skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Non-obvious pros/cons of contracting vs. full time work?
I've been contracting full time for a company for the past four months or so. I get paid pretty well, but of course have to pay self-employment taxes and have to handle my own insurance, etc.

It looks like there's a good chance the company will offer to hire me full time. This will presumably mean less taxes and some decent benefits, which will be nice, but will probably come with a pay decrease to even it out. Thats's all fine.

My main question is this: what should I consider besides all the obvious stuff (taxes, pay, benefits)? For example, this is a fortune 500 company, and I'm a little worried about being sucked into the politics of working for a company that large, whereas I've been able to stay out of any of that as a contractor. Is this a valid concern? What else should I consider before making this decision? What are the non-obvious pros/cons of full time work for a large company vs. contracting for it?
Or: "How can you tell you're an internet celebrity? By having people code your name into a web app".
I agree that's what happened. But I'm still trying to think of whether there are any other cases of this in the last decade. There certainly have been other paradigm shifts. Yet i'm having a hard time thinking of anything which both gained significant prominence and then was left behind. Maybe OpenID?
When I read his comment I automatically converted it in my mind to "Common Lisp has stood still for the past 25 years." 25 years is probably too much, but compared to clojure and racket Common Lisp seems archaic, like reading Shakespeare. If it has had updates they've been on the edges, making the standards bulkier and more arcane, harder to parse.
$500 is the new $20.
Net Neutrality Suffers Congressional Setback
I made a list a while ago but it's a couple years out of date. It's probably a big underestimate because I last updated it before Clojure started to boom. I'll add anything people mention in this thread and if anyone knows more, email peter @ pchristensen . com

http://www.pchristensen.com/blog/lisp-companies/
Adrian Chen from Gawker pretends to be cancer patient?
A post on Reddit from a person who said they were going to end their life using Oregon's 'Death with Dignity' program is a hoax according to Adrian Chen from Gawker, he's bragging it was him all along.
In terms of the design, it's fairly flat right now....try to highlight the one or two things you want peoples' eyes to go to first.
I have some experience with fantasy sports, and my two cents is that it seems like you'll have a hard time getting traction. Although fantasy sports are popular, you're not really tying into any existing fantasy games. You're creating a brand new game from scratch, and that will be hard to do.

As a user, I couldn't care less about it being "social" or not. It's either going to be fun or not fun. I think the landing page should be overhauled to somehow show me why it would be fun. I wasn't convinced enough to join.

Also, I don't know what country you're targeting, but it's probably not mine (U.S.). Maybe if I were interested in cricket, soccer, or tennis, I would be more likely to join.

Edit: I tried clicking on the links for upcoming events, and they all redirected me to the home page. I wanted to browse around the site before joining but I wasn't able to.
Is the iPad 2 worth the Upgrade if you have an iPad already?
Why Does Google Hate SIP?
The price of data
Looks like a ton of fun.... but I don't follow football, cricket or tennis.

If there was American Football, hockey and basketball I can think of at least 10 people I'd send this site to right now.

Also, kudos to including a real user signup alongside the facebook signup.
Why Nokia failed: 'Wasted 2,000 man years' on UIs that didn't work
I fail to see your point. Every copy of a git repo is a full copy [1] - unlike a svn checkout. If you follow a centralized server model with git you have a copy on the server and every workstation it is checked out on. With svn, the full repo only exists on the server. Why couldn't you have a redundant, backed up central git server?

[1] Not a substitute for real backups of your repo!
Perhaps it is from growing up with Star Trek, but for me, space exploration and settlement is a no-brainer. I almost feel as if that's our purpose as a species. We're meant to evolve and expand. That's what we've been doing since day one. Space is the logical next step.
So, if a 1MW pulse can shoot through a razor blade, it could also cause a serious wound on a bare skin. I wonder what kind of damage a 10MW pulse would do (aka "laser rifle")?
Well, no. I am coming to Philly next week!! :-)
If you're interested you can sign up to be notified when pre-launch tix are available; that's the action available today.
I think you're confusing "most marketing checkboxes checked" and "best support" in terms of Webkit and HTML5 (and also in terms of Webkit and "finest rendering engine").

For example, Webkit is the rendering engine with the worst CSS 2.1 support of the big 4, last I checked, based on the results of the CSS 2.1 test suite. Yes, it claims to implement all of it, but the quality of the implementation is not as good as the others.

For another example, Webkit is the only rendering engine I know that claims to implement CSS3 Selectors but purposefully does so incorrectly because they think doing it right would be "too slow".

