skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I actually am, and I'm a Hacker News nobody that is 100% solo, including all of my sales.

I started in mid-2012 after being fed up with every employer out there, but was well aware that I was one of the best people someone could hire for things that are necessary, but not glamorous -- database performance tuning, data warehousing, ETL process development, and cleaning up disasters. Yet getting market rate for salary as a senior dev was like pulling teeth. At the time I was gritting my teeth to collect a paycheck. I got fed up with it, quit after managing to line up an engagement (and getting contracts drawn up), and struck out on my own.

In 5 1/2 years I've averaged 42 hours of billing a year, with the big gap mostly being because I decided to take 6 months off in 2016. I started hourly, but I learned exactly what Patrick learned and switched to weekly for the bulk of my engagements (which are short term), with a more amenable rate for long-term projects (we're talking 6+ month with many small projects, or one huge one). Most of it has been putting out fires to save a director's or VP's job, which gets you solid recommendations from said directors and VPs when servers go from on fire to twiddling their thumbs being nearly idle. Though I've built data warehouses and the teams to manage them as well.

There is a lot of selling. I'm either sourcing or making a ton of calls or emails every week, which isn't easy for someone that doesn't like to toot their horn. However, working remote affords me the ability to do that, as well as work with anyone in the US. If a local client wants me on site (preventing me from doing sales) there's a heck of rate increase for that, which causes most to let me work off site, though a few bite and the bump more than covers my opportunity cost.

There's also a bit of contingency recruiting. Employees take note when you turn a disaster into boring, easy to manage calm. More so when you teach them what you know. Keep in touch, and when you see the writing on the wall, perhaps your current client is what both of them needs. After all, you're already an approved vendor, so might as well make things even better for your client (and the top-notch candidate) and stick another $40-50K in your pocket for your trouble.

From when I started I TRIPLED what I was making (and am not in a cheap market), and making more than senior AmaGooFaceSoft devs in the Valley (incl. options and benefits) despite living nowhere near Califonia. Yet I'm still some nobody that's been on Hacker News since mid-2009 that just does fairly boring database things. Though there's a ton of database work out there.
I have a x270 that I just don't use, about to put on ebay because I can't stand the screen size. I thought I could but I just cant :(.

Its a shame too because it was the top of the line one...
> It is a publically discussed issue with multiple acceptable opinions which range from “expensive quagmire” to “massive human rights violation.”

It is publicly discussed, but it is also drowned in a flood of other information.
What the fuck are you talking about? Have you looked at the markets recently? What recession?

I’m a millennial and i don’t feel like I was affected by the recession in the slightest. No millennial is locked into self employment, unemployment is at like 4.5%, the job market is doing fantastic. All this doom and gloom and “poor me” is fucking ridiculous.
IMO the death penalty is a disgrace, but it's not comparable to things like Tianamen Square. Not even remotely.

The death penalty is administered within a legal framework that is designed (nominally at least) to be transparent and afford due process. The implementation is sometimes flawed to the point of absurdity, but the American people largely know this and are free to criticize and debate it without fear of punishment by the state simply for disagreeing. (EDIT: And, more to the point, Americans are increasingly using the power of their vote to abolish the death penalty.)

I hope you can see how the Chinese government's claim to the right to slaughter and imprison its citizens at will and in secret or the crime of expressing dissent is, um... different?

> "And they consider it perfectly legal to assassinate their own citizens without anything like a trial (as in remotely, with drones, when said citizens are involved in terrorist acts)."

Who's this "they" you speak of? Obama's extra-judicial killing af Anwar Al-Alawki, for example, is one of the great stains on his presidency in the eyes of a large portion of the voting public, and it was hotly contested within the government too. And again, Americans are free to criticize these actions without fear of government reprisal. I remember calling Obama's action cowardly and illegal here on HN a few years back, and the thought of being killed or imprisoned for this never occurred to me. Exactly how does this situation compare to that of China?
Classes are a really nice way to group functions together

Spicy take. There's been a big crusade against this in the Python community lately, but honestly I don't understand the reason people hate it so much. Sure, it's called a "class" when you really want a "namespace" or something, but who cares what it's called?
Is it really communist beside the name? I wouldn't say it is and the very important increase in the wealth and salary gap between classes shows that it's far from being a communist regime nowadays

As for Tiananmen, one needs to see the context. China had recently endured the cultural revolution and the leaders had a good understanding of the potential disasters of a revolution. In that context, if they believed that the ends justify the means and that millions would die if a new revolution happened, the leaders could rationalize their decisions.

I'm not saying it's not horrific. It is. But, it's the kind of decision that needs to be understood in it's historical context.

