skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've spent a good deal of time over the last year hunting for good VAs. Here's what I've learned.

1. Hire three of four to start. Give each of them a chunk of the same job (if it's research) and see who does best. Then use that person to either finish the project, or give them a couple of new tasks and see how they do on those.

2. Don't go for the cheapest out there. Earlier today I was hiring someone for a research position and I literally had multiple people bidding $0.50/hr. You don't want them.

I usually try to stick with people in the $4.00-$8.00 range. I can't really afford more than that, and anyone I have ever hired for less than $4.00 has not worked out at all.

3. ODesk has a lot of people to choose from. There are quite a few outsourcing services out there, and I have used a few to find people with different skill sets. IMO for simple VA tasks odesk is a great place to find people.

4. Individuals are better than firms. Obviously there are benefits to both, but I have tried two Indian firms in the last year and both were a complete waste of time. Basically there were so many people in the chain between me and the people doing the actual tasks that what I asked for and what I got were quite different things. I have had three different filpinos work for me, and have been really pleased by the results I've gotten.
I'm surprised they didn't jump all over the 'fag' anything like brits are brit-fags, rookies are newfags etc.
I bought a companies old software
I'm not sure where to bring this up so I turn to the wisdom of of the Y. Recently I purchased a medium sized businesses old software licenses along with a lot of hardware and it turns out I purchased in the bundle original discs and paperwork for Microsoft products and a number of VLK's for various software. XP Pro / office / visio as well as licenses for other non-MS software. I was after some adobe products and other engineering softwares but these came in a bundle that were WELL worth the costs. My question is: what's the legality of reselling these to another company or individuals? Microsoft's licensing site is more confusing to me than anything.
When did sendmail become "not difficult"? I thought it was one of the largest and hardest to configure daemons out there.
We're in agreement actually. I was actually talking about specific and real cases that happen here in the US. Whereas in many Western European countries one doesn't have to worry about being handed some insanely high medical bill when a health emergency occurs. Their systems work more like how traditional insurance should. You pay more when things are going along normally, but when the shit hits the fan health-wise, you are neither denied medical care or handed a bill so high it wipes you out or have to spend the rest of your life paying. You get the care your body needs and don't have to worry about becoming financially devastated.
Just fixing this problem myself at the moment. Currently living with parents working on a new version of my main startup. Bartered a work exchange with a designer for a new design for the site so I can purely work on the code. Last week picked up a side contact for 5 days every 2 weeks for a minimum of 10 weeks and got another possible contract after they have finish their funding run.

So will probably be back working full time with contract combo and will just hire out simple bits of code / skip sleep for my start up
Something not mentioned here is that you also get an idea of someone's "cultural fit" by looking at their code. I think code can provide an insight into personality, especially into work related character traits.
Ask HN: Review my "Teach Myself Programming" project, Getset (Please be gentle)
Hi HN community,

www.getsetapp.com

Getset helps you find the cheapest method of travel, whether by air, bus, or driving, to get to your destination. I got the idea from the frustration I experienced going to different sites and manually calculating and comparing the costs of travel (should I drive there, or take the bus? Train or plane?). I'd like to one day turn it into a monetizeable venture, but it's mainly meant as a learning tool to help me obtain the skills necessary to build my own start up in the near future.

I've been teaching myself how to program via this project for the past 7 months or so part-time. It's a rails app (no surprise there), and I would greatly appreciate your feedback (technical, marketing, monetization, and features).

I know that there are a number of issues with it in its current state, but I hope that it provides some value to you. As this is the first thing I've actually built, please be gentle with the feedback! :-)

Thanks a bunch!
Jugaad: Questions for Santosh Ostwal [irrigation and automation in India]
Interesting name change from Getupandmove
Switching support software isn't gratis, 30 days free trial may make people look at it half-heartedly, but not really try to integrate it.
Did you give them money? Those people probably haven't forgotten. The problem is that they are on the hook for something that's effectively impossible, with limited options for getting out of the situation.
This isn't a normal Android user's experience. I have had to reboot my Nexus One a few times when it seemed to be behaving strangely (laggy, screwed up multitouch) - but I'm talking about 3 times in three months.
Quitting is not an option and even ridiculous to me. I dunno if its the founder optimism at work but I am sure this is gonna play out great after launch. We are just 6 months into the startup and have yet to release our v1.0 with the iphone / android app. (ETA 2 months). Its tough but not impossible.
Meanwhile, the Appleseed Project has been posting regular updates all summer. Their roadmap, SVN, and documentation is available to everyone, and they've been building the software since 2004.

http://opensource.appleseedproject.org
Yes, we are transitioning to that just to extend the runway. Our 1st step to building that safety net is spiffing up the company website and taking in Facebook and Twitter application contract work + white labeling the product we are building.
15 minutes that would be better spent writing code? :)
Dude, drop the puppy. :)
They could've gone into a similar (or probably more lucrative) deal as Novell did when Microsoft gave them $350 Million dollar "patent cooperation" and Suse license over a few years.

