skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I should mention that I worked as a contractor for 5 years, so I'm familiar with how to manage contract-based employment. However, this was on the opposite coast, and since I've been in the Bay Area, I've been working at other people's startups. I'm a bit out of the contractor networking loop.

What I'm looking for is some piece of something a startup wants or needs to do immediately, but doesn't have time.

I'm altering the details on this example so that I'm not breaking an NDA, but the most promising candidate out of the leads I've received is an online service that needs a simple desktop based upload/sync application. I'd be writing the upload/sync app. Stuff like that is what I'm most interested in.
Firefox 3 Goes Live Tuesday! | Tech Jaws
I write on anything. I have a deal with myself that whatever I'm noting doesn't have to be correct or even interesting. Just the act of writing it down is enough.
Wasn't the demo canned? I imagine they just edited the Flash message out.
most of the graduates from indian colleges and universities are not employable - they need extra training anyway - so why not pick them up from high-school and train them and give them employment so that they can come out of poverty ... also they will have experience by the time other peers come out of the university with no experience and employability what so ever ... this innovative model of recruitment should be replicated in all 3rd world countries ... it solves multiple problems at one stroke.
"And he's my hero."

Count your blessings.
I would expect a data warehouse manager should make the list, usually they are bosses of data architects. Not many IT jobs needs more political and technological skill that a DW manager.
It's mainly a re-adjustment based upon the diminished chances of a microsoft buyout. I own MSFT stock (bought some speculatively, expected the deal to fall through, as it did), and at this point Yahoo seems, in fact, quite dead. (I don't mean its properties, but its corporate independence.) I suspect that when it becomes clear that a google deal will happen, yahoo will drop another 30-40 percent. It's really that bad.

What's keeping it up is the continued possibility of a stockholder revolt, which is precisely what needs to happen. (Supposedly, someone was organizing it, but I haven't followed along.) The stockholders need to oust the whole board, and replace it will a cleanup crew, who'll sell out to microsoft.

A google/yahoo buyout won't happen. The gov't (hopefully) wouldn't allow it.
Only the good posts tend to talk about that. You will not 40 on billable stuff, unless you are crazy. There is a bunch of admin/business work to account for, that leaves you billing less than 40 hours per week, at least with still having some sort of life.
A quick and dirty baseline is to take your yearly salary and divide by 1000, giving you an hourly rate.
Teaser page up for Golden Braeburn, a payment processing option geared towards indie mac developers
The article mentions 3 leaving Yahoos, and 3 more in the last 2 years. Hardly a "steady exodus".
I'd love to work on twitter, not so much because I care about the service, but because it's fundamentally hard

Either I'm missing something, you're missing something, or we have different opinions of what "fundamentally hard" means. What's so hard about twitter? You can keep recent tweets in RAM and maintain on-disk per-user "all your friends' old tweets" files.
I find that a moleskine seems too nice to use up with my chicken-scratch quick notes. I tend to like the feeling of crumpling up a post-it after completing the task on it. I can't cleanly do that with a moleskine. Tearing the page out of those things really makes it less pristine and formal-looking.
Yahoo Announces Non-Exclusive Search Agreement With Google
yahoo made a smart move - problem creators now have to calm down for a while - it will give some time to breath and move their strategy as a success ... kind of wait and watch.
An Interview with Douglas R. Hofstadter
Original Yahoo-Google Ad Deal Press Release not TC copy and paste
That's nonsense. I know of no phone or device that does this, it's not like the calculations needed are exactly challenging even for your typical phone with a 200Mhz arm chip.
I've looked into it a little bit and FireEagle(http://fireeagle.yahoo.net/) seem's ok, but it works with Navizon (http://www.navizon.com/) which I think would be a better solution if it provided api access to the free users of it's product.
as pg once said that if enough time and freedom is give to jerry yang to run the company the way he wants then he can prove his worth - i think the time has come that he proves himself and get back the reputation and business as earlier ... good luck to him.
This was about 4 years ago. SharePoint may have improved since then, but the main thing that I didn't like about it compared to Trac was it forced you into a single structure which was hard to change, especially if you weren't the person who originally set it up.