This is one thing IE8/9 have actually been doing right. When they commit to implementing a feature they've been implementing it well. The feature set is smaller than webkit, but there are fewer gotchas in the features they do support...
Better make it two, because after you drink in too much culture, you're going to need to un-acclimatize. :)
The article and your comment share the same deficiency: they don't deal with concrete problems (or at least when the article does it's about edge cases, as you point out). It's all very well for you to have decided that svn > git for your purposes, and I applaud you for having evaluated the two and chosen one based on relative merits. But in order to extrapolate from that to a general counter-argument to "git is better than subversion," you need to a) provide the details of the problems you had with git and b) explain how they are specimens of a general problem which SVN doesn't have.

I don't say this as a git fanboy, just as a techie who hears "I had problems" and instantly wants to hear details so that I can evaluate the argument properly.
"the more highly compensated you are, the less likely that you will actually be able to enjoy the work you are doing."

If you take only one thing from this thread, it should be the above quote. If you need a highly intelligent, hardworking person to do something tedious and dull, how can you convince them to do it? You pay them buckets of money. Examples: programmers in finance, big law firm associates.
Show HN: Super-simple company signup with Google/Facebook
For some reason, we seem to get more respect as contractors than we do as statutory employees.
This is my big problem with Git. TortoiseSVN is extremely well done and fits nicely in my workflow. With Git it feels like a hack. W/o better tools support Git is probably dead on Windows and Mercurial win the Windows world.

Also Git's CR/LF issues on Windows are a pain. The fact that I've never seen an issue with them on any other SCCS, and they seem to cause headaches with Git is another reason it'll have trouble catching on in a big way.
I've never* seen a user-facing command that
causes Subversion to become mystically wedged
and require a new repository for non-advanced users.

It happened to me 3 times already, with my local copy ending up in limbo - as weird stuff can happen when you're deleting a directory locally, with another dev having made changes to its files.

And torching .git and starting over is easier than doing the same with SVN ;)

That's why I'm using git-svn; even when I have to use SVN.
If someone says svn is easier it's because they don't do significant branching. Git and hg allow you to branch sanely. Subversion doesn't. Someone that doesn't get this hasn't learned much.
The intermediary has little control over the quality and delivery of the product being sold, and must be trusted to pay the third party. The risk of chargebacks and fraud is higher thus PayPal cannot afford to underwrite the transactions.
Apple needs Dumbledore to fix old iPad banners
I used SCCS in the 80s. Not sure if that was the one you're talking about though.
The Entrepreneur’s Speech
Why can't anybody write a decent javascript ide in HTML5 that uses all the goodies of multitouch and visual programming so that we can program on the ipad in a 2010s style. Something like yahoo pipes together with decent syntax completion and such alike. When I try to write a program in JS it feels so 80s that I could puke.
I was going to suggest registering betting.ly since it seems like an obvious domain hack, but it looks like it's already taken.
If it would take a recruiter more than 20% more effort to get your salary up by 20%, they are better off putting their time into placing as many people as possible.

Because they can increase their total commissions by 20% if they increase their number of employees placed by that much.
Word!!!
Lean Startup Bundle for SXSW for $99
The discussion of whether you should upgrade from iPad 1 to 2 just seems absurd to me. It's the epitome of a first world problem. I like my gadgets just as much as the next guy, but buying things you already have simply because they're slightly faster and slightly thinner is ridiculous.
Maybe not that obvious, but my facetious comment was along the lines of other languages needing such a long time to catch up with Lisp. And the gist of it being that those all-the-rage features they are including are already present in Lisp. It something that leaves me thinking away, but hey, don't get too serious. I promise to be more direct next time!
There's one other huge factor at work here (for many programmers, anyway). I'm tempted to call it the "wimp factor", but that's too negative, so I'll just call it the "introvert factor". I'm a perfect example...

I was always small for my age and looked nerdy with my glasses and attraction to books, etc. I was always picked last for sports teams, drew little attention from girls, and was usually the first one to be bullied. It even happened in my own family, subconsciously I hope. It was always easier to pick on the little guy to get what you want.

Fast forward to adulthood, and not much has changed, especially with bosses. It seems like my boss was always a sales/business guy, extroverted, and bigger than me. His/her natural reaction was to "bully", probably because they knew they could get away with it. This was for almost everything: project management, discussions about work, and of course, money.

No more. I don't know exactly when it happened, but I decided not to take this shit any more. The more anyone picked on me, the harder I shot back, right between the eyes. Nothing pisses me off more than being bullied, especially about money.

This is not natural behavior for me. (I imagine if it was natural, I would have become a sales person or a lawyer.) I have to consciously work hard to stick up for myself. But as soon as I paint the other person, especially my boss, as a bully, I put myself on even ground. And as soon as they see that, they understand that they can no longer take advantage of me. Only then can I be treated like everyone else.
While I know what you are trying to get at please for a moment think about what you are saying. For most people photos aren't about optical perfection. Photos are a trigger. They are there to trigger a feeling of what a moment was like, to capture what the smells, the sounds and the atmosphere were like at a given point in time. A photo with a new born baby, you and your first girl/boy friend, you an your degree certificate.. these are personal moment with personal feelings. Its about what the moment means to you.

