skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In my experience (seven years as a freelancer), most clients are good. You need to build up your sense of who is good and who is bad so you can weed out the bad ones early on. Things to look for are:

* Have they fallen out with their previous developer / team

* Do they start off saying they have no budget

* Have they decided it's a short job but have no noticeable idea of how long things will actually take

* They only want to pay at the end of the job, when they've received everything

* They won't sign a contract

On their own, none of these is a deal breaker (apart from the last one.) However, if you start hitting two or three points, that's real warning signs that they're going to be a bad client.

In the UK, I and a lot of other developers and designers ask for some money up front (for new clients, long running clients not so much, it depends what they're like.) I started doing this from advice from another freelancer, and it's the easiest way of weeding out bad clients. People who argue about paying 25% to 30% up-front also tend to be the ones who pay late or argue about paying the whole amount.

By not working for clients who won't pay a deposit, I've actually saved myself hassle in the long run by not having to chase for payments.

The most I've been ripped off for is £300, but I've some freelancing friends who are owned thousands of Pounds by various clients.

To mitigate risk, if you're doing a lot of work for a client it's best to break it down in to milestones and bill frequently - at least monthly. That way if they haven't paid a previous bill you can stop working until it is paid, and you have less to lose.

[Edit - trying to format list]
The logistics of it are different. With username + password, 2 people can have the same password. So you only need to warn someone if the username has already been taken. But in order to warn someone that a secret phrase has already been taken, you've just given them all the info they need to login as that other person.

That being said, if you were to enforce that the first half (or some undisclosed portion) of the secret phrase couldn't be taken, then you'd be closer to comparing apples to apples.
Then the promise has been broken, you nag them about it, and the next time you use it as why you won't do it.

Never say, "You're lying" though. Instead say, "once burned, twice shy".
I never say "No".

I just say, "Yes. And this is what it will cost you to do it right"

You have a number of "this is what it will cost you" options which will only work if the party you are negotiating with is reasonable. There are teams and managers out there who will happily assert that they can violate the laws of space-time in order to avoid making the sacrifices you'll tell them they need to make.

Note that "doing it wrong" or "doing it quick & dirty" are not options.

What if you are told directly to do it "quick & dirty," and you refuse? Is that not the same thing as saying "No"? Or by never saying no, do you mean never say no without providing what qualifications would turn it into a yes? What do you do about people you know will attempt to spin things later on to bolster their claims that they weren't advised of the costs ahead of time?

In other words, what do you do about people who don't have an impeccable sense of ethics? It seems like you would need that before you could feel safe being this agreeable.
Agreed, it's their privilege to put the rules up in just their home country language. After all, if you're a foreign entity you will have to abid by the local customs, and part of that is the language.

Yeah but as I said above, the process for buying the domain is VERY intentionally internationalized - everything is in English, you pay in US$ not local currency, etc.

I would agree with you if I had gone in there and essentially bought a domain that was only really intended for local use (some ccTLDs are like that).

But when they WANT international sales and are encouraging it, it doesn't seem right not to ensure that international customers can discover what Libyan Law says if the regulations for these same domains depend on it.
While I love the reviews, I just wanted to point this awesome page out, it's my go-to page soon after a new Mac's release:

http://www.primatelabs.ca/geekbench/mac-benchmarks/
> CDMA technically doesn't support simultaneous voice and data.

So? Push voice as packets over data then. Not trivial but then Apple has an army of engineers for that.
Do you really think these people properly learned Ruby by reading a Rails-specific book with a 10-page overview of Ruby?

There's some good business in picking up Rails projects when a client discovers they've hired someone who really only knows how to wire up pre-coded plugins to auto-generated MVC code, and cannot custom-code special requirements.
> Measured traffic is nice for bits & pieces. Flat rate is pretty much the only way to go if you're using a lot of bandwidth.

This used to be advice nearly everyone followed, but I'm seeing an increasing number of high-traffic sites serving from per-GB-billed providers like EC2. (It could be that it's still good advice, but the other benefits of EC2 outweigh that downside?)
> take ww.com away from me .... I'd be fairly confident about the outcome.

