skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Where to hire for short specific technical help?
Like many here I have ${dayjob}, side hustle, trying to learn new things, do life, and everything else.

After doing software for a long time, I'm finding that while I enjoy the technical challenge, learning _everything_ required to do it all isn't as fun as it used to be.

Particularly in the side hustles, I often come across something where I've got a "good-enough-for-now" solution, knowing very well I'm incurring technical debt.

At the same time I also am acutely aware that there any number of people out there that have solved that exactly problem, already encountered all the hard to learn lessons, and could replace my good-enough solution for an excellent one in the fraction of the time.

Where would you recommend I turn to to hire someone to solve small and specific problems?

Yes, I could ask on stack overflow or another forum, but I want to pay someone for their time to come and implement the solution.

Should I just put small projects on some freelancing sites? If yes, which ones? If not, where else could I look?

Here are a handful of some concrete examples I've come across in the last 6 months:

- finishing off a hacked together CI flow for a django app for minimal downtime

- Evaluating and finding the right html/js component to allow thousands separators in a text field

- Fine tuning twilio video performance and multiple streams

- Setting up a good developer workflow for doing nicer form layouts in django
I guess the question then is how much of the trilobites range also depends on its neural network
The email clearly states that only the excess amount will be refunded. Yes the author decided to invest another $9,975. It is clearly his mistake.
There is nothing more beautiful than not being able to delete malware because it is currently running.
i’m not accusing them of anything and i think it’s alright to use some help, but just look how big the number of upvotes is compared to the amount of positive comments? why does a niche product take such a high spot?

why are so many people upvoting but only so little commenting? how is it that only a minority commented positively the product?

this isn’t like a typical #1 post

makes you suspicious doesn’t it?
You associate it with spam because spam uses effective subjects. There are a handful of effective subject forms that are used in essentially every email campaign and transactional email, and a sharp drop off to a long tail of subjects that people ignore.
I may sound stupid, but I didn't even realize it was proprietary until it started asking me questions about data collection and too much bombarding on feedback collection. "Why did you uninstall fig". Your comment nailed it and I immediately uninstalled it.
This is just to show that even experienced developers like us could be easily misled by companies almost looking like an open source initiative.

No offence to the founders - but I am not going to trust access to my entire filesystem by a proprietary software just based off some projected goodwill + marketing.

Thank you.
Musk wants end-to-end encryption for Twitter DMs. It may not be that simple
I have witnessed this working at FAANG where people usually have the choice to allocate their grants into either risky options or safe, straight cash. The amount of people I see going all-in into the riskiest option and then proceeding to not understand why they lost their "compensation" (?) when the stock drops frightens me.
GHC extensions, StrictData (strict data structures) or Strict (strict evaluation for everything).
Valve showing its corporate greed. Should have left months ago.
... and even if I did, I wouldn't dare to use the adverb "accidentally" to describe what happened.
The Life and Death of the Original Micro-Apartments
Personally I hope a day enough people join to push a law that impose banks to have a standard open API (like SEPA OpenBank, witch is mandatory here in EU BUT only open to institutions not private citizens) open to any customer NOT ONLY as read-only but also for disposing transactions to avoid the need of crappy web-banking porcals.

Unfortunately too many use computers every days without even understanding how can they work for their user profit instead of some third parties mostly employing the human customer as a data cow and small-microfinance bank...
The blobs are back[1]! Yeah, that's rad! :D

[1] Officially, they were still available as a font, some amazing people continued to create blob-moji for the new emojis since their deprecation: https://github.com/C1710/blobmoji
It's the opposite [1]:

"taller soldiers are more likely to survive battle and that taller parents are more likely to have sons". This was based on his research of British Army records from the First World War, which showed that "surviving soldiers were on average more than one inch (3.33 cm) taller than fallen soldiers"

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Returning_soldier_effect
Apparently there is no such thing, so never.
Weaker fundamentals? Do you really think the relationships with third world countries are more strained than were during active colonization? Russia and China did a lot of work with their infrastructure programs but I am still not sure they have the upper hand.
It is not an RFC, it is an I-D (Internet Draft).
This post reminded me again of how different neurotypicals and neurodiverget people think, and it's showing in the comments.

Most people are going "that's not a great idea"... well guess what, the author was concerned enough about their privacy to ask an expert out.

Well, for folks with conditions like ADHD it's still likely easier than actually maintaining a list, and this difference in effort required is something I think a lot of neurotypicals don't understand fully.

(To give an example of how something is more "tough" as opposed to "Just do it already!": Imagine you have to wash dishes. Easy, right?

