skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
1. way too many details not revealed in this story, so difficult to make any kind of assessment of the review.

2. my freelancer experience dates back to the days of getafreelancer and I have way more reviews that the reviewer, so I think I can comment with my take on freelancer.

3. I have never had a issue with freelancer in regards to payment, either as a freelancer or as job poster. This is the one and only thing that they do well.(That said everything else is pretty poor)

4. I've had a couple of disputes there, mainly due to the ignorance of job poster on how payment is finally made, and this has always been settled in my favor.

Enough of the nice stuff.

Freelancer is a subscription site disguised as a job portal. IMO they don't give a shit about either the freelancers or the project owners, all they want to do is collect the subscriptions, which I think is not a bad business model. They have to go through the motions of giving a damn, but everything besides collection and disbursement is done on a shoestring and it shows.

Freelancer is the anti-pattern of how to do things online. They have earned a place as one of the classic a case studies on how not to do things on the web.

Their web site sucks in just about every respect, speed, not so much. Test environment = live site. so when they roll out changes, guess how that goes. Might have changed recently, I hope so, after all they have this wonderful pool of resources to draw on.

Their search engine is precious, search on "automate", fine, now search on "automated", and now on "automatic", and so on...

I estimate that less than 10% of job postings actually end up as actual projects. Now and then I tinker with the idea of monitoring their projects and collecting actual statistics, but then I realize that I have better things to do.

Job bids - fields are limited in to 200 character length, and then they have the cheek to send you an email saying basically, "hey, your bid sucks, you need to fix it"

You have no way to vet either bidders or job posters, used to be possible, but they took that feature away.

I'm receiving fake job offers which look like deliberate traps for ignorant subscribers. Can't prove that, but all the accounts are a day or so old for stupid amounts $10, or so. If you're desperate for any lead and click on Accept, hey look, Freelancer just deducted their $5 commission. This has been going on for a couple of months now.

I can go on, but that's enough. The fact is that the site is up and running and generating income. There must be thousands of subscribers hoping to find a career via the platform and freelancer is milking them.

TL/DR - Stay away, the site can be useful, but probably not for you unless you are v careful.
Some people argue that US government’s generous spending on sciences is in big part for security reasons - so that, if the next deadly weapon is to be discovered, US will have it first. In such case, sharing code and data is be counterproductive.
Good long read. With a real world example of a startup called Hubble Contacts pursuing their distribution strategy through Facebook ad microtargeting and Instagram promotions.

Nice blueprint for managing a small team with limited resources. Producing inbound content. Raising venture funds. Sourcing and packaging product. Discovering secondary network leads. Dealing with customer service. And on and on ;)
So much hate for Meteor here, but I use it at work and it's been great for what we wanted.

I inherited a vendor-built website that was Craft CMS (a Yii framework) sitting atop a Laravel application that was integrated with Google Maps and indexed by Solr -- debugging even a minor issue could take days.

Meteor is fast and full-stack, no more knitting together 13 different frameworks. It's integrated with Apache Cordova, so you can easily port your website to mobile apps. It supports importing of node packages. Is Meteor the answer for everything? Of course not. But for a fast, data-driven app it's still great, IMHO.

The alternatives recommended in this thread so far are:

1. Firebase + React/Angular

2. Elixir/Phoenix + PostgreSQL's LISTEN/NOTIFY

3. Deepstream.io

4. Kotlin

5. .NET Core

6. Vue and Rails

If those things work for you, great, but I'm not sure they're 10x better than Meteor or that MDG is in some kind of death spiral -- it's still a viable solution for fast NodeJS apps.
That's why I explicitly stated that it's my personal opinion, although "comment" already means "a verbal or written remark expressing an opinion" :)

I actually like JavaScript more than many typed languages but I don't like writing a server that runs on an event loop. Again, preference.

ps. You seem to be downvoted, I tried to compensate by upvoting. It is just a tease with a smiley at the end. Relax, people.
Freelancer.com seems like a bunch of assholes, but the guy made a big mistake also by only working for only one such site basically going all in and standing on one leg.
The same applies here as many other investments in life; you don't put your money/work/whatever in only one place/thing. In this case, multiple platform, own network should have been build instead of relying one shady company.
> Both parties benefit, I don't see what the problem is.

The problem, as always in this kind of situation, is how unequally the benefits are distributed.

If the investor pays 4-5 times (and that's a low end) less for something, while the worker gets 10% more compared to doing the same locally then it's unfair, even if both sides "benefit".

It's also natural for investors to seek the lowest prices they can get. That's why there are laws like minimum wage and other protections of the workers. The globalization is not just a way of getting things for cheap, it also a workaround for laws which prohibit investors from paying too little.