As for the actual mowing of bodies and the bulldozer's making a pie. I'm not sure if it's real or not. It does seem like the kind of rumors that circulate because they are particularly gruesome. What would be the point for the Chinese government to do that? I may be mistaken but, in my mind, the Chinese government at that time was nothing if not practical and pragmatic (in a horrifying way for sure), there would be no justifiable reasons for being this gruesome.
> poor investment decision

We should talk about your poor assumption generation algos. Risk assessment indicates a willingness to examine certain "opportunities" which only exist in hindsight (i.e. confirmation bias) over observations of truth of reality. For example, if we knew the DAO hack was possible, ETH may never have gotten expensive enough to justify a fork for it.

Factually, it is true that the Ethereum maintainers are willing to fork their chain if it means getting their money back from someone who found a hole in their codebase - a codebase few people understand at a fundamental level. This inability to understand it at a fundamental level, coupled with the inherit irrationality of the markets indicates it may be of higher risk than a Bitcoin investment.

This means "opportunity", at least in the context you give it, could indicate a blind willingness to follow the lead of others, when one themselves may be in doubt over how they may guarantee a given level of risk during the waiting period for outcome.

That you'd bother to attack me over this point is fairly irrational, except if you were one of those people hoping to continue to blow hot air into this particular crypto market.

Fact is, we just might NOT need Ethereum where we're going. Time will tell.
Apple’s self-driving cars could use routes others have traveled
Zebra Finch Self Tutoring
If you're in Europe and a programming consultant, you can (and should) charge usd100 and more. Like, double, or triple.

Edit: actually, first thing you need to do is stop charging by the hour, and charge by the day, or better, by the week.
> and even him didnt clearly wrote that this work ONLY if bitfinex has higher price than other exchange...

To be fair, it does not appear to be pointed out in the readme.md, either.
> 12c is genuinely state-of-the-art

i know a lot of companies that are still on 11g. and this is not in any way state-of-the art, heck it does not even have a limit clause.
It's hard to actually trust your statement that 12c is so much better, when 11g was basically trash.
Yes. Hennessy is a Google board member, too. It's a small world.
Facebook will stop paying publishers for their content
MongoDB doesn't scale. Write are handled by a single node.
Depends a lot on implementation. My example: Netflix at the beginning of shows sometimes says something to the tune of "contains product placement". Several times now once gotten to the end and notice that it didn't stand out to me. It makes me suspicious, was it there all along and I just got advertised to without noticing it? Was it not there this episode? Am I becoming complacent and not noticing product placement as much as I used to?
Working remotely pretty much destroyed my career for two reasons: (1) my networking opportunities plummeted to zero and (2) I was fired for reasons I believe could have been avoided if I had worked in an office and had stronger relationships with more co-workers.

My remote job was at a fully distributed company with good compensation.

I worked there for about five years, receiving only positive reviews.

Groups in the company worked in a very silo-ed manner — there was not a lot of work overlap or cross-team communication. But I loved my team and work so it was fine with me.

Once the company started struggling, they re-organized our group several times, and eventually a non-technical manager with more seniority than me was brought in.

Although I was highly effective, well-reviewed, and never had issues with other managers, the non-technical manager and I dealt with all of the classic issues that come up in this scenario: unrealistic deadlines and expectations, scope creep, etc. I tried to deal with this in an ego-less, professional manner, but he took our issues personally and lobbied HR to have me fired.

At that point, after all of the re-organizations, I was the only dev left on my team, and my other managers who I had good relationships with had moved on. I had no one to vouch for me. I believe that if I had worked in an office, in a less silo-ed manner, I would have had more opportunities to network with other developers within the company and my accomplishments would have been more visible, which would have at least allowed me to switch teams.

Instead, I was quietly led out the back door and disappeared.

In a remote company it's a lot easier to be fired. It's a lot more difficult to resolve interpersonal issues over IRC than face-to-face. There is a huge amount of value to passing people randomly in the hallway, by "the watercooler," or at a social event. These kinds of relationships are critical and are just not replicable via remote work.
> I'm not sure how a tax attorney would mollify any AML concerns on the exchanges

Exchanges and banks need to verify you aren’t laundering money. You want them to verify this quickly. A competent lawyer can help you prepare the necessary paperwork and, in a pinch, explain things to a bank’s or exchange’s compliance officer over the phone. That increases your credibility and in turn odds of getting approved quickly.
US national level politics has been stuck in neutral for a while. But local and state level governments have been often doing pretty well. So although it's not visible on the surface, I think US democracy is doing "good enough". I think a key here is that one person / governing body really doesn't have all the power here.

Fox News is populist media; populist media is a "feature" in practically every country. On the other hand, populist media on the "other side" exists without too much conflict here so far. There's also more sober sources of information too, for those that feel that both are pretty junky. Honestly, the fact that polar opposite populist mouthpieces can both exist is probably a better indicator of democracy than the fact that a single populist media outlet exists. If one had to ding our democracy at the moment, it's that high level government officials in the US are trying to discredit media sources more than in previous times. It's not censorship by any means yet, but it is something to watch (and, if one was a US citizen, seriously push back on).