When I joined, a SharePoint structure was already established and filled with out of date design documents. Unfortunately nobody (other than me) wanted to it bring up to date because they were already behind schedule getting things actually working. This in itself is not suprising - unless it's specifically part of their job, whoever sets up this kind of collaboration software generally won't to spend the ongoing effort to keep it organized properly and up to date so rigid structures that look good at the start often end up looking like dilapidated housing projects from the 1970's.

Part of the reason SharePoint sucked was that it offered no intrinsic editing, rendering or linking features. All it could really do is offer a place to put other documents. With Trac or any other wiki, editing and linking pages is trivial so its less of an ongoing effort to keep up to date. Furthermore anyone with the time is free generally free to create a separate collections of pages with whatever organization they want. This means newcomers can easily create new structures that reflects the current engineering design while referring back to the old information.
If you're not one of those poor schleps on the eternal waiting list.
My short and fast rule Is charge about 4-6x your hourly salary of doing equivalent work. You pay more taxes, you are not receiving benefits, and most of all you are doing difficult work. Of course there are exceptions to this rule.

If you make $20/hr slinging code. Consulting that be $80/hr. May seem high, but really it is quite low. The big boys charge $250/hr. I think that rate is fair for small businesses.

If you need justification for charging a certain fee. Research numbers on how much it costs to actually hire someone full-time and all the extra costs associated with it. Time, Interviews, Job board placements, training, benefits(big costs long haul). If your being hired to do something you know and pretty much getting going on day one, they should be paying a decent sum of money for you, because you had already done the legwork, you step in and work.

You are also temporary to them if the contract ends(a.k.a they fire you), as employee you get unemployment(extra cost to the company), exit interviews, more time and money wasted. If you an IC the contract ends, what are you going to do. Look for the next gig, more time spent with no money coming in.

My favorite pricing quote is the one about the artist, name escapes me. A lady asks him to paint her caricature of face and he get out a piece of paper, paints a few lines and she says it's amazing and ask how much, he says 5k or something. She says thats ridiculous it took you five minutes. He responds no it took me my whole life.

I'm not saying I'm picasso or monet or whatever, but the work you do today will be added to your overall experience and knowledge that you will apply to the jobs of tomorrow, and you should be compensated for that. i also don't change $1000/min (it be nice) - sorry for rambling
a few months ago twitter may have been interesting, mostly for the technical challenges. But now I'd rather hack on FriendFeed simply because it serves a supserset of the same purpose and is likely just as hard (in other ways) under the hood. But Paul, Bret, and friends have done an amazing job of hiding that so far.
Talking Business: The Sinatra of Southwest Airlines Feels The Love
There's plenty of code on the Nokia wiki, including a complete compass application: http://wiki.forum.nokia.com/index.php/GPS_Compass

(See also, the location category index http://wiki.forum.nokia.com/index.php/Symbian_C%2B%2B_Locati... )
It is a rare day when a HN comment makes me laugh out loud. Here is your plus one karma. Don't spend it all in one place.
Yahoo Runs Into Google’s Arms
Is a bar-member lawyer responsible for supervising the outsourced work? Can he be disbarred if something is done improperly?

As an example, for outsourcing of public works projects, a professional engineer (PE) must supervise the project and is ultimately responsible for the project. That is to say, he would lose his license if the project were deemed injurious to the public, etc.
Yeah, did anyone visit nationalgeographic.com with Flash enabled before voting this up?
Gramatically perhaps, but in context these sorts of statements about the personal characteristics of groups of people are generally understood to be generalizations.

