradable. Their whole purpose is to keep ownership in the founding family or founding investors.
I wasn't in any way trying to claim Google is the end-all-be-all of the Internet either. Sorry if the word 'brilliant' made it seem that way. I wish people would stop assuming that anything that doesn't outright slam Google implies that whoever wrote it is a fanboy. Google has a lead, and usually to overcome a lead by an established player in a market, you need to be brilliant. If you have been around here and sipped some of the startup kool-aid you would know that. I'm not even sure what "being Google's baby" means... but I'm definitely not trying to be one.

My point was that simply merging isn't going to magically create ideas and execution (good engineers). All it creates is a distraction, while the two sets of management elbow for position and a ton of employees flee.

So maybe MicroHoo doesn't need brilliant ideas and engineers, but it needs some of each, and merging isn't going to create any of either, and will most likely scare away quite a few of the great engineers that both companies already have.
Just a joke, poking fun at people overreacting to little statements from big names.

But if you were going to bet on a tiny-revnue/big-eyeball startup, it would be wise to bet on the one started by a guy with 2 multi-billion dollar exits :)
in the immortal words of ogden-nash:

here's a good rule of thumb:

too clever is dumb

what's more interesting is that it applies to programming. quite nicely too!
Even though not publicly but still tradable, is this correct?
Just writing about whatever makes pmarca happy - but that little line at the end did make me wonder about his intentions for when/if Ning goes public?
I don't know why people are dancing around this issue. I'll name some dollar amounts for you. As a LAMP consultant, I charged $100/hr. USD take-home and worked W-2. I'm now looking to get into independent (non-W2) consulting and will be charging from $50-$100/hr. USD on a sliding scale based on the type of work and the ability of the client to pay. Not all small businesses can pony up $100/hr., but mid-to-large corporate clients certainly can. Database tuning gigs can see $250-$300+ hr., but that's a very specialized skill set. You'll need to determine the going rate for your market and start out in the middle of it. If you go to low, you sell yourself short and look cheap (which can sometimes give the illusion of poor quality). If you aim too high, you price yourself out of the market.

Good luck!
This is how recruiters do it: http://computerconsultants.yuku.com/reply/2987/t/A-fascinati...

In other words, it's more about sales skills than technical ability.
That site is garbage.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purchasing_power_parity
The post is about dual-class structures in public markets and Ning is still privately held, so I'd imagine not. VCs get preferred stock, which has more rights than common, so I don't think he's aiming at Ning's VCs.

More likely, it was investors screwing around with Netscape in the months leading up to the AOL buyout. Or possibly something with Loudcloud, though I know nothing of the history there. I remember that Netscape had been severely punished by the stock market starting in the beginning of 98, and if it hadn't it probably could've gotten a much better deal than the $4.2B it ended up with.
It depends on how you bill (hourly vs day vs project) -- but there are many things that are obviously non-billable, because they are not for any client (e.g. doing your taxes/administrative for your business, buying office supplies, and every other little thing that isn't directly tied to the end product you're providing to clients).

Another big time sink (that I didn't realize) is all the work that's involved with even setting up a contract or freelance relationship. Depending on the client, you can spend weeks waiting / working out details before the project begins. This is why longer projects are more valuable (and can be billed at a lower rate) -- since there's always some fixed overhead per project.
"without literals for the most basic data types like arrays"

You know, I assumed that would bother me a lot more than it actually does.
The Java API for RESTful Web Services - Public Review
Depending on the client, you can bill for commute (or travel) time. Make sure this is clear though before you start doing it, you don't want to create ill will.
I think there may be some conditions for private sales of class B shares, like if a member of the founding family wants out and sells their shares to current management. Not being privy to any folks who have class B shares, I wouldn't know. There's definitely not a liquid market like the public exchanges - it's like selling stock in a private company.

Edit: just thought of a public company with both class A and B shares. Berkshire Hathaway (Warren Buffett's company) has class B shares that each have 1/30 the rights of class A shares, except that they have 1/200 the voting rights. Right now, they're trading at almost exactly 1/30 the price of BRK-A, so the market doesn't seem to give much weight to the reduced voting rights. It's worth noting that BRK-B shares were created for a very different reason than the article is about: some mutual fund manager was about to setup a mutual fund that invested only in Berkshire Hathaway but let you invest in chunks of much less than the $100k share price of BRK-A, so Buffett figured that if someone was going to arbitrage the share price, he might as well be the one doing it instead of letting a money manager pocket the liquidity premium.
eat smart... when hungry
MVC as Described by its Creator
An excellent analysis. I've seen this "faith-based" project management too many times, and it just might be that identifying it as such is the first step to correcting it.
The allure of the .com domain name
Because millions of people with money use Outlook for hours every day and Outlook hasn't improved much in years.
How To Use Triggers to Track Changes in MySQL
Quote: I was able to fit very nice formulas to describe users' reading behavior for pages containing between 30 and 1,250 words. For longer pages, reading became quite erratic. Pages with a huge word count are probably not "real" pages anyway

Steve Yegge, are you reading this? :-)
If you do go too low, remember one important thing: your value increases as you get to know their system. After x months, raise your rates. You'll still be a bargain over someone new because there's no learning curve.

