skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Started a consultancy, ran it for 5 years, closed it down. YMMV.

My experience:

Running a successful tech consultancy has nothing to do with actually building tech. The only thing that matters is sales. I'll say it again: the ONLY thing that matters is sales. Every consultancy will be more successful by selling crap than by failing to sell great work.

(That said, do great work. Referrals are typically your best way to get clients you actually want to work for, so do good work. But you're here on HN already, so you probably don't need to be told that.)

Someone in your company will need to be spending just about 100% of their time attempting to sell your services. If you're running a one-person show, this will be very hard. You will need to make much more money per job, so you can float financially between projects.

Did I mention that the only thing that matters is sales?

Why is sales the most important thing? Because in a consultancy you only make money if you're working on a project. There are no residuals. No one will signup for your services and automatically start paying you, then keep paying you indefinitely. You will need to close a sale, start work, then charge for it.

All of that means that you are ultimately selling time. Your time. And that time is finite. Take a vacation? You're making less and spending more. Get sick? Making less and spending more. And if you're close to the line on your overall finances, this can be devastating. Which leads me to...

Cashflow. Cashflow is your new master. It owns you, controls you. Everything you do will be to serve your Cashflow. The only way to keep it happy is to feed it more sales. If you don't feed it constantly, it punishes you, brutally.

When you aren't feeding Cashflow sufficiently, you will lay awake at night trying to figure out what sacrifices you will have to offer. And, there will be sacrifices. When you _are_ feeding Cashflow, you will wonder how much longer you will be able to feed it. You will know how much Cashflow runway you have. You will know when you will be out of money.

Consulting is just a game of kicking the run-out-of-money can farther down the street. When it catches up to you, the game is over.

I'd echo many other things I've seen in this thread:

* Charge for specs
* Charge high rates for good work
* Pay your taxes
* Say No to projects you know will be awful
* Don't give discounts for any reason
I left a bunch of comments in that vein yesterday. The thing is, you can’t answer the question of “how to measure air quality” withiut some sort of product. By contrast, if someone asks “how do I manage my time?” the answer can be free.

So if you use a naive filter you’ll be more suspicious of the one case but not the other. But the baseline probability of product mentions is way higher for domains that require products! You can see from my karma and general comment history though that I didn’t make an account to do this. I’ve had an account 8 years and am interested in air quality, to the puzzlement of my peers.

If there were new accounts repeatedly dropping the same products, that would be suspicious. Did that happen?
Yes, I even explicitly mentioned social reasons in the previous comment. A society in which humans are all actively trying to eat each other obviously would not function as well as the one we have, where we generally all agree that it's not all right to eat other humans. The reason for it is not for some nebulous, indefinable moral reason about preventing suffering, but simply because one works and the other does not.
I get how Amazon can be seen as revolutionary, but not how Uber (or even Lyft) is. I mean, when I think of catching a taxi back in the day, the only difference is that I made a phonecall instead of using an app to get the service. If it's the "gig economy-ness" of it, we had hacks in my hometown. Maybe there was a license requirement to be a hack, but it always felt like hacks were just regular schmoes who would charge a flat fee to take you somewhere.
> The Nest thermostat is really great, a huge leap over crappy manual thermostats

In what regard? I've yet to run into a problem with my "crappy" thermostats.
See also: “Why NASA’s newest space shuttle uses a computer chip from 2002”

https://qz.com/317406/why-nasas-newest-space-shuttle-uses-a-...
It is, https://eurocrypt.iacr.org/2019/program.html
It's penny-wise and pound-foolish. Many of the best contracts you can land won't pay for you to do scoping work. Contra the graphic designer orthodoxy, spec work is in fact the norm for the seriously well-compensated professional services sector.

I'm just one perspective on this, there are others on the thread. But this stuff is all I've been doing since 2005 and I'd make a case that I've gotten reasonably good at it, so I'll go to bat for my perspective here and say that the advice to charge prospects for scoping work is bad, and you should avoid it.
I travel a lot (about 100 days in another country in the last year). I live in the UK. I am not implying my anecdote is data - just adding another anecdote to the pile.
They do both. It's relatively rare for a company to IPO without raising fresh capital for the company. There are however often "secondary" share sales where only "selling shareholders" (rather than the company) receive the proceeds.
Code formatting is difficult to read on mobile because the text doesn't wrap properly. You end up having to scroll horizontally to read it all.
It needs to change if the title changes, though.
What is funny is when you see CNBC change the headline/narrative when the market suddenly moves in the opposite direction.

Stock drops 2% at open:

"Markets are falling because tariffs are 100% bearish signal. Sell it all!"