"Ravens are black" ==> "All ravens are black"

"Germans like beer" ==> "Germans have a significantly greater tendency to like beer than people in general, though of course there are some non-beer-liking Germans"

It could be an interesting question in linguistics to figure out the difference between the two types of "Xes are Y" sentence.
Yahoo Math: $800 Million  $12 Billion
Yes it does. These kind of posts really bringdown the quality of the posts. HN used to be very informative - but these days, the quality of the content has gone down.
Answering others' phones, with unknown callers, is one of those responsibilities that low-ranking workers always prefer to pass on to someone else. Answering phones sucks. The downside is that one might inadvertently offend an important person. ("[Y] speaking." "Hi, this is [X]." "Who are you?" "Your new boss, as of Monday, actually." "Oh.") There's no upside to answering, since responsibility for non-answering is diffused. So the phone is not answered.

There's also conditioning at play. Remember the Grey Phone of Death, in high school? The one that usually carried calls to and from the principal's office, which you could get an in-school suspension for using without permission? Yeah, that phone.
Our Agreement to Provide Ad Technology to Yahoo!
How do you know what you're worth?

Think about what you need to make, and double it. Then double it again. You're probably getting close to what you ought to charge. I expect to pay $50-$200/hour when I hire a contractor (depending on whether they are famous for what they do or not), and when I did contract work I billed at $125/hour. I was reasonably well-known for the field I contracted in, with a published book and code sprinkled throughout the project I supported, and my name appearing daily on the related mailing list--I probably should have been charging more, as I never lost a customer because I cost too much.

Someone once told me that if you, as a contractor, don't get a response of "fuck you!" in response to your estimates about half the time, you aren't charging enough. That's probably really good advice. You'll work less, but work better, because you can really devote yourself to the clients you do have. This assumes that you are really good. If you aren't really good, then you'll just have to take what work you can get at whatever rate you can get. Doing fantastic work fast is more important than working cheap, because people will recommend you if you're good and expensive (they'll say, "This guy is a bit pricey, but he does amazing work") but probably not if you do crap work and don't pay enough attention to them (if they say anything at all about you, they'll say, "I can never get this guy on the phone, and he does sloppy work, but he works cheap").

If you were hiring a contractor, which of those choices would you call? And which kind of customer would you rather work for? The cheap customer always demands even more than he's already getting, and expects to be treated like a king for it. The customer that wants great work is grateful when he finally finds someone that will deliver--at just about any price.

Also note that the larger the corporation, the more you need to charge to deal with their red tape. You will have to invoice according to their rules, you will have to keep yourself updated in their vendor database, you will have to deal with additional tax forms, and you will have to get sign-off on projects from more people. Working in a big corporation will also drain the life from you at an alarming clip, because they will have meetings over the stupidest crap--you'll be getting paid huge sums for eating donuts and listening to endless arguments over what to name a table or a variable, but you will probably die a little inside, as well. After my first couple of experiences with big corporations, I began to charge extra for soul death (that's not how it appeared on the invoice...I just added another $25/hour to the rate).
Then maybe Canonical will run a marketing campaign and future people will have an OS duopoly of OSX and Ubuntu.
Hey I wasn't using google to establish the truth-value of a proposition. I was just trying to show that there's wide-scale usage of 'radiation' to describe what an electromagnetic wave is.
Quantum Physics Revealed As Non-Mysterious
This won't happen, as the "Change in Control Employee Severance Plans" is explicitely activated as soon as a change of control happens (election of new board).
There's a difference between checking that the code works overall, and checking that each individual component works.

Anyways, I realize I'm in the minority (in many ways..), but I find that if I have a crapload unit tests, then I'm more inclined to not want to change how something works (because then I'd need both new code AND new unit tests - for everything).

To me, that's a bad thing

As an aside, is there any studies that show that the proliferation of unit testing in the last few years has actually reduced the number of bugs and/or decreased development time _overall_?
Not exactly: It forces you to throw away bad code inside a component _that conforms to the unit test_. If the unit test inherently tests something that isn't optimal for the larger problem then you're no further.
Yahoo Announces Deal With Google; Calls It Part of "Open Strategy"
Fair enough, but it does seem a bit like splitting hairs. One hacker's alpha is another's general release candidate.