I look at photos I took 10 years ago with my 620x480 camera and I am not upset I didn't take them with a film camera, because the photos still have all the important things to let me relive that moment.
Now I'm convinced that Jaques left HN for good.
Exactly. Looking from the other side, I suspect Java's much more comprehensive library caused more programmers to favour it over C++ than Java's garbage collection ever did.

I think the almost symbiotic relationship between C# and the .Net libraries today is an interesting case. It seems clear that several of the language features added to C# (or the underlying .Net execution model, if you prefer) in recent years were motivated by particular ways of working with the libraries. Usually, we see mostly one-way traffic, with standard libraries trying to paper over any cracks in the underlying language.
This is fairly common in the UK. Over here people use real money instead of funnymoney.
Are you a novice programmer who feels regretful that they are spoiled by the modern world of programming? Confused by your own nostalgia for a time years before you were born? Want to relive the glory days of bliknenlichten, mainframes of solid gold and necks of solid beard, from the comfort of your own home?

Well then you'll love the world of Microcontroller Programming!

You too can spend weeks optimising your opcodes to squeeze them into mere bytes of memory! You'll need the rest of the 8kb available for lookup tables, because your processor is only running at 8mhz!

You too can dream of a 'debugger' as you write and decode your own LED blink sequences!

You too can draw your graphics by timing your own NTSC scanlines!

You too can almost burn your house down using a soldering iron while sleep deprived!

You too can almost lose your mind when you find out that the reason your program isn't working is because your resistors have heated up by one degree since you wrote the code!

It's fun, the tooling to write the code can be as modern as you like, and the community is great.

It isn't as hard as it can be made to sound, precisely because the constraints quickly force you to think small. When you're only trying to make a device for automatically traumatising your cat, the constraints only pose as much of a problem as the much looser constraints you might encounter solving a larger problem with more powerful tools, say, running a website. So the learning curve isn't that steep if you're already a programmer.

http://arduino.cc

http://hackaday.com

http://electronics.stackexchange.com

And if that's still too sissy for you then just build stuff entirely in 555 timers: http://hackaday.com/2011/02/24/555-video-game/
Fixing Chaotic character encoding in MySQL databases (65Gb dataset)
Text messages to replace stamps in Sweden and Denmark
If the work would have mattered to you, you would have found a solution.

Clearly the manager in the article is infallible, and has never had an issue that has caused late/non-delivery.

Excuse 201: My manager p-ed me off so much with his stupid Book of Excuses mind games that I spent all my spare time look for a job elsewhere.
The large binary file thing keeps coming up again and again.

I hear mercurial is working on support for these, but to my knowledge it's not something Git is overly concerned by.

I keep seeing statements like "If you're storing large binary files in version control you're doing it wrong", which leaves me wondering - what's the generally accepted approach for versioning artwork. I'm mainly thinking about source formats like PSD or fireworks PNGs.
You mean respect from the company or from your peers/other devs?
Am I the only one that gets the humor here? Lighten up folks, no need to disparage the author for that line.
>this is a business relationship, first and foremost.

This is only a business relationship. Nothing else and be wary of places that try to make you feel like it's more because they're playing mind games.

If you believe that's too hard a statement and that your company actually has a tighter relationship to you than this; ask yourself what will happen if the company starts having financial difficulty and has no choice but to drop half their staff. Will you survive the cut? What if they keep halving the staff? At some point you will be let go no matter what relationship you think you have. The relationship is only a business one.
3 steps to an easy and inexpensive video testimonial
United Computer Nerds Local 0x55AA?
just a suggestion

for your richest players, if they don't have any change then the decimal points don't show up and the rows don't align as nice. maybe add that in there.

as i said, just a suggestion.
I think this is incredibly true on technical expertise, but as for advocating organizational change instead of a technical solution, being an employee has seemed to offer more respect for me. Granted there are business process consultants that do that exact thing, but I do feel there is some kind of line there with technical experts employed vs. consulting.
Essays Term Papers Should Provide Research Based Information
Writing essays term papers require students to use the proper writing techniques. Writing essays term papers also require students to follow the essay writing rules which they had to adhere in high school and college. With knowledge they will be able to submit good essays term papers.
Or as JWZ put it 8 years ago, the CADT model of software development.

http://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html
I think you missed Tim's point. A better analogy might be duplicating code vs writing a function once and reusing it. Hand-written recursion with the operation inlined is not usually very reusable (i.e. composable); however, if you factor out the recursive traversal and parameterize it by the operation to be performed, it composes much better. But at that point you're writing a library routine, rather than logic specific to the task at hand.