Rates go up for everything else, why not you too?
Good observation, wrong conclusion.

Too many words never stopped people from reading a book. Same thing applies to a web page: you quickly scan a page, but read it if it's worth it.
Sorry for the tone; there is a lot of Google fanboi-ism on HN, so my reaction was as much to the general phenomenon as your post.

I think brilliant (well, clever is usually the word I would use, brilliance is much more rare) ideas are what make 4 guys in a garage able to take on a market leader, but when you've got a merger of companies with a combined market capitalization of over $300 billion, blunt force often does the trick. This is sumo wrestling, not fencing. :-)

And in the world of blunt force, the combined forces of the most profitable company in the technology market and the most popular site on the internet could pack a pretty hefty punch. I don't think that's a particularly good strategy for MS to pursue, but I wouldn't misunderestimate them.
Olinda - modular social network aware physical radio
>He said he had a friend who owned a pawn shop with a computer

Unethical to aid a pawn shop, especially if you are a Christian. But hey, who am I to judge.

Edit: pawn shops are unethical from a Christian viewpoint, as they charge interest. And the parent said he was doing Bible study. But again, who am I to give advice on such topics as an heathen. Just downmod and show me I'm wrong.
Google Reader Is Now Feed Reader + Twitter + Del.icio.us
On object-oriented programming: "That which obscures my code is bad."
The current ranking scheme is such that just after submitting a story that it only lives a few seconds on the front page, meaning that luck plays a big part in if it ever gets its first upvote, and whether or not anyone notices it at all. And for those of us that primarily browse via the RSS feed, most stories never make it there.

Perhaps a side-bar on the front page listing the most recently submitted articles would be nice so that they at least creep into the peripheral vision of those visiting the front page.

I've started making a point to dig through the "new" page to upvote where appropriate, but I suspect most readers don't bother.
I do a lot of PHP work in Austin, TX. I charged my very first client $65/hour. I was pretty excited about that at the time (whoa, someone will pay me $65/hour!). Then I realized that this was very cheap to many businesses, and saw how much many "agencies" were charging to complete a project. I then got a couple more clients and raised this to $75, then $95, and still haven't had anyone turn me down. Most people would say that means to charge more, but I haven't done this yet...

If you can find a few good clients that pay consistently and are really cool to work with, you can make a really good living working about 20 hours/week, especially if you live in a city where the costs aren't outrageous. As said above, you need to talk to a lot of people. As edw519 said above, if you do consulting and talk to enough people, it's surprising how you feel as though you "luck out" and get some good, well paying work.
Sure, some are able to get a better ratio of billable to non billable hours than others. Dealing with fewer clients in one day helps this. The point still remains. You have to take the down time to maintain your business at some point and you have to plan for that when you are figuring out what you need to keep food on the table.
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.

I understand your general sentiment, but this is silly. I don't know why you call it pandering when they have a vested stake in a company's financial future; the shareholders are owners, too.

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.

This depends more on management compensation than stock structure. If the CEO gets a huge bonus for the stock going up in the short term, he's more likely to do shady things to boost the price.
Purely from a performance perspective, browser & ISP caches are more likely to have the .com TLD cached when compared to a .net, .org, .tv, etc. and hence needn't look it up with the root servers.

This probably results in a performance optimization of .25% to .5% when compared to the entire page being downloaded but none the less ;-)
Microsoft considering a bid on AOL
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.

Not to be obtuse, but if everyone is overworked, why don't they charge a little bit more so that there is less demand and therefore a more reasonable workload?

Is there perhaps a fixed ceiling above which no one will pay? Or do clients get angry if you keep changing your prices to meet market conditions? Or do companies in your line of work only hire consultants for projects in crisis, such that the only work available consists of high work loads over short periods of time?
Excellent piece. The idea of the expensive hobbies is actually something that I had not thought of and is certainly another very interesting vector for offering services people will pay for.
Forget that new-age, mumbo-jumbo.

Behold the Power of Interruption Marketing:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JP21sFu_hwY
Why You Shouldn’t Just Give a Quote to Potential Clients
Folklore.org classic. Beside the obvious comic value, it shows the depth of insight Jobs had even at that age.
Sorry, what? Pawn shops are unethical?
This is a really great article, if a bit long. This is something that is definitely coming to the fore in our circle. The 37signals "less is more", four day work week philosophy is becoming more and more popular, and this article lays the groundwork for the philosophy quite well.

I sincerely wonder why people don't strive to work less. When most people finally achieve a comfortable wage, the thought process is always "buy more" and never "work less." I wonder if we'll see that change in the near future. I hope so.