What I was hoping this article was about was whether or not private WHATEVERs were a good idea at all. Let's say you've got some software that does something interesting. Should you slap "invite code needed" on your home page?
Mobile Advertising
Seems like facebook is going through the trough of disillusionment of the hype cycle. I'm sure last year it could do no wrong.

Did Zuckerberg pull some douche moves or was he savvy?
Would you have acted similarly?
The Price of Convenience
Can Twitter Make You More Literate?
First Round's Josh Kopelman on the new Yahoo Search Deal
You forgot the Greater Than (>) sign. It's REAL important to the point of the title...
I like the "pitched Sequoia in pajamas" story. That takes some balls.

Also might shed some light on why Sequoia never got in on Facebook...
> I wonder why someone hasn't already transitioned Twitter to a publish-subscribe architecture internally, and used a bunch of queues to buffer the impact of load spikes ( a slow tweet is not the same as a dropped tweet! ).

c.f. Starling : http://rubyforge.org/projects/starling/

As others have pointed out, it's not the messaging that's hard, it's the ad-hoc services-- friends-of-friends timelines, keyword search/subscriptions, etc. that are hard to scale and are what is bringing twitter down:

http://www.hueniverse.com/hueniverse/2008/03/on-scaling-a-mi...

Which, to jzawodn's point, is actually really similar to what FriendFeed is doing under the hood, and doing it well.
>Posted Jun 26, 2008 2:25 PM

scared the hell out of me.
As much as monopolies hurt business and innovation I set two benefits to this:

1) As a publisher using Adsense I have much more relevant ads with more advertisers flocking to one supplier.

2) As an advertiser I have access to a nearly unlimited amount of channels in almost every market.

I'm sure one day we might look back at this as a negative thing but for now I still hold respect for Google.
Yes. Possibly, depends on what is done and went wrong.

In U.S. we have a few people from Florida Bar who do most U.S. related clients.

Most work undertaken in our U.K. offices with the usual pre/post reviews by the senior legal team/section-head to ensure accuracy, consistency, competency etc. but most of the menial tasks can be done by others.

Everyone gains: juniors acquire skills and experience, seniors save time and can focus on other tasks.

Of course no work is passed until signed off etc. etc.

Legal businesses in U.K. are continously audited by Law Society and other auditors/regulatory bodies so everything conforms to set standards, hence nothing to worry about for clients in these respects etc.

Hope that helps :)
Recession Survival Strategies for Business
A lot of great opportunities appear during difficult times. For smart people under 30, the coming "next Great Depression" is a boon. For as long as we've been alive, social connections have mattered a lot more than hard work and talent. That is going to change.
Mod_failgracefully (Bram Cohen)
Comet is neat, but in broadcast situations like this it doesn't really matter if there's a delay, just like it doesn't matter that there's a 10 second delay for radio listeners.
If you are a business, having an online presence is always important. Especially if you are able to incorporate ecommerce elements based on your business model.
The problem is the people who don't see this guy is dead on right.

The Fed is trying to get more money out into the economy but debt is eating it up before it can do any good. Now they are going to try raising interest rates to get more outside investment but were messed up by the EU also announcing there own interest rates may rise.
In UK there is much evidence showing as the economy here slows down, people are spending less on the high-street and more online.

Hence even if you are a small shop, you should get online. You never know what can happen.
Disallowing reassignment would leave a finite amount of (useful) keyphrases; my business model is to charge for people who wanted to keep their keyphrases for a duration of time.

Maybe I should make that more clear...

Detecting circular assignments is a great idea though, thanks!
It really depends, I think. If you know the person or has a very good recommendation from a friend, then Id test it out. I am currently working on a friend of a friend (recommended highly by the latter friend) who resides in NZ (I am in sydney). Comms is a problem. It is a very new thing but I could really use his presence in Sydney.