It's unfair, in my opinion, even if the worker does benefit. It gets much worse when the workers don't benefit at all. For example, in EU, we currently have a heated debate about delegated workers - people employed in one country and working (and living) in another. Companies do this to dodge the laws - minimum wage, social benefits, and so on - of their own country, while the workers suffer the higher costs of living in the richer country. It also makes the richer country native workers screwed. It's probably going to become illegal in the next couple of years.

People working remotely are in a different situation, in that they indeed live in a cheaper place. They still get paid much less than the minimum wage of the richer country where the investor comes from, which I think is also unfair. Also, the "cheaper place" is often not really - the prices in these countries are getting ever closer to the richer countries, while the wages lag behind the prices significantly.

In other words, there should be - and is, in many places - a limit on how badly workers can be exploited. The globalization is a loophole which circumvents these laws. I hope it will get closed in the future.

EDIT: note that it's definitely not the only way globalization affects people and many effects of globalization are positive. Just not this one, in my opinion.
These are drive-managed SMR, so no special drivers needed. I agree they are ideal for write-once/read-many media servers :)

Today I'm not sure the 8TB drives make any sense as prices have come down so far on regular 5400rpm slower drives that are much faster. These new 14TB spindles will be interesting to keep an eye on.

I imagine SMR won't really take off, if it does I'd expect more direct kernel/driver support for the hardware. Drive-managed SMR is always going to be exceedingly inefficient.
Yeah that can be a PITA. Samba is always an option if you want to make it a bit easier for yourself. You can run a domain for Windows (and other platform) machines without the increased overhead and licensing cost of a Windows DC (although you can get away with running a server core DC on as little as 512MB of RAM, I generally use 2GB).
Korea was a UN action.
Mac in Norway is an odd duck. It never caught on as a wide consumer computer, but has maintained a presence as the primary computing platform in media production.
> judge him negatively for speaking out

Anything you put out on the internet can be a positive or a negative. This sort of post is not a positive.

Part of the reason software buyers pay good rates (those who do) is because they need to know they are dealing with competent service providers. If the provider is offering services for less than that which would sustain a business (which many cash-strapped freelancers do) then that's a red flag. If I have a critical, high profile project, then I want to know that the person I'm handing it off to is going to be relatively stable. Think about this from an investor perspective, the people involved in the project need to be able to recover financially from a trip to the hospital (as opposed to going homeless).

I need to know you can pay the rent and keep the lights on. If you are one step away from financial disaster, then you're too much of a risk to partner with on my project. That may sound bad, but that's reality.

His review will not look good for taking on better paying work. The people who will take a chance on him are likely the same sort of people who he feels has been screwing him over.

Bottom line, you might be one misstep away from the streets, but that's not information you want to include on a cover-letter.
Their German Twitter account has more info:

https://twitter.com/Crunchyroll_de/status/926782599460212736

And for our English-speaking audience
Please DO NOT access our website at the current time. We
are aware of the issues and are working on it

Update: We have NOT been hacked. At the moment, it appears to be DNS hijacking.
Pretty sure that this is simply copying an API, and Google specifically fought a court case against Oracle, against the notion that they couldn't copy Oracle's Java API. As such, I doubt they'd have a leg to stand on without giving Oracle another shot at them.
Freelancing is about being able to work for whoever you want to. A temp can only work for one person at a time. Those websites allow you to work for more than one person at a time. So those people are, in fact, freelancers, not temps.

I hire people on upwork. My favorite person charges $40 an hour. His work is great and gets repeat business from me many times a year.

I'm not sure what you're referring to as a scam. These places are free markets and free markets have fees.
Grad school is an immigration pathway these days that in my experience brings zero benefit to most jobs.

Where it matters, you see a more normal/typical level of diversity.

For most things tech, it’s meaningless. I literally give it zero weight for hiring unless the candidate had a non-qualifying bachelors degree, needed a couple of years of experience, or they went to a foreign school for undergrad and a US grad school (less paperwork).
No, you ruined your life. You joined a group of people that are not really freelancers but are effectively employees only without the associated perks and securities. Just like Uber drivers are not freelancers.
Do it better
What a 21st-Century Police State Really Looks Like
This is also the right attitude for casino gambling.
hackernews has been infiltrated by wantrepreneurs and techno-communists.
Many years ago, my friend and I play something we called the N train game. Traveling from Manhattan into Queens, we would guess which stop the white people would get off in Manhattan. Only us "ethnic" white people went into Queens, the rest (American white for lack of a better term) did not.

Now all of that is over. Everyone got pushed into the outer boroughs. There is a hipster bar next door to the building I was born in. Unimaginable twenty years ago. I left my hometown due to cost. Twice the price for a city that is half as fun as it used to be. But this article still shows the amount of diversity in the city.
Ultimate Guide to DECENT Mining on Ubuntu 16.04
The actual article title is “We don’t need the iPhone X”.
It's not so much that miners would ignore empty transactions, it's that the spammer would need to pay the miner fee to get each transaction in the block which would end up being very expensive and unsustainable long term.