Well, what if you've just come back from a mentally gruelling day at work and just want to order takeout and sleep? Surely it's still "easy"? Well it's about that hard "normally" for some ADHD people without having spent 8 hours at work.)
I agree that the system should be better and it's too much to hold someone's money for that long. At the same time, attempting to toy with a system you don't know is a recipe for trouble.
Ok. So fat is actually water. Then if i drink less water i will loose weight.
> What happens when a citizen states an opinion that the government deems misinformation or disinformation?

Well, what does happen?
I've tried almost every tool, both free and proprietary, including GnuCash, before finally landing on ledger a few years ago. Ledger, when supplemented with little scripts, was the first tool that could handle the complexities of my financial world.
I thought this was funny.
Weird comments in the thread about how he/she should have known better.
Author is not making a complaint to demand internet outrage. There is no inflammatory justice warrior content here. Sheesh!

Author admits they screwed up, decided to share the screwup, and who hasnt been trough that exact dunder blunder?

Fun short read 8/10.
did the same too.

screw you fig, thank you for enlightening me.
LOL. Touche.

Im a quarter inch shy of 6’2’’. So, indeed, 6’1’’.

My old man is 6’4’’ and when I was young he’d rib on me that I never got past 190 (we’re metric background). Now I don’t care much about height. At 70, he’s shrunk to my eye level and of all his traits height is the one Id rather not have inherited and gotten his monastic character instead.
You only have one life
This addresses some of my misgivings with pandas: https://tomaugspurger.github.io/method-chaining.html
Wouldn’t really call it a “basic principle”: as with anything else, it really depends on what you assume your audience knows (and you will need to make assumptions about that). If you are describing advantages of your new CRDT over past ones, most likely expanding that into “conflict-free replicated data type” will not help any of your readers; if you’ve come to a statistical physics lecture, “BBGKY hierarchy” might be even more evocative than Bogoljubov-Born-Green-Kirkwood-Yvon (seriously, I know the concept but just had to look up one of the surnames).

Of course, it’s possible to speak about either of those things without assuming this knowledge, but this is then a very different talk, most of which will be useless to most of the people who do already have it (not all—it’s useful to occasionally read introductory stuff on topics you think you know!). This is essentially the same thing as power-user usability: it can and does evolve into gatekeeping if left unchecked, and a fresh perspective is a useful check, but assuming everyone is a novice is not the right approach either.

(Some mathematics books choose the worst of both worlds: you really do need to know X to read this book, but “to make this book self-contained” we just included a short two-chapter summary of X that instills horror in anyone who doesn’t know it and forces everyone who does to dig through every word searching for conventions or non-standard assumptions. I’ve been in both categories, sometimes simultaneously. On the other hand, other introductory sections of this kind are remarkably crisp summaries that I go around recommending to everyone.)
That's an interesting take - a kind of "default by elimination".
Sorry not to spot this reply earlier.
I assume everyone here in opposition will call their House Rep and Senator's office on Monday and express their disapproval. If your representative is a Republican, then make sure to say you are not happy if they help Disney.
Off topic but thanks for informing me of explainshell.com! I'm sure it'll come in handy next time I need to re-figure out how what curl flags do etc.
Nope already knew about that site, it leaves out a tonne of countries, including Australia (which I mentioned is my country)
they’re only using open-source for their advantage without giving back

Fig completions are made by a group of unpaid volunteers and are incompatible with any other completion system

Fig pretends to be developing the product collectively in the open, but don’t give any code back to the community

of course they’d welcome everyone who wants to be an unpaid volunteer and improve their product in their own time without any expectation of a return

https://github.com/withfig/fig/issues/35

is it morally correct to exploit your contributors trust like that?
Modern Pandas (Part 2): Method Chaining
I work in the financial advice industry, and I honestly personally believe current legislation in most countries have truly failed to protect normal people from bad financial advice, despite that being their entire point.

The problem is, giving financial advice en-masse is very expensive and risky for a company. You need to ask a lot of questions about the users situation (assets, debt, income, dependants, etc) to make an informed decision. If you give bad financial advice, your putting yourself at big legal risk. The language has to be very specific (aka hard to understand for normal humans). And often the advice comes out as rather un-opinionated and general, which for most people means it's hard to actually action and put in place. All in all, it's a big investment, big cost, stresses out your legal team - which means less companies choose to do it, which in turn make it less accessible.

The alternative camp is very clearly just choosing to give 0 advice. Just giving access to investment products, with a full hands off 'make your own choices man' approach. Think robinhood. This is where people make mistakes.

The weird thing is while legitimate companies are afraid of giving advice, anyone with a social media presence can get online and talk whatever smack they want, with very little worry of blowback. One of the biggest mistakes I see is somebody from one country (say AU) watching a youtuber talking about another country (say US) like it's a universal truth. Different financial systems have their own metas depending on government retirement schemes, importance of credit scores, mortgage systems etc. Most useful and practical advice is country specific.