But I am new to this game, so I cant tell you the otherside of the story.
I would totally use something that used facial recognition to automatically tag all my facebook or flickr photos with my friends names/profiles.

Anyone here with facial recognition experience care to chime in?
I admit I don't really come from a corporate IT background, but don't a lot of those pretty much sound like almost the same job: "Guy in charge of some big ugly database system"?
>My favorite pricing quote is the one about the artist, name escapes me.

I've heard that story. It's probably apocryphal, but instructional.

The artist is Picasso (at least in the variation I encountered).
This is actually pretty common. The pre-post-date is the shelf availability date of the magazine.
I feel a special kind of levity whenever I read something Hofstadter's written, or when I listen to Feynman speak.

Is there anyone else who does that?
The scuttlebutt is that Facebook actually passed on Sequoia because of Peter Thiel.
That's a hot domain name... have you owned it forever or did you buy it more recently?
Thanks for this. Theres some really useful ones I hadn't heard about before.
This is a good rule of thumb, and probably the most common one. It's basically identical to 2x your hourly rate as an employee. (FT employment is often figured at 2000 hours/year.)

So if you want the equivalent of $75,000/year, charge $75/hour.
Anyone know who is behind perfect-woman.com?
I would bet my bottom dollar that http://www.perfect-woman.com is a hoax. Claims to have developed a humanoid robot with an IQ of 130, which, I would imagine by definition would pass the turing test. I thought the best estimates said we are at least a couple decades away from being able to pass the Turing Test? Just wondered if anyone knew what was behind this. Reminds me of "The Turk" chess playing automaton hoax of the 1700's.
Merlin Mann coined the term "Hipster PDA" for this back when the GTD philosophy was taking off.

http://www.43folders.com/2004/09/03/introducing-the-hipster-...
Hah, at least 10 HN'yers are sucking on mama's milk in their twenties while dreaming of becoming .com-millionaires. Hey, how about starting to pay your own rent as a first step towards world domination? :)
Malcom Gladwell and Stephen Pinker are two writers to mold my mind recently.
Some of the calculations here are fine, but it leaves out by far the most important cost of contracting: dead time. If you're a contractor and you work 2000 hours/year (50 weeks) for five straight years, you've got a sweet gig. Most consultants work 3 months on, 3 weeks off, 6 months on, 1 month off, etc. So don't forget to factor this in.

I recommend not relying too much on calculations: the market sets your price, not a calculation. If your peers charge $100/hour, it doesn't really matter if your spreadsheet tells you to charge $70 or $150.

Also, what's with the reference to price fixing at the end? Have people really gotten in trouble for announcing their consulting rate? That would seem extremely odd to me. Most contract designers or developers have a standard rate, and don't keep it a secret.
Of course it's a hoax, and anyone laying down any sort of estimate about when AI will pass the Turing test is full of it. We don't even know what intelligence is yet, so it's impossible to truthfully estimate when we'll be able to duplicate it.

When we do finally figure out what intelligence is and the first batch of AI machines starts coming out, it won't be human like at all, that's too hard and pointless, it'll be cars that can drive and other non human like things that are actually helpful. It'll take years after that before we get it to the level of faking human behavior.
Facebook's Thrift Project officially in Apache Incubator
I was the first person to register Social.com back in 1995.
How can a teenager get a programming job over the summer?
I am a high school senior who is very talented at programming (at least if I say so myself). In my junior year I was a USACO finalist, so I know my way around algorithms. I know how to program in Java, Python, C++. I have successfully wrote a website in Django in the past. I am now looking for a job for the summer. I have looked at Rent A Coder but it seems inefficient: most of the time is spent on hunting down a manageable project and discussing the problem with the bidder, who usually don't even understand the problem! Does anyone have any tips on how to find a job? I am not looking for high pay, but it should be interesting.