For the second idea, this wouldn't really work either. When each node receives a transaction it will validate it first before broadcasting it to other nodes, so it would be stopped from propagating through the network pretty quickly and no one would attempt to include it in a block and run do PoW work it which is the most time consuming part.

I suppose in theory if you had a large enough network and could target a ton of nodes individually you might be able to do some form of damage but that's likely a pretty impossible amount of power and similarly to the previous example you could maybe bloat it a bit but it would be very expensive to sustain an attack like this.
I don't think that's true. The cost of food, rent, transportation etc is far greater in the developed world. The cost of living an "expat lifestyle" in developing countries is higher though, but local people typically don't aspire to that.
Facebook allowed child abuse posts to stay online for more than a year
Please update the submission title to match the article. The guidelines request the title not be editorialized.
Debugging Jupyter notebooks
6 Lessons from Navy SEALs for New Venture Founders
What you describe is called "Security by Obscurity" and it's not a good security mechanism. It is only applicable only after other type of defenses has been put in place.
> unpleasant, annoying or offensive.

You define pleasantries, annoyances, and offenses, and that attitude of setting yourself above so many others by default without spending the time to understand their unique human stories is going to cut you out of many fullfilling human experiences.

I can only imagine you have a far more difficult life than I, if your world is populated by such annoying characters.
In the UK I earned around $750 USD/day for node work as a contractor. A day was around 6 hours when you take the lunch break away so it's not far off.
Precision strikes could probably take out their nuclear and missile program, and much of the top leadership, and probably cause the regime to eventually collapse. The problem is their artillery, spread throughout the south of the country, that poses a major threat to South Korea.
Osama, Usama, etc. are just anglicized versions of his Arabic name, thus none are canonical.

According to Wikipedia, the direct translation of his name is usāmah ibn muḥammad ibn ‘awaḍ ibn lādin
0.) What is "person is susceptible to disasters"? You seriously suggest there is something shameful about people who had parents die/car accidents and such people should keep it secret?

1.) Companies and services are open to criticism from their customers or providers.

2.) If you allow and accept positive subjective reviews, you should accept negative subjective reviews too. They are part of the system.

Free market requires access to full information, that means both good experiences with provider and bad ones.
It didn't work for me, but might be busy.

This is IPFS and it theory will use the javascript IPFS server in your browser unless it can find a local IPFS daemon on your machine.
(Or perhaps it uses one of the gateways?)

How do they prevent the data from disappearing if everyone disconnects?
Yes, built a React front end on meteor a few months ago. Well documented, excellent tutorial. They worked well together.
Thought twice, and then done the same thing anyway.
This is the world Facebook, Twitter, and Google are, in part, helping to create. It is the world which is very likely to come into being unless very specific steps are taken to prevent it from happening. Of which, "don't be evil" (espoused and since abandoned by Google), simply ignoring potential for harm (practiced and still believed by Facebook), or my own personal responsibility approach of "I will not be a party to building this" all fail equally hard.
Developers in the developing world typically don't use iPhones and Macbook pros. You can easily get a "good enough" machine for 10% of the price of a Macbook.
Among other things, I actually modified liner to stop using/swallowing all control codes, and to instead surface some of them to the client program to decide how to respond. e.g. liner stops doing anything with Ctrl-X (0x18 ?) and instead ng could respond to Ctrl-X by writing a docstring to stderr for an identifier under the caret in the input buffer.

https://github.com/frou/liner/blob/master/common.go#L208
>There are times where you don't have the energy to stand but need to work - so just sit

Then what's the point of not getting a table that can go up and down?
> At the moment, it appears to be DNS hijacking.

A google search for "crunchyroll" returns as the first result an HTTP link. Had they used HTTPS, would it have prevented the attack (turning it into a denial-of-service instead), or would the DNS hijack be enough for the attacker to obtain a valid certificate?
This project is not intended to be a general purpose replacement for the standard Go net package or goroutines. It's for building specialized services such as key value stores, L7 proxies, static websites, etc.

You would not want to use this framework if you need to handle long-running requests (milliseconds or more). For example, a web api that needs to connect to a mongo database, authenticate, and respond; just use the Go net/http package instead.

There are many popular event loop based applications in the wild such as Nginx, Haproxy, Redis, and Memcached. All of these are single-threaded and very fast and written in C.

The reason I wrote this framework is so I can build certain network services that perform like the C apps above, but I also want to continue to work in Go.
See yesterday’s

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15619634
Cool site! Reminds me a lot of https://thingsonreddit.com/ which was also shared here recently.