Stock rebounds 2% a minute later:

"Markets are up because tariffs can't stop the American economy."
No, you're right. Portal is effectively iframe without all the security protections.
Yes... this article's headline is absolutely off. The massive one-time compensation from IPO was unavoidable. Outside of that Lyft is now losing LESS money than it was before, beat on Passenger Growth AND beat on $/passenger. Overall, a good quarter but definitely still losing a LOT of money.
> "what about the obvious tracking issues?"

frankly, tracking seems to be a primary purpose of the portal tag. it takes the imperative away from the user so that the server can make the decision about what you see and how intrusive it can be. the point seems to be to shift control to google.
Qt Assistant(Offline doc browser) comes with Qt. You can also use Zeal(supports offline docs for JS/HTML/CSS/TS/Vue/..., OpenGL, Qt, and many others)
I was on the hype train for quite a while jumping between different systems and burning out a lot. It's mainly because I entered web dev when javascript was beginning to eat up the world. Its the only language I know and understand well. (learning Rust and dart now) Lots and lots of ideas and frameworks keep coming up.
Now when i read stuff for the backend its pretty calm and steady. Especially in the java stack. I used to laugh at people writing java. I complained that JVM takes a lot of memory. But I didn't see that JVM still completed >98% of the requests whereas my Node app was completing only around 65% of them. The memory mattered in my laptop but not in the server.

Now we rapidly prototype features in Node and move them to java once the consumers like those features. Even though the stability of an application depends on the programmers, its a good decision to use well tested and stable stacks.
Yep I really feel like a lot of these companies are drunk on spending.
Lambdas on untyped streams? I think I'll pass...

Speaking of dark matter coding, story time: a spare time project of mine involves bringing an actual, pre-generics codebase into the not quite as distant past. That beast still has real, living users! Surprisingly, a frequent complaint is running out of heap memory, so they are happily sharing their magic -Xmx incantations with values that would have been outrageously high when the code was written.
There is some good stuff there.

I kind of feel bad about my first comment because I know it takes a lot of time to do these modifications, the new interface is a clear improvement from what was there before and UX wise it's not bad at all.

It's just that every time I use KDE, I have this feeling that great work doesn't shine as it should because of padding, alignment and box in a box in a box issues. I know these adjustments are a pain to make and that it's a very ungrateful work but it shows.

So, thank you to the design team I guess and keep up the good work.
> Google seems determined to hide network latency with its various prefetching efforts, but since I'm paying for bandwidth, I'd rather just wait the extra couple of seconds.

Google makes money off companies whose goal is to keep you in a mindless state of flow. Having to wait for a page to load disturbs that flow, making it more likely for you to realize you're being monetized and/or just wasting your time, and should do something else instead.
I just made a git alias `fpush` that does --force-with-lease
The licensing has gotten super onerous.
I think you've got the gist of it: we help clients identify processes that are running inefficiently (due to a wide variety of possible reasons) and figure out whether and how we can utilize technology to ease or eliminate pain points.

Our solutions range from simple, commoditized stuff using enterprise tools (e.g. accounting department receives paper invoices, then staff keys them in manually into the accounting software - we convert that to a 95% automated system where invoices are scanned, values are OCR'ed off them and automatically pushed to the accounting system) to "fairly advanced" (e.g. custom APIs, specialized UIs, backend validations/triggers/approvals etc.) that involve a fair amount of programming.

We find most of our clients through referrals (either from existing clients, or from our partners), although we also do some cold-calling and telemarketing.
Are you sure it's an autoimmune disease?
For me when I went to uninhabited islands for example, the symptoms of my illness went away completely.

I believe the problem is that my body is not able to metabolize the toxic air molecules that gets to my bloodstream through my lungs.
The article was saying women wanted more kids and men (if they took paternity leave, in Spain) wanted less, it's not nonsense and it's not sexist nor a charicature. it's pretty much (but paraphrased) what the research is about!
I wonder if capsule networks would be another good, maybe even better, approach for scene reconstruction, as opposed to pooling convnets.
It wasn't farfetched, everyone had the same idea, there were dozens of online retailers that IPO'd in those years. Amazon was just better managed so it was one of the few that survived the dotcom crash.
That's an interesting point. I started my first successful business at 25, but I came from a poor, blue-collar family. I was a tech-head since I was 12, though. Being poor is why I became a software engineer -- my primary interest as a child was in electronics, but I learned early on that you had to be able to afford to buy parts and tools to really do that. I had access to a mainframe computer through my school, though, so programming was free to me and that's what I did.

I never lost the electronics bug, though, and the first computer I ever owned was one that I designed and built myself when I was in high school.