Unless of course you were a foreigner, especially an Libyan one then the outcome might not be so confidence inspiring.
Oh, I knew this one, I couldn't find it anymore. It's made by some Ruby star guy and Amy Hoy designer.
You wouldn't believe the millions we bring in on free web articles. Or, I should say forecasted millions. They don't make any real money right now, but I'm sure we'll make it up on bulk!
Sorry for being slow, how is websockets being used here?
Sure. What do you have in mind?
Dalvik seems off the table to me. I suspect Oracle has little case there.

But the Apache stuff seems shadier. It reads like you specifically can't use the Apache stuff for mobile devices due to patent and copyright issues. Clean room implementations don't get you around either of those specific legal issues -- unless I've misunderstood something here.
If by someone, you mean 'one person', then you're probably right.
Savvy brand marketers would probably disagree with that:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZyQjr1YL0zg&feature=fvsr

But that's besides the point. My point is that a high quality content site will not have any trouble receiving click-throughs and selling ads -- ads which are probably more effective for the advertiser and relevant for the user as well.
similar idea here, too. Called it deathgrip. We'd hold on to your information until you died. Impossible to get traction. People don't tend to think much about dying. Those who do simply leave this information with their lawyer.
The problem, as it is with any religion, is in the way men interpret the scripture. For example, Biblical law, on which all western legal systems are based, is similarly barbaric. The laws of all western societies come from the law of Moses, which is simply the ten commandments. The difference between modern interpretations of the law and old testament interpretations is that in Moses' time, the penalty for breaking any of the ten commandments was death, pure and simple. Coveted your neighbors posessions? Death. Coveted your neighbors wife? Death. Prayed to an idol of some other god? Death.

In most western societies our legal system has evolved to the point where we recognize that the punishment should fit the crime. The problem, as I see it, is that most modern muslim societies haven't progressed to this point yet. They still practice barbaric customs such as cutting the hands off of thieves, or public stonings.

As a whole, humanity needs to denounce all barbaric punishments and legal systems, regardless of origin. The thing that is so ironic to me is that some of the same religious conservatives in the US that are speaking out against Sharia law, if you ask them, will tell you they want the US to go to a biblical law system. They are pretty much one and the same at that level.
You left out an option: using SSDs on development systems but not in production. That is my situation. I have an SSD on my work machine (a 13-inch MBP) but not on any of my servers. I absolutely love it. Not only is it faster than blazes, but it is, of course, dead-silent and it runs cooler too so my fans don't come on as often.
I use OCZ 60GB drives for my netbook and desktop. They're good enough for the price, and from what I remember, cheaper than Intel. Makes Ubuntu boot for ~8 seconds on my netbook.
I could see definitely see arguments on both sides of the fence regarding this feature. It may also lead to more work for designers, since the "first impression" of a website would occur before the click-through.
What programming language has made you the happiest?
inDinero (YC S10) seeking lead frontend engineer
I pity your coworkers.
The Ultimate Top 25 Chuck Norris “The Programmer” Jokes
It's a smaller version of the page, those ad impressions are basically worthless in terms of clicks/conversions for the advertiser. It's also unclear if the ad display/tracking Javascript even runs in the preview window.

Frequently, if the information I'm searching for appears in the search result, I don't click through to the source, I'm sure that is the case for many searches.

If this takes off, you can expect to see greatly reduced traffic and ad revenues for certain types of sites(e.g. reference/lookup).
I suppose it depends on the main expenses of the companies, optimizing programmer workflow is a very good idea in a tech-centric environment because its a major part of your operational costs. However, if the quality of the technology is not an important business driver then I suppose you can afford to be average about it.
If you look at most of the Middle East countries, there are a few good examples of countries that practice Islamic (NOT Sharia ;)) law. Egypt, my home country, has a nice mix of Islamic law and British martial law. Jordan's similar. So is Turkey.