Red Hat turned it down outright. Think of how much that would've benefitted Red Hat. That was well more than half of their revenue at the time. They stuck to their principles at the expense of that type of massive profit. It paid off.
I am. I usually pull about 150 - 175 a year contracting and now I am making 0 because I am working on my startup. Money starts to disappear fast when none is coming in.
Clickable: http://www.getsetapp.com
C'mon, while they have a very good idea in theory, I don't think it could work. The general public is not quite ready. It's too technical to host your own node and there won't be a critical mass who can figure out how.
Did they promise to blog? Sounds like they didn't expect to:

http://www.joindiaspora.com/2010/05/31/a-little-more-than-24...

"You may not hear too much from us in the coming months and we will try our best to provide regular updates, but our silence means we are hard at work."

It's not like they had daily updates for weeks and then stopped. Since starting they've had one post. It appears intentional.
Yeah. Contract work sucks. it takes much effort away from your primary goal. But you know what? I think that contract work is usually less distracting than debit.

Debit, I think, has a ongoing negative effect... you are committed to paying $x a month, even after you've spent the original loan on your initial bad idea. Now you've gotta come up with operating cash for the business, for yourself, /and/ the cash to make a payment.

I see debit as more of a "you have this one shot... if you fail, bankruptcy" kind of thing. Which can be okay for some things... but it's not how I work. See, usually I end up doing the wrong thing first. After that, I have a better idea of what the right thing is... but if I took out a loan and spent it on the wrong thing? now I'm stuck with a pretty big debit payment. Only spending the cash I can get my hands on through the fruits of my own labour puts an upper bound on how much money I can spend on bad ideas.

Now, for me, I ended up just spending a while contracting and paying off the debit that way... if I hadn't been an idiot to start with, I'd be a year ahead now.
A well-worded and thoughtful blog post takes time and effort. It also interrupts other development work, which the context switching makes doubly costly. So I don't think it's a "15 minutes over lunch" affair exactly.
I think that's completely the wrong offer. As you just said, they have way too much money.

What they need is some solid UI people to come take a look, and a few backend people wouldn't hurt either. They probably have something right now, they're just terrified of launching. What they need is a safe group to beta-test with who can help clean up some of the rough edges.
BTW, Diaspora isn't a company and nobody invested in it. Donating to an open source project != early-stage investing.

In Diaspora's case, I suspect many of the donors have low expectations and are not monitoring the project carefully, because it doesn't make sense to spend much time following up on a $20 donation.
I'm reading this thread from top to bottom and it looks like both sides are talking past each other.

His point: His plugin is a wrapper that provides a basic framework for handling authentication. He's not implementing his own cryptography. He happens to use an SHA256 construction as part of it because that's what he's seen as one of the standard ways of handling passwords.

Your point: Don't use salted SHA256 for passwords. Use bcrypt.

I think this whole conversation could have been snipped off if you had started with "change auto_hash to use bcrypt instead of SHA256 since it's more secure".
I kinda feel bad for these guys. People need to stufu and relax. Like, go troll github for a project to contribute to and just leave people alone till they have something to say. Especially you, mattwdelong.
We tested this with http://www.reedge.com for a client that integrated the facebook login on the checkout page of a Magento shop. I remember that Around 8% more finished the checkout compared to when we did not show the facebook login option.

The problem was we did not test the actual login, just having the option. The client did not give us details on revenue/turnover or hoe many people actually used login of facebook.

It was a health product on the US market.
I am broke.

Sep 1 will be the 1 year anniversary of my decision to go out on my own. In the last 10 weeks I have missed rent payments, missed insurance and had it cancelled, sweated 2 dollar bus rides, not eaten sometimes because I didn't want to spend money on food.

At times, I have regretted my decision to leave a comfortable life, doubted, cried, bargained, been depressed and thought things the former me could have never imagined me thinking.

I've learned a lot, but not enough, and while part of me is deeply worried, the bright spots are really bright and I am hopeful that I'll emerge stronger. I've separated some real friends from fake friends, learned where I'm strong and where I'm weak, realized how amazing my girlfriend is, and grown up a lot.