Legislation has just fully failed to protect consumers from bad advice, by making the barrier to entry so high for legitimate companies looking to inform at scale that it's not financially viable - compared to just doing the hands off 'not our problem man' approach. They've also done nothing to stop people taking advice from randoms online (not that they really could). Unfortunately visiting a personalised financial advisor in the same way you'd visit a doctor, is just expensive and not an option for most.
It makes me wonder if I've waited sufficiently long for Pascal to be a Niche language again yet.
Don’t bother asking here about anything with the word ‘blockchain’ since not only it is poisonous here, but it is guaranteed to be quickly dismissed without any curiosity of the 1% of applications it may have. Here are a few that are part of that 1%:

[0] https://skiff.org

[1] https://ens.domains

[2] https://impervious.com/beacon
I think I would very much be dissatisfied as well after finding out that someone can arbitrarily devalue my opinions. The original comment by the author wasn't even that negative in my opinion, it just outlined real problems with Fig. Someone didn't like that though and the author got the hammer for it.
Yes, but water weight wont hold
It might be harder to hire, but you'd probably end up with people who thrive in that environment.

Will this get you to where you want to be faster? Dunno.
they are excited by our “lowcode for CRUD apps” RAD tool whose next-gen I/O requirements are the reason we made Photon- “minimum level of ambition that is useful” - see http://www.hyperfiddle.net
No, that's how you specify your length in the metric system. I'm 5'14, or should I say 'between 6'1 and 6'2'?
Serious curious question. Why would you want to become American if you’re Canadian?
Sorry, you're absolutely correct. Brain fart. The equation I wrote actually is for an exponential, whoops.
Even when the models are trained on data that should coax the outcome they want to see they're still getting undesirable results. Reality is simply refusing to bend to their will. I wonder at what point they either just fudge it or give up.
Writing in Markdown with Apostrophe
I agree with the article that the study is flawed in its unwillingness to exclude the all-H and all-T answers. But I’ll go further: the original study is just silly.

“Make a sequence that looks random” is sort of a nonsensical ask. Looks random to whom? To our algorithm, is what they meant. There’s no such thing as a randomness test that can look at a sequence and decide “is it random?”, so this algo measures something else and uses it as a proxy for “looking” random to…the study authors, I guess? There’s no ground truth here; it’s chasing a ghost.

I don’t know what information we could even hypothetically gain from knowing older people score lower according to this algo—-perhaps that the paper’s authors are younger than 60 and thus picked a different “randomness-looking” algo than they would if they were older? At best that older people have an equally incorrect but qualitatively different idea of “random looking”?

Of course we did not learn that; we only learned that older people pick all-H or all-T more. But my point is that there wasn’t really anything interesting at stake anyway.

(Edit: expanding a bit)
Reveal.js: open-source HTML presentation framework
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27277819

> Telemetry: Fig has basic telemetry in order to help us make product decisions. We currently give the you option to opt out of all non-essential telemetry by running `fig settings app.disableTelemetry true`. This removes everything except for one daily ping. We use this ping to help us understand how many people were using Fig.
> A piece of proprietary software that collects data on basically everything on your machine and is unavailable on Linux? Nice!

new slogan: "it's like Grammarly, but for code!"

meanwhile, just like Crypto AG, Grammarly (so useful btw to have a program that gives full access to any text-editing a person does, outside of the browser) is a small NSA project. but seriously, the onus is really on these companies to disprove this, and they have been found wanting.

yes it does sound like a conspiracy theory... but we know better now thanks to leaks involving Snowden, Crypto AG, etc.
Another terminal to try - cool! Another terminal that wants me to log in - not cool.

I wish I could try both Fig and Warp, but I can't: giving my email to a terminal is insane and I would never do that.

I wonder what is it that two similar projects popped up recently for quite non-business lucrative usecase but both require something that the very target audience will mostly never agree to?
I really don't like seeing companies use GitHub just as an issue tracker for a proprietary product. Something about that feels... wrong, almost like they're using the platform but giving nothing back.
Solving them on a global scale, is likely a bit unrealistic on your own, but there LOTS of ways to work on the problem, especially with low cost home tinkering.

Photovoltaik, desalination, automated greenhouses, etc.