Keep in mind that there are four big schools of thought (and that's just in Sunni Islam). Saudi Arabia and the gulf conform to one of those, and it's traditionally more conservative.
It makes a difference that you're a polarizing person -- there will be people next week mocking you because 37signals isn't a $100million company yet, so you have more impetus to actually achieve it compared to a person who tells his or her friends, who will be supportive and forgetful of failures.
If you can find a VPS provider with undersold hardware, then usually any extra RAM is used as disk cache, which should definitely speed things up.
I made an adult themed URL shortener pr0n.ly and they ended up canceling the registration b/c it violated islamic law. They said that the problem was the domain name, though, not the content, and issued me age.ly instead (which I still haven't re-branded)
Did you draw the sprites yourself? Or is there a open collection somewhere?
Yep, and from Runge-Kutta you can get better by switching to variable (and/or independent) step size. Eg. Adaptive Runge-Kutta (variable timestep based on local error estimate from two different orders). Or you can go to predictor-corrector which is pretty interesting as well: http://www.sns.ias.edu/~starlab/kira/
Met Douglas at JAOO (http://gotocon.com/) this year; got him to sign my copy of "JavaScript: The Good Parts" :)
I did this, and boy do I wish I would have added a second raid, or even single drive, for my OS. My computer becomes unusable when I thrash on the drives by unraring a large archive or something. I am going to toss in a mid-level SSD for the OS so I can avoid this hit.
Intro to jEdit: A Programmer's Text Editor
For the chat and transmitting player movements.
I love this book! The advanced topics really helped me out with some performance issues I was having with my own sites.

Definitely a recommended read.
If you are interested, I'm charting the load (non-cached requests to HN) on the iHakcerNews API which hackerfollow is partly using.

http://api.ihackernews.com/load
Not to let facts get in the way of a good rant:

"I would stay away from any Muslim country domain, just in case, including .io"

Are you aware that .io is assigned to the British Indian Ocean Territory, which is "an overseas territory of the United Kingtom?" The registry itself is maintained by two UK-based companies, Internet Computer Bureau PLC and Cable and Wireless.
Ask HN: Fixing a horrible diet as a programmer
Lately, I've been paying more attention to how much work I'm doing as a programmer. I get things done, but I feel bedraggled. I'm 25, but I lack the energy you figure a 25 year old would have. The cause? My diet sucks. I typically wake up, start coding, have a very meager breakfast, eat lunch fairly late, and then sometimes, have a big dinner (steak, etc.). My energy levels are never consistent, however. I do know I have a high metabolism, though, and this clashes with any serious eating I'll do even on the days where I eat three meals a day. In the event that I do eat something heavy, less than 2-3 hours later, I will feel as if I haven't eaten.

I've been told to keep snacking (fruits, nuts, etc.) throughout the day, but I never seem to actually be eating enough to not feel washed out. The key is that I never actually feel hungry, though.

I've been trying to figure out how I can do better with my diet as a programmer. A lot of things I've read are aimed at losing weight. I've been the same weight +/- 5lbs. for the last 10 years at least, so that's not my concern.

Does anybody have any recommendations for foods programmers should be eating to maintain energy levels?
"this is a confusion about the meaning of a word (namely, "physics")"

I agree; http://science1.wordpress.com/2008/03/30/definition-of-physi... "physics" is a pun; and this is how physicists like it.
True for the US with a big supply of uranium in a (relatively) friendly country to the north.

Different for say India that has lots of Thorium, no Uranium and doesn't want to go begging to Russia or spend hard currency in Canada.
InDinero (YC S10) seeking lead frontend engineer
For example, upgrade to the latest iPod Nano and whoa, no camera. So wait, if I get the old version I get a camera and now I completely lose it. But if I go up to the iPod touch I get the camera, but the classic line never had one?