China will be interesting to watch too. Although they've come a long way, they are still a middle income country by PPP. I can't think of any high income country of late (other than petro-dictatorships) that hasn't embraced some form of more democratic, more open model. Xi Jinping is going in the opposite direction.

The interesting question is whether his current concentration of power will satisfy, and truly keep the stability they seek, of all of the 1.4 billion people in China... especially at a time when China's middle class is rising. I also wonder whether the current control tightening of information, and a reluctance (so far) to ease off the heavy handiness of government involvement in business, will harm innovation in China in the long run. We'll see -- not being Chinese, I obviously don't know enough to wonder anything other than some vague "armchair thoughts".
What point are you trying to make here? Again, the claim of an "unidentifiable alloy" without XRF data backing it up is simply not credible. Period. Worse, the claim here is of an "unidentifiable alloy" without any evidence whatsoever. That is not credible.

The issue of being able to reproduce an alloy or material is an entirely separate one from being able to identify what it's made out of. Nobody calls Damascus steel an "unidentifiable alloy". We know what it is, a type of steel, we know what it's made out of. Whether or not we can manufacture something with identical properties is irrelevant to whether or not we can identify it.

This whole "unidentifiable alloys" thing is a lot of meaningless speculation that hinges on a throwaway phrase with zero evidence backing it up. Show me the XRF data then we'll have a discussion. Until then it's just a bunch of hot air.
Show HN: Nymph – A slightly different version of C
"popular/famous" seems to imply these are those unfair forces of the universe that bless others but not me. Rather, #1 comes out of #2 and being proactive in your career. Patrick was active here, knew what he was talking about, and that developed into a reputation where he'd be in a position to have conversations like the story suggested.
PhantomSQL: front end database using Web Storage
Indeed I am his great-nephew and namesake! Impressive of you to connect the dots!
Amazon Video has it for purchase/rent: https://www.amazon.com/D-Right-Passage/dp/B078HV33TL/ref=sr_...
Most laptops with dedicated GPUs can drain their battery quite a bit faster than a phone can, but they don't exhibit instability on batteries nearly this young.
I've signed something similar at other companies. Talking about sex work at a regular company is inappropriate. But discussing an article your co worker wrote about sex workers is okay because it's your job to cover vices.

The agreement protects Vice from being sued for the second scenario, but not the first. Though I've encountered employees who interpret it as "anything goes."

People who work on search engines, build family friendly filters, or categorize apps and movies have to deal with porn. But that doesn't mean employees are allowed to watch porn. One story I heard about Bing is that they go to a covered conference room whenever they need to view adult material. A good idea to not expose porn to bystanders.
> * What degree you get in college isn't that important, a B.A. will let an employer know your teachable

And the lies we're telling the next generation are

* Get a STEM degree, they're always in demand

* Become a programmer, there will never be enough programmers.
Forget Design Documents
The Chinese haven't attacked anyone in a long time. Seriously. I think they are pioneering new forms of social organization that are different than the western system and might even be better on the whole for the average individual who ignores historical events that took place more than 25 years ago. How many times has the economist predicted a economic crisis in China since 1990 and they just keep on growing?
> I've heard at least two stories of engineering teams who felt that their specific product couldn't have scaled the way it did and they wouldn't here today without Mongo, for whatever reason. I've heard the words "it was the best engineering decision we ever made" from one team who's company ended up selling for 8 figures.

Do you expect to hear them say, "Yes, choosing MongoDB was a bad decision and our production infrastructure is currently on an unwieldy, slow, dangerous piece of crap" and then go on to sell the company for tens of millions of dollars?

Do you expect people to admit the real reason they're using MongoDB, which, in 99% of cases, is "we don't know how to use SQL and are really perturbed that anyone thinks we should have to learn"?

It is true that MongoDB only spontaneously combusts occasionally, but that doesn't mean the choice is of negligible importance.
If it is Earthish temperature, it going to be made of normal atoms (i.e. elements we have identified on the periodic table) and mass spectrometry and X-ray crystallography would be common tools that physicists would use to identify its molecular structures. And yes, highly advanced nanotechnology uses regular old atoms, as far as Science can see today.
Data point of one: I’m a millennial that suffered through the financial collapse, having graduated with massive student debt from a private school while basically being unemployable in the market due to lack of experience, and even once I got a job watching housing prices rise faster than my savings for a down payment.

But this didn’t drive me to be anti-free market. Far from it. The financial collapse was due to the power of the banks which existed as a government authorized oligarchy. Allowing banks monopoly over the mechanisms of monetary policy is the source of the problem. 2007 was NOT an unregulated market by any reasonable measure.