My point is basically, that I never had the fear of being out of projects, when there are so many problems waiting to be solved. My problem was more, picking the realistic ones. But when your goal is the tinkering, than it likely will not hurt failing a unrealistic project and learning in the process.
For visualizations, I do two things... (1) use little scripts to generate gnuplot input, (2) convert ledger files to beancount files, and use fava. Both have their place. For forecasting, ledger has some built-in capabilities, although I've never used them.
President Xi is white? (He banned it apparently).
To give credits where it's due: Fig's data collection policy is explained in a very straight no-bullshit language and is perfectly reasonable. Instructions on how to disable telemetry are written right there. I would be okay with that policy but I will be disabling it anyway without any consideration.
> OpenMoji's neckless people

Legomoji, even the ":)" face matches :D
That is a stretch. You comment has nothing to do with copyright. If you want to talk net neutrality summit something to discuss that. This thread should be about the harms of copyright
> And often the advice comes out as rather un-opinionated and general, which for most people means it's hard to actually action and put in place

I agree with this. It seems that I have to make all the choices myself to shield the company from any responsibility so why should I pay some fee for the advice? No wonders that people get advice from random videos on YouTube or any equivalent source.
See also: Smart Motorways in the UK. Otherwise known as "how can we funnel billions of pounds into the construction industry for zero or negative benefits to tax payers"

https://www.electropages.com/blog/2022/03/smart-motorways-ki...

https://transportactionnetwork.org.uk/campaign/climate-chang...
I have a gnarly python script which converts all the CSVs I need into a ledger format file and classifies them into accounts by merchant.

I do have to go fetch the CSVs myself, and if I want a purchase from e.g. Amazon to go into a category which isn't Expenses:Goods:Amazon I have to move it, but all in all it does the two things I need: puts my purchases into buckets and makes me look at my expenses on what should be a monthly basis but is closer to quarterly lately.

This is with ledger-cli, rather than GnuCash, but same principle I think.
I switched to an iPad Mini with Notability. There are no downsides. I rarely leave the house without it these days.
Comcast is big enough to develop that new tech every 3 years, which has to be bought by smaller companies. Basically squeezing money from smaller ISPs every 3 years, eventually eliminating them from the market, and making money on them
So the “we acquire assets not liabilities” argument forwarded by Disney… I have heard of many acquisitions that follow this model.

Any lawyer/lawyer-adjacent people have any thoughts about the validity? It does feel pretty uncontroversial that Disney owns the book contents but is it obvious that the royalty payment scheme must transfer with that? But the opposite seems odd as well…
Personally I'm dyspraxic. This makes the actual physical act of writing more difficult than for most, especially if the content needs to be legible when I no longer remember it. And if I am taking care to write legibly, they're too slow for whatever I'm taking notes on.

This means for me, physical notes are not the solution they clearly are for many others. I've made peace with that, though for many years my "folder of markdown" did leave me with a feeling of not doing it right when so many people raved about how physical notes improved their experience. I always found the practical difficulties outweighed the benefit of the forced mode switch for me. I guess my point is to not stress about it - while paper notes are the right tool for many people, the right tool for you might be digital notes.

(I've also settled on obsidian these days, and the growth of obsidian and notion is also kind of vindicating for my folder of markdown approach when others were using Evernote/onenote)
That's too bad, the usb is broken on my old kindle, the experimental browser in it is too old to use to connect to the Calibre server feature and the only option I had left was sending mobi by mail. (It does not read epub)
Can you think of any other solution ?
Just block mail.ru, vk.com (clone of Facebook), odnoclassniki.ru (clone of classmates.com), and gov.ru, and you're good. I'd say it's "reasonable".
I used them as travel notebooks and they're indeed great.
Yes, I had a very similar situation to you; startup (I took a salary though as we were profitable from day 1) and assets enough (nothing to do with crypto). Banks don't like any risk or differentiation of process; it is just easier to just say no. Even if you have the cash to pay for the house (which I did in my case); you can pay for the house in cash but the banks still, in some situations (like having a startup) they won't give you a mortgage (in my case, I knew I could get a far better interest rate for my money than the interest rate of taking a mortgage, so I didn't want to put my money in).
There is a Minecraft mod that is really really fast and it corrupts your world very quickly. I am thinking of rewriting that mod and making it "slow" but correct again. So yes, for me it is very important that my software works. I don't need broken software.

>How often do you experience "errors" that corrupt your database files?

I don't know what you mean by this sentence. ACID has nothing to do with that. It goes way beyond that. For example, confirming that updates have been written to disk has nothing to do with database corruption. You can lose writes/data without database corruption.
Ah, so it is. The converter I used gave 5 feet 8.11 inches, and that last number tripped up my mental rule for rounding measurements in 12-inch feet such that I came out incorrectly with 5'9".
mschrage (the author of the comment you're responding to) seems to have a personal affiliation with the project.

If you assume he's contributing here in good faith (my assumption) then I'd say it's safe to say that it does in fact disable telemetry.
Do you have a link? Curious about the use cases
I suspect many of the “bad” responses are smart aleks saying “11111111” is just as likely a “62536164”.
Point her at AdaFruit.com, buy her a gift card

In particular have her browse https://learn.adafruit.com/ to look for stuff that interests her
I took the digits of a random phone number in my memory (excluding area code) H for odd T for even
Hm, my Kindle is in Airplane mode since I bought it 7 years ago.

So this should work wonderfully
The ACLU is the AMERICAN civil liberties union. So talking about them in an US context is the proper context