I'm still depressed and unconvinced I'll be net better off. And this might sound awful, but part of me is glad when I see that other people have pains and doubts, because it makes me imagine that I'm not alone in the struggle, that the lack of immediate success doesn't mean I'm incompetent.
dude, i tweeted you three times. you should really check that stuff since you can't be DMed unless you follow back.

you should be hearing from someone soonish.
You've bought a huge can of worms. If you are planning to do some substantial volumes of upgrades, then you will need to read the paperwork very carefully and then use that knowledge to negotiate very hard. I've been involved in several such situations and in every case the responsible account executives would come up with wildly inconsistent interpretations and numerous retractions.

Unless you represent a substantial value deal and are prepared to dump M$ for open source alternatives, you are not likely to have much joy. Sometimes dealing with systems integrators (resellers) is more lucrative.
I am doing this right now. After 1.5 years of shuttling back and forth between two town every week, I'm now, "running a 1 man mental ward in my apartment as head shrink, head nurse, chief bottle washer, and patient."
I suggest,make logo smaller, add video above the fold. Explain in images what you so, since you make me read a lot.
My girlfriend found an american VA for $6/h, she was a retired woman with great experience in the tax sector (my gf was looking for help with her tax accounting business). I'm sure for that kind of task you could even find high school students looking for some works. For $5/h much better search on Twitter than flipping burgers...
A few Fridays a month I feel like blasting the following message to a few people. I think the Diaspora guys would love to FWD it to anybody inquiring about their lack of blog posts:

"Guys,

Our meeting on Friday at 4PM still stands. I will submit the deliverables by then and you will have 5 business days to evaluate my work. In the meantime, it would be super-nice if I didn't have to make daily statements, as the conference calls and meetings are taking up a lot of my energy and time. My work is documented, to the extent that any competent developer can dive-in and understand the gist of it immediately. At the moment, I am unable to communicate our progress to several people, at several different levels of technical sophistication, at the same time. So I would really appreciate it if you let me get this done, at once, and we talk about it afterwards.

Regards

- mahmud"
Patent search app, like a little lawyer in your pocket
"I think contracts between corporations and government that have the result of reducing competition in the marketplace should be legislated against."

Or just not legislated into existence in the first place, would have been a good start. But now we need more legislation to undo the damage of the monopoly granting legislation.

So it's not so simple as blaming it on just government or just corporations. It is the collusion of large corporations and government eliminating competition that is the real problem.
The comments about phone exclusivity have nothing whatsoever to do with wireless net neutrality, but they do illustrate how everyone seems to want the wireless data and voice providers to turn themselves into valueless, interchangeable commodities fighting on margins much like major airlines. You really can't blame them for not wanting to play that game. Time and again other industries have shown that they will all lose. The exclusive phones and two year contracts are what's keeping their industry at a reasonable profit margin.

If I were running Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, etc, I probably would be pro net neutrality, as a lot of the consumers of wireless data will care about it and it will be a valuable feature, but I wouldn't be in a hurry to compete only on price and coverage either. If the people writing about this topic could only see past their loathing of the providers to be fair about it, and exclude off-topic rants about the providers trying to actually make a profit, they might further the discussion a lot better.
A minor point: that decision on meta.mathoverflow.net barely involved the moderators at all. One said what he was inclined to do, but otherwise it was the MO community.
Discovering Hats, a New Generation Brims With Anxiety Over Etiquette
The worst thing about this security flaw is that cars don't really have a good update system for their OS. You have to take your car in to a dealership to get the ECU software updated.

If cars were designed so you could plug in an Ethernet cable to update the firmware, then patches for security flaws like this would be easier to distribute. With cars becoming more and more computerized we might reach that point some day.
Outsourcing isn't too hard. Just remember that you are still hiring someone, so you should take the time to actually interview a number of candidates and find a good fit. I recommend oDesk, but have had decent experiences with eLance as well. Many offers on these sites will come from outsourcing companies in India, the Philippines, and China. I'm sure that some of these companies do good work, and they do offer the advantage of having people in-house with many skill sets; however, I try to hire people who are independent consultants because I prefer to develop a personal relationship with the contractor.

I recommend interviewing over AIM or Google Chat and having candidates answer some questions or send you written work to help evaluate how well they know English. For example, I interviewed 8-10 people before I found my current assistant. I had them each write an example document, and I also told each of them what kind of affiliate links are appropriate for Freebie Finder (one of my websites - http://absurdlycool.com), then had them each pick the best affiliate link from an example set of links. This tested their comprehension and ability to learn from example, and I found it to be a revealing metric. I narrowed my candidates down from about 10 to a couple of candidates then chose my current assistant, who lives in the Philippines and speaks English very well. She has done excellent work and I gave her a raise at Christmas from about $3 to $4 per hour (25% raise over her bid hourly rate), and I am going to be giving her another raise soon. I've had outsourcers disappear on me more than once in the past, so I try hard to treat them well and to have backup plans. For the current assistant, I took the time to write detailed and reusable google docs about her responsibilities, so that the next training should hopefully be easier. But so far she's been great! (I am conflicted about globalization and outsourcing, but I think that if I pay more than someone bids, and treat them well, I can't really be causing harm.)