Don’t let your partisanship blind you to be grievances of those who align with neither yours nor the opposing party platforms.
My bank makes it a bit difficult to wire large(ish) sums regardless of whether Bitcoin is involved, particularly when wiring overseas. It's just the nature of the US (maybe world) we're living in today.

I haven't had any trouble moving around the small sums I deal with in cryptocurrencies on Coinbase, and I suspect most people just dipping their toes into it won't have any issues. It's more likely to be an issue if you're dealing with large sums. $10,000 is, AFAIK, the amount that banks have to report and that's probably where things start to get a little more hair...and if you split up >$10,000 into a few transactions over a few days, they probably report that, too.

I guess Bitcoin millionaires are dealing with problems that Bitcoin thousandaires just don't experience.
Same story, despite all the praise. It just never had sufficient capabilities to actually do things I wanted to automate. Every time I needed something, when I remember about IFTTT and decide to give them a try, it ends up with "nah, they're as useless as ever". Even webhook channels the article recommends are limited, so e.g. outputs for many APIs are just not possible (for example, no way to pass an auth token in headers, let alone refresh it).

On the other hand, anacron + python + requests + lxml (or beautifulsoup when they've improved) + other nice libraries have never failed me.
How do the companies know that they can trust their employees?
If they're just making people change their handles with a suggestion they be real names, I have to wonder if, in effect, it was all just an attention-getting setup for the email they sent out today with a discount on paid subscriptions.
Harry Potter and the Magical Profit Margins Under the Tree
The last thing I'll add since edits don't seem to be working ...

My advice to you is that unless you are at the end of your career, or value working from home over your career prospects for family or health reasons, avoid working 100% remotely, even in fully distributed companies. The ideal is a situation where you work in an office, but have a flexible schedule where you can work from home 1-2 days a week, or 1-2 months a year.
Always good to keep notes on things like this (noted at the time each issue appears).

Always better that they never have to be formally given to the customer.
If you're regularly selling amounts more than 25k USD worth, don't use an exchange. Try these guys, for example: https://genesistrading.com
You realize that your perception of what your friends went through is driven by your own personal situation, and not that of millennials at-large, right?

Your friends, I assume, were rich kids, or at least comfortably middle-class. The problems my friends dealt with in high school weren't trivial. They dealt with divorce, drug addiction, alcoholic parents, unwanted pregnancies, struggles with poverty, bullying... To me the notion that they never had to learn how to deal with failure is ridiculous. The class gap is enormous, and I've lived a life where I've been intimately acquainted with both sides of it.

Besides, it's not me I'm worried about here. I'm worried about the people around me. I'm one of the lucky millennials who has a tech job. It's my friends who are struggling to eat.
here, let me show you why

- Man in China sentenced to five years' jail for running VPN
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/dec/22/man-in-china-s...

- France couple in China unreachable after Liu Xiaobo tribute - BBC News http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-42454865

- China Continues Hunting Down Liu Xiaobo Commemorators, Rounding Up Dissident Writer https://chinachange.org/2017/12/22/china-continues-hunting-d...
Befreie+Dein+Gerät+-+Befreie+Dein+Android+-+FSFE
Wonderful! Like a case study on learnings from the "rework" book.
We send people to risk their lives to save homes in fire risk areas. That’s already a pretty profound bailout on the part of the government and her citizens.
I made a bet with myself that the top comment on here would be a very intelligent person using said intelligence to argue all of the reasons why none of the (excellent) advice in the article was applicable to him/her.

I won the bet.
I use Zapier for this since you can inject code via Python between tasks if needed. Also filters and such. IFTTT is great for consumer stuff but not having multisteps has been annoying.
"We need to find ways to think socially and politically about the machines we develop."

...say some folks every decade, only to watch another wave of suffering to arise because of the technological progress going far ahead of the ethical progress.
That's a nice rate.

Mind sharing how many weeks you work a year? Ie, is there enough demand you can work in the upper 40's, leaving enough vacation time?
Can you affect the number and size of AWS instances that a company needs? As Patrick said on twitter the other day. If you can optimize the use of AWS for a company that has 3k instances, you can make the company boatloads of money in reduced server cost.
In this post someone who doesn't like functional programming decries a lot of the good parts of functional programming.
Currently, I'm employed FT. When I was consulting, typically multiple projects. It's necessary (IME) to do so to guarantee you have a steady flow of work. I'd always be looking for a new project midway through the current one.
I agree with you and I'm not sure why you're being downvoted.

Dispatch, especially multiple dispatch, can be really useful when used judiciously.
There is something especially nefarious about your own government taking the opportunity to murder 10,000 of its protesting citizens because they conveniently pooled together in one location. Is that not worth talking about? Especially when that government is still in power, and covering up that event?