(As an aside: in my way of thinking about software design, generic library code is "free" - it doesn't count towards the number of lines of code for the actual task being solved. I try to make as much of the software that I design library-like, and the core of the app not a lot more than composing these pre-fabricated bits, as possible, potentially even to my detriment in short-term productivity. But this approach handles scale much better, in my experience.)
Having been through a similar circumstance (built a huge application by myself, which later grew into my job) -- one of the major difficulties you'll have is in finding anybody else that can understand your code.

One of the hidden features for a framework, of any sort, is the general understanding of where things are, or can be expected to be. If I work within the conventions of Django, then when I'm hiring somebody, I can ask them if they know Django -- assuming all other things being equal, they'll have a much shorter learning curve ramping up to learn what I've built because they'll know, in general, where to look for certain kinds of things.

If you intend to ever hire anybody, then I'd take every spare minute you have where you aren't coding, and get to documenting the framework you've built.
Social Search Surges Ahead With or Without Traditional Players
Strong agree. It confuses me when people respond to articles about Anonymous and /b/ by saying, "You know, there are lots of other boards on 4chan!" My perennial answer is: So what? /b/ is the only one whose influence leaks out of 4chan itself, like rainbow-colored smog billowing out of a dilapidated smokestack. The article isn't like an encyclopedia entry on Asia mentioning only China; it's like a little kid opening a package of Starbursts and eating only the pink ones. Everyone knows they're the tastiest, and only candy apologists insist otherwise.
Good News, Online Tracking is Slightly Boring
What to do After Making a Billion dollars
Short version: Danish service Post Danmark and Swedish postal service Posten AB are adopting a high-tech system to make it easier to post letters, packages and cards. Users simply text-message the word 'porto' to the number 1900. In return they receive a unique code that is written where people would have previously stuck a stamp. The letter or parcel is then posted as normal, and the code is read by sorting machines just like a normal stamp.
My excuse is that you either whittled down the amount of time available to get the job done, or didn't pay enough to make the job the sole focus of my life for the time required to get it done, so something else came along and took priority instead. You are not the most important thing in my life.

There, now you've been a dick, and I've been a dick. Is this better?
You & me both, Ivan. And like every other controversy on HN, "hard vs. smart" isn't a real debate.

I've got 2 kids; they were 2 and 0.5 at the end of my first company, and 11 and 9 now. And one of the people from whom I learned the most about business was also a founder with kids. So, I'm particularly interested in the dynamics of startups and family life.

One thing I saw work remarkably well was company culture. You can easily create an inclusive and family-oriented culture: have the whole team be local, do lots of dinners and offsites, have after-dinners work-hours where kids are OK, make sure the families get to know each other.

At the first startup I ever worked for, the office was a very large apartment on the north side of Chicago. There was a full kitchen, they cooked dinners, and evening hours were --- at least in the beginning --- of a different character than daylight hours; people worked, but the whole environment was more social, less button-up, and more welcoming.

I don't think they really did this on purpose. It was just very friendly and family-oriented group of people. But I can't see a reason why it would be hard to duplicate and extend the idea. Just set an objective, to allow people to routinely work longer hours when necessary while causing minimal strain on families. Then come up with practices that support the objective. I can think of 10 ideas for that off the top of my head. I'm sure you can come up with 20.

It's kind of remarkable that so few new companies do this (if they did, they'd be made of stupid not to advertise it). Most startups advertise a culture that is almost the opposite of that idea.
There is a difference between focusing on a certain part of the whole and speaking as though that certain part is entirely representative of the whole. It's less like talking only about China in a discussion about Asia, and more like using the words "China" and "Asia" interchangeably. Touhou and tabletop games may not be of interest to a general audience, but these things don't necessarily have to be discussed in depth; they can be covered as briefly as a sentence stating that "4chan hosts a variety of boards catering to various interests, including video games, Japanese culture, and cooking."
I occasionally wish for an e-commerce site that specialises in 'Not made in China'...

What ever happened to quality products from other Pacific Rim economies?
cheap plastic and it looks like opening a tin can. i bet the whole thing dissolves after a year of usage. why didnt they build the ipad more in the way like the microsoft courier? this would be something that i would buy right away. it reminds me a little bit about the first ibook, this was looking like a girls' make-up case. sometimes apple's design is borderline.
Well, in my case it's not a submarine, but a train.

And yes, it is great advantage that I can freely make a branch with the new feature that I just started working on, without having to summon a meeting to let everyone know that a new branch will be created, which is not intended to be used by anyone else even if it's visible to everyone.
You could actually run your entire backend operations from Amazon, as they offer operations as a service so you can get them to do your stock management, warehousing, etc.
CSS2.1 (finally) completed
+ Firefox Sync - I can restore open desktop tabs on my android device when I am on the go