But this is a deliberate choice by Apple, not one forced on them by technology. And users understand that this year's iPod Nano is a different product from last year's, with different features. iPhone CDMA vs iPhone GSM is gibberish to them.
I switched over to a SSD (from a 5400 rpm drive) in my new laptop and didn't notice much difference at all. Everything was instant before, and it's still instant now.

This may be because I have a lot of ram, because I mostly work with small files, or because I'm using Linux which seems to be more resistant to bad disk IO speeds.

However I do like the gain in battery life.
Imagine this: you search for some topic. You hover over one result and get a pretty big chunk of text about that topic, you hover over the next one - you get one more big chunk of text, you hover over 2-4 more - you've all the information you need. There's no more need to click.

I don't mind "small JPEG pic versions of what sites look like" - these are fine. I'm strongly against the JPGs of site where you can read text from my site. And with a move of mouse - from next site. All cropped around the subject without any ads or any message attached to article that PAID for this article.
This totally changes how I will play Settlers of Catan from now on.
Feature suggestion: "Follow me" URLs that users could put in their HN profiles. This would greatly ease in-context following:

Read insightful comment › Click username to profile › Click HackerFollow link

Alternatively, the best solution (though much more time-consuming to implement) for in-context following would be a browser extension that adds an HF link next to everyone's name.
On the other hand, if you hate working out and working, and you have a limited amount of willpower, you might end up spending all of your willpower working out.
You've obviously never cut your hands to shreds working on cheap metal cases repairing peoples PCs.
Wrong. HD speed improvements have been pretty flat, and has been far outpaced by HD capacity which is closer to Moore's Law. SSD offers a nice boost in speed. Don't just throw around Moore's Law as if you know something.
excellent. thanks!
I agree with most of your points, minus the phrase "most modern Muslim societies haven't progressed to this point".

Yes, there's a fair share of the problems, but I can honestly just think of a few (3 or less) that truly practice the old barbaric stuff. Most, even though have other problems, have at least progressed away from that.
see: http://github.com/dkeskar/hnbot

/threads is not polite to robots.txt, so discussion.rb is deprecated.
protip: it goes faster if you move your mouse cursor out of the window.
I will be making the plunge in a production server environment soon, but I will be starting with my read only, or read intensive applications.

I have an elevation service, which has 600gb of binary files which are queried randomly. Since I have users from all over the world using the service at any one time, the heads on the drives must be flying all over the place. Perfect application for SSD's, even if they are poor at wear leveling, because it's a read-only application.

As far as database is concerned, I'll be holding off until I am sure I won't be screwed by the wear leveling. My database is currently sitting at 91% reads, but as we grow I can imagine that 9% writes can add up way quicker on the server than any amount of writes do on a persons desktop.
i wouldn't, but clearly people have. thats more my point -- if they're okay with doing this, they're probably going to be okay to pull arbitrary content.
Here an App, There an App, Where’s the App for You?
"Whatever the size of their smartphone’s app universe, many people just want a way to find the apps they can really use. This week, I tested two free tools that offer ways of sorting through hundreds of thousands of apps to show you some you might actually like and some you might find useful."
I just wanted to say that the creator of the project is a great guy. He has spoken at the Houston HackeSpace (http://txrxlabs.org). He also gave a great talk at Entrepreneur Camp Houston (http://entrepreneurcamp.pbworks.com/) about lessons learned from his startup.
He doesn't have web access? Really? I don't think I understand.
Buy Ads on the Hit “Words with Friends” App Directly with Burstly's Storefront
Lost me when he said that saying something more than once is lying.

DRY is a great principle, but not following it is not the same as lying.
The main character sprite was ripped directly from Chrono Trigger[1], a SNES game. A lot of gamers I know consider it to be one of the best RPGs ever made.

The tiles are very familiar but I can't for the life of me remember which commercial game they are from. They're used a lot in indie games. A lot of sprites from the SNES era are. :)

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chrono_Trigger
I would absolutely pay for this. I'm a hypochondriac and think that I'm just about to die for a different reason every day, and have a fear that some people that I keep in contact with on the internet simply won't know until years after the fact.