Thinking back on it, although I didn't know it at the time, learning how to work around scarcity really did teach me a lot of skills that were critical to my business and professional successes. That remains true to this day.
Java usually offer one of the easier paths to find decent developers.
I'll never give up my smart home devices. You'll have to pry them from my cold dead hands (or house). I have smart plugs hooked up to Alexa that'll shut everything off without me lifting a finger. All I do is ask Alexa to do it from anywhere in my house. And if somehow I forget to turn things off they all turn off automatically by 3am. My mom is in her 70s and lives alone. I bought her a connected camera for outside her house and not only can she see who is out there from her phone, but I can see as well.
Privacy concerns are a real issue but this isn't a fad that'll simple come and go. It's here to stay!
Building Serverless Python Apps with Azure Functions
When this happens it means that the investments that were made did NOT increase the value of the company. What you want are rounds that increase the value of the company beyond the initial valuation at which it was invested (aka growth)
It seems short-sighted to deem yourself more important than celery. We're both a tiny blip, an eddy in the outflow of energy from a star where we momentarily reverse the flow of entropy in the universe.

If you're not survival-driven, you will eventually be out-competed by something that is. If we don't survive, everything else is pointless.
This is so simplistic. Yeah, it might be better if we had less cars on the road, but the US is very large and not that easy to traverse without cars.
> I’ve finally come to realize that most businesss and developers simply don’t revolve around whatever’s trending on HN.

shocking.

but truth be told,HN have a share on my hate to any IT job in my country, and my past professional decisions.
Making it could be done, Mercurial already exists for example. Perhaps a next-gen version introduced with all the lessons learned over the last decade.

Getting folks to use it would be very difficult due to network effects however.
>The best & brightest in tech are working with the best tools on the biggest problems, and that's what gets talked about

We should be so lucky. Nobody knows who's the best, what the best tools are, or what the biggest problems are. We only know the ones that get written about.

Writers cover what's flashy, who's the best self-promoter, and what makes the most money.
Thanks! I'll give that a try.
Right. At the time, I thought Sears would dominate that business.
They had the big-catalog fulfillment thing down, and had for a century. All they needed to do was take it online. But Sears gave up on general mail order in 1993, when they discontinued their huge print catalog. They thought WalMart and the malls had won.
We don't know if they did a split before going public or not.
You nailed this and this is very thoughtful.
But that's no good because it means the slug may end up having no relation at all to the actual content of the page (after the page has been edited). The only thing worse than no slug is a bad slug. Don't bake bad slugs into your database design.
It does, but it doesn't contain the Qt documentation. It only has documentation for itself.

It might be that something is missing, i just cannot figure out what.
Arguably, smartphones, apps, and usage of the drivers' own cars have together reduced the administration costs, and thus raised the scale at which a provider can profitably operate. That interplay of factors hasn't been around for 100 years.

Although I've often speculated if you could have had an Uber-like service in the 80s, where you register with your credit card on file, and then call a number with a location to get an estimate pickup, and then they page a driver to get you, perhaps with an authentication code.
Don't accidentally delete the entire table because you left off a WHERE clause.
Actually one of the less known features of the JIT is the ability to deoptimize/recompile based on CHA (class hierarchy analysis) or pushed compilation request via invokeDynamic&friends.
This is very true. Their diversification it's not necessarily a good diversification. I think only Uber Eats has the potential to produce some positive result in the mid-term, but it also depends on how much they decide ton invest on it.
>>providing energy to our overlords

The Matrix AI robots do not really need humans to survive. They had a form of fusion. In reality the reason why they created the symbiotic relationship was as a kindness to their human supporters so that the human race would not go extinct.
Facebook was extremely cavalier about data handling and privacy well before they were public.
> Link prefetch/preload puts the loading under the control of the browser

This is a good thing. Many are on metered connections and have data caps.
It's certainly disappointing for people who have been underpaid compared to industry salaries for the last several years based on their belief that their shares were worth more.
What licensing? OpenJDK is licensed under GPLv2 plus Classpath exception, the same as ever.
Thank you so much for answering

>For context, you have to pass a math and literature exam at the end of 8th grade and you get assigned to a high school

But what if someone failed miserably, does one still try to switch collective or choose a more humble mediocre one?

>based on your score and your preferences.

And failed to even get to choose on your own preference (computer science) so you are stuck (electrical engineering) because of failure. Is it worth it to do a switch?

Edit: see I am at a dilemma for the past 9 months in between deciding to stay or just switch highschool to a National College. So far I didn't took any action because thinking that it doesn't matter that much and being far too late for that.
I can see where you're coming from, but for the area that I work in (finance) I can't help but feel the features of the JVM are a net gain rather than a loss.

I'll absolutely agree that it's not good for applications that don't need it's complex machinery. Half my side projects are written in java, and probably could be easier in python.