A few other thoughts:

* You usually get what you pay for, but I've gotten good assistant work for $4 an hour and a pretty solid web design for $75 total. It can be hit or miss, but once you form relationships they can be very valuable. You can probably get good copy editing and preliminary research for $7-$10 an hour. For more skilled labor, you will likely need to pay more, or do a more extensive interview search.

* Be clear about what you need and spend the time to train contractors.

* Get them to recite back to you what they will do in order to check their understanding. It can be hard to get people to admit that they don't understand you, so tease it out, at least until you get to know them.

You should post a couple of job positions on odesk and interview and give it a try! Let us know how it goes!
Part of the reason why the iPhone is usually a June release and the iPod Touch (and its music-focused siblings) are September releases is probably just necessity in terms of supply chain management. Launching the iPad in April was very likely a choice to keep release schedules in Apple's mobile unit optimally spaced; we'll likely see an April-June-September schedule for a number of years to come.
I can understand Fermat's Last Theorem but I don't understand its proof.
"Defaulting" to dismissal isn't a default, it's a decision. They could just say, hmm, interesting.
Well, I was thinking of offering them actual beer instead of money, but I don't want to be accused of enabling anything. When you're trying to stave off depression, handing out depressants does not help, even if they are really tasty depressants.

That said, if they don't want the money I'll bake a cake instead.

Your serious advice is, of course, perfectly fine, if serious advice is what the project actually needs. If, however, what the project needs is fewer expectations and more whimsy, I offer my services. I am a very poor substitute for _why, but open source projects must make do with what they can get.
Can you not be dismissive of others' efforts and accomplishments in this manner?

They have just launched. They haven't had any news, good or bad yet. PR and 20k is nothing. You could get that streaking a football game on national TV and selling some of your stuff. If you think media attention is worth something, you don't know anybody who has been famous and broke.

Let these people perform on their own merit before you write them off so callously.
Chats do show up in the gmail web interface. So (and I'm not saying this is elegant) you could open each chat and Forward it to a real email address, then save it from there.
RoundCube looks great, their Search features look impressive.
How did the author know which depict killing?
I am in a very similar situation: Mortgage, kids, wife and in an almost failing startup. First, you need to know how much risk the wife can stomach. Second, the money does not matter to children; they may be better off if you have more time to spend with them. Third, always have small contracts on the side to balance the startup losses. Fourth, it is important that you contract to other companies, instead of being employed. This will help with the small contracts, but also allows you to own the copyright you build for the startups; maybe not directly useful to you, but adds to your personal library and makes you more productive to your customers.

Good luck!
Have fun spending eight hours a day with abrasive people. Life is about more than productivity.
I've been in the bay area living off savings for a few months now. i have a website that has started to generate money, so I'm on my way out of being poor (hopefully).

it's incredibly tempting to spend all the revenue on myself. the business won't grow if i do that, though. it's hard.
You can hire American SAHM (stay at home moms) with graduate degrees in almost any field of your choice for ~$10 an hour.
The problem is the lack of service starts right at the sales process rather than tech support. This is what a friend said about buying the Nexus One:

"Google really does have a TERRIBLE sales process. Firstly I meant to order a car dock with the first order. If you email them at all (including on your "order status") no one reads it -- based upon what category you choose they send you a stock response with zero way of escalating. So when I emailed saying "Could I add a dock to this order so I only get one shipping and one customs charge?" I instantly got the stock 'Nah go screw yourself' response claiming that their fulfillment is so super quick that it's impossible to make a change."

After hearing that, I think I'd rather get a nearly identical HTC phone from a local store where I can some recourse if something goes wrong.
Good code is not really a hiring criteria. It's just the price of entry.

Hiring criteria for startup programmers:

1) can you work with others

...or are you the comic book expert from the Simpsons

2) can you ship

...can you be happy with a duct-tape solution, even if it's not perfect

3) do you care about customers

...everyone in a startup needs to be hyper-aware of customers and obsessed with getting more. the last thing a startup needs is a "tell me what needs to be built" programmer.
Great points. I think limiting the invites is key. What do you think about posting your resume and sample works on the site?
I tried Boston -> SF, and got an error 'The change you wanted was rejected. 422'
"I'd wager that many startups don't implement Facebook signin because of the engineering overhead that could be spent on sexy new features."

How much time is really spent integrating FB Connect?
Agreed. Because the next people who have to make this decision will be able to look at Diaspora as a model of what could happen next.