The company would have to be extremely trustworthy to get my passwords though, and that'll be a tough hurdle. The key to distinguishing yourself would be a great UI with sensible (well researched) defaults and offers of form letters.

But $10-$20 bucks a year? Done.
Introducing NuPack Package Management for .NET
Online Transaction Processing. I meant specifically on the web, where life is more chaotic than in traditional environments. I suppose I could have written "web OLTP". By "new", I mean less than 10 years old.
Hm, in the top left-hand corner I have "Logout", not "Account". Is there another way I can check?
I remember it being 3 days. Could be faulty memory.
Your 100 and 1000 year assumptions are just silly. You assume energy demands will remain constant, while they are exponential.

Just think what will happen if electric cars become popular. We will need a lot of electricity.
Does anyone know if this effects Android users too?
Why the "technically"? It's an absolutely fair warning, and tells you exactly what it's doing.

Although I do agree with you, this information isn't something Facebook's app should be harvesting in any event... although the functionality itself would be tempting for a lot of people. Maybe they could only send hashes of your contact data, and compare it with hashes on their servers?
Nuclear power plants can't replace oil- or coal-powered plants, because nuclear plants can't adjust output over the day to fit actual usage. Nuclear power plants are great for providing the baseline power production, but you need something adjustable to handle the morning and evening peaks, like oil or coal or wind or hydro or really big batteries.

So no, you can't do the math for how many nuclear plants you would need to get off oil.
I think you've misunderstood something: Apache never signed anything with Sun. Apache never got to use the TCK, because the ASF didn't accept those terms, and therefore, Apache Harmony can't claim to be an implementation of Java, legally speaking. Copyright doesn't apply because Harmony does not use other people's code. Patents... may or may not apply, but the complaint only goes after Dalvik (Google's VM, not Harmony's) in terms of patents, IIRC.
IOS SDK 4.1 Breaks Unit Tests
Do it where I work and you'll be out of a job.

You might be out of a job anyway, even if you decide to go along.

Companies do not fire people just for matters of insubordination, they fire people for budgetary reasons as well. If whatever change is pushed for costs the business millions of dollars because the lowly develop who said it was dangerous was right, that developer is still at risk of being fired.

The only think that might save you is a culture which demands that companies be loyal to their employees at the expense of everything else.

Everwhere else, obsequiousness isn't as safe as everyone thinks.
I guess it's the new rickrolling.
Apart from the one mention of Americans using Twitter, I deliberately made a point of using 'Western'.

Also, the kind of xenophobia, intentional or not (note that I heavily implied it was not the result of conscious thought), that leads to the 'weird foreigners' attitude is in no way unique to America. I'd imagine there's just as much of it in London as there is in Edinburgh as there is in San Francisco.

Oh, and yes, bit.ly should be worried. They should've taken this into account when planning their business and doing risk assessment.
> Assuming your projects function correctly, 95% of clients at this level are going to judge your web development skills based almost solely on the design of your sites. Unfair, but true.

Not sure about this, we have had a steady stream of clients since we got going without a particularly attractive website (http://gastownlabs.com)

I'd say the percentage is 95% but the metric isn't your web design but references from previous clients.
301 redirects. Follow jacquesm's link to Google's recommendation.

Here is my how-to guide on implementing what Google recommends:
http://www.joshklein.net/seo-basics-how-to-safely-move-redes...
3 hours and no one's posted the Software Engineering Code of Ethics that was written jointly by the ACM and IEEE??

Read it, learn it, follow it

http://www.acm.org/about/se-code

Let's try and bring a bit more professionalism into the industry.
I just wish there was something of non-US citizens (especially India) like kickstarter and with the strong community that kickstarter has
Catfish: The Real Danger Of Social Media
That definitely sounds like a direction I would be interested in pursuing: I do miss programming (it's now a free-time hobby) and PM work is something I'm intrigued enough with to try for a while.

While I'm not looking for a change right now, I'll be in contact: this route sounds promising.