I'm not sure your metaphor really works here, as you're implying that Java is inherently less efficient/worse than Javascript or Clojure.
I meant pointless to web tech and consumers. Obviously Google has their own reasons.
Solar Balloons
When I see this, I wonder if the shaving industry is fated to always have high margins, just due to the fact that brand power is very strong in the shaving industry.

People don't trust razors they've never heard of. Too dull. I really like my chinese Weishi brand double edge safety razor w/ standard barbasol, and have shaved for about $5 per year for the last 5 years (capex included), so I feel like an outsider looking in.
And I guess it comes with the specter vulnerability?
I had a funny discussion about Uber with my uncle. I said I refuse to use it because they are a shitty company who are only cheap because they are using investor money to subsidise the rides on the plan of forcing the other players out of the market. His answer was that the barriers to entry on private car hire are so low that if Uber are doing this as their plan and I dislike them, I should use them as much as possible, as then they will collapse quicker.
Most likely, it will be added as a per-app permission like everything else. Like location and contact information, there will be apps that use dark patterns which ask for this by default and just bank on enough people being lazy enough to just click through when they install FlappyBirdsGo2020.

Google will shrug its shoulders and blame its users for not being responsible and for 'bad actors' who were in no way enabled by the Goog's primary objective of maximizing its stock price.
Sorry but what is meant by this "specs"? Estimation?
Uber Eats is making money... the financials are clearly listed in its S-1, https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1543151/000119312519...

Uber Eats is currently 2nd/3rd place in market share for food delivery at around 20%, https://qz.com/1549084/doordash-overtook-uber-eats-in-us-onl...

There is a lot more out there on Eats financials as listed in the S-1 and in previous "leaks". Definitely seems like a healthy business where I agree its revenue is much smaller than the overall ride-sharing business, but from a technology standpoint they are likely better than their competitors BECAUSE of having a core ride-sharing business with which it overlaps a lot of ideas like pricing, dispatch, ETA predictions.
I understand. We used to not charge for specs, and this resulted in a lot of "spinning wheels" where we would spend a bunch of time (e.g. 5-10 hours of engineer time) on the specs, and the client would come back with "OK, we will discuss internally and let you know if we have any questions!" and we would never hear back from them. This hurt our bottom line quite a bit, when added up.

It stopped happening entirely once we started charging a token fee. We realized that if we could convince clients to pay for a spec, even if it's a small amount, we have basically "soft-closed" them, which makes the rest of the engagement easier because money has already exchanged hands and trust has been built. Indeed, in our CRM system we move such clients to "existing customer" category, because that's what they are, and we treat them as such. (It also gives us the opportunity to name-drop them when needed, e.g. "we have done business with X").

It does occasionally give clients pause, especially if they are, like I said, just shopping around, and need convincing. But we don't care too much about such clients anyway.
Sounds more like The Fifth Element.

(EDIT: BTW, that was a great categorization of a movie sub-genre!)
The public is an infinite supply of suckers though. Until they go bankrupt, their stock price doesn't have to reflect their financial position. People will buy it if they believe you can dump it to a greater fool later on.
Assertions dressed as facts are not very useful either.
Sounds like when a major college football team schedules a cupcake team for its home opener, and then loses.
The licensing has gotten far better. First, Oracle has just open sourced the entire JDK for the first time ever, and second, instead of offering a mixed free/paid, open/proprietary JDK (with -XX:+UnlockCommercialFeatures flags), it now offers the JDK under either a completely free and open license (under the name OpenJDK) or a commercial license for Oracle support subscription customers (under the name Oracle JDK).
To the tune of...
"Tank!" from Cowboy Bebop
> Furthermore, portals can also overwrite the main URL

> address bar, meaning they are useful as a navigation

> system, and more than embedding content --the most common

> way in which iframes are used today.

Well, this looks like the next hack/scam feature. I really hate to think of the sort of rubbish that this will cause.

> Google says portals allow users to navigate inside the

> content they are embedding --something that iframes do not

> allow for security reasons.

Surely this is exactly why the "portal" shouldn't do this either? Why not work towards fixing the security issues of the iframe?

Regarding pre-loading content in links, they could just implement this in the browser if they think it's really that important. This will destroy your mobile data.

I really wish they had sat down and discussed this with other browser teams to flesh it out. I think part of this is in getting the jump on other browsers, this really will take a long time to implement securely.
Functional programming is a concept, not a magic cure-all for bad programmers.

Java also supports functional elements (though I'm not implying it's a functional language in the slightest).

I could have an optimistic view of programmers, but I feel like that article is heavily slanted towards CS education, which is taught by people who intrinsically understand computer science. I work with people who are definitely not even approaching the middle of the bell curve in terms of skill and efficiency. They still produce work in imperative programming, and without introducing catastrophic levels of instability into the system.