What is your formula for popularity score?
5 Reasons you are not making money from agriculture
Oh please. Everyone online is far stupider and more insane than before? There's an assertion wanting for evidence.
I have heard a lot of bad things about freelancer.com from the users' perspectives like the one in the post - but also on both sides - those who do the work and those who post work.

I think Freelancer as a company though has somewhat of a positive feel here in Australia (correct my if I'm wrong fellow Aussies).

It's probably seen as one of the better tech products from Australia and its CEO Matt Barrie is at times outspoken about the aussie startup scene, lack of innovation in Australia etc [1][2].

[1] http://www.afr.com/technology/matt-barrie-says-doomed-austra...

[2] https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/would-last-person-sydney-plea...
And what's with music and TV now? When I was younger everything was good, but now it's bad.
Do the admin and faculty staff see a share of the returns in their salaries, or are there outside investors? Or is it more about ensuring a long-term and improving ability to pay for top researchers and fund cutting edge research, raising the university's profile?
Quoting the article: "Going to college doesn't guarantee a good job, far from it, but the data show that not going dooms most young people to an increasingly shallow pool of the very crappiest, lowest-paying jobs. There's a lot of stick, but not much carrot, in the education game. [...] the squeeze on the un-degreed grows tighter, increasing further that original negative incentive: Don't go to college, and you'll be standing on soup lines by age 25. "

The article itself explains why teachers and parents and students themselves still seek degree - because alternative is nothing good either.

It is competitions and if you dont compete, you loose for sure.
The same story can generate different conversations depending on the tenor of early comments, who makes those comments, who sees those comments, and if and what response those comments illicit. Things as small as whether or not a post appears on a weekend or weekday (the previous was a Thursday -- $ date --date="618 days ago") makes a difference.

On the other hand, the perception social science, psychology, and even STEM as science has changed a bit in the last several years and part of that change is increased scrutiny and skepticism.
It makes me wonder if there is space in the market for a freelancing website that has minimum rates and does some more vetting, or referencing as we might call it in the real world.

Ditch the credit card nonsense and make people pay by bank transfer, like real agencies would. It sounds like a product I would use. I have a need for Freelancer style services, but I don't need to have to vet people and read reviews, thats what agencies are for. I want the service that I get from my local contractor agency, but availability for small projects rather than long contracts.
I'm glossing over the details. The actual description of the software the guy wanted written was very straight forward. That said something like, Python program that imports the historical pick-4 results from the North Carolina Lottery and allowed the user to look-up the last date those numbers were picked regardless of order. The job had a fixed price of $10.

This was a long time ago but I think my thought process was that doing the hourly rate jobs at $2.00 per hour would never be viable so I was trying to find fixed price jobs that were miss priced in the sense that I knew I could perhaps do them in 30 minutes but the purchaser assumed it would be several hours of work. This project fit the bill. The job description didn't actually explain that the guy wanted to use the software as part of his nutty system to game the lottery. That only came out later after the work was done.
It's hard to overcome the troubles of global CSS
If your work product has a real barrier to entry and strong value like you say, I wish you'd stop coming here to 1) play coy / not describe the product, 2) flog dissatisfaction with VC behavior, 3) throw out outrageous $1T numbers, and finally 4) rile people up with arguments about VB.NET.

Look, it's nice that you got some use out of Microsoft's frankly very irritating old developer tools. But all we're doing here is reorganizing bits, any language will do that job, although it is harder to enlist others in helping if you have settled on awkward means to get there. At some point you will have to "put up or shut up" about the thing you believe you're building.
That was the first sentence of the article and the title Fastco used on Twitter but I can't change the title now, HN won't let me.
Cloud Firestore has too many limitations on what it can't do...

e.g. can't query with age > 10 and have it sorted by age <-- (wrong example)

edit: see benjaminl's comment on the wrong example

CORRECT example:
can't query with age > 10 and have it sorted by total_spent
While goroutines are cool, there's not the whole point of Go for me.
> I've done lots of event loops in the past (eg hellepoll in c++) and think that the cost of that is on the programmer - keeping track of things, callbacks, state machines and things and avoiding using the stack for state etc is all hard work and easy to mess up.

I very much agree. In the past, I have had quite some fun developing a few streaming parsers using Node.js, which also uses an event loop. And while these parser worked relatively good and efficient, debugging them was not an easy task. In addition, understanding the code is also a though challenge, especially for people other than the original authors.

When I started using Go more and more, I really enjoyed the different I/O-model using goroutines and blocking function calls. It also has a few drawbacks but the mental model is a lot easier to reason about.
The destructive practice is not knowing how to write stable things. There is a small period at the beginning of a project where stability doesn't matter. There is a long period where instability will lead folks away.
There was a "spectacular bias" before too, but it was reflexively in favor of things Google did.