skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: online Work a winner takes it all market? Elance vs. odesk
Hello hacker news community,

I am a frequent user of marketplaces like Elance and odesk where I offer my services as a .NET developer. I thought a lot about the nature of hat market and how many platforms we will have as the markets matures over the next 5 years. The main questions I would like to answer is if that market is a winner takes it all market and what are its characteristics.

For example Facebook is a winner in my opinion. It might get replaced but I do no see multiple social networks co-exist due to strong network effects and switching costs.

For online work and the current platforms available it is not so clear for me. I do not see a big advantage for a developer like me if I signed up with a platform having 15000 or 100000 projects. For a contractor it's kinda the same. A platform with 15000 or 100000 developers does not concern me. I do not see a strong network effect. Switching costs aren't so high as well.

I would expect to have maybe 4-5 big players worldwide. I don't see multiple platforms like over 50+ neither. It would be too hard to maintain for human in my point of view.

However, I have observed something interesting in the data Elance and odesk disclose for the market in USA and Canada. The past two years odesk seems to show a monthly growth rate which is way higher than the growth of Elance if you look at number of projects and number of service providers. I am not sure if odesk managed to steal a market share from Elance since both compani are growing. Anyway, if I look at the exponential growth (oconomy at odesk) it feels like that the reason for that growth can't be only operational excellence which brings me back to market effects/ dynamic.

If you have any more insights I would love to discuss with you because I am personally interested in topic. I think in the future online work will play a big role how humans work.

To sum up, will there be one player one
In that market which takes it all?

Is it just a money game? By money game I mean the player with the most funds will win?

A the end I want to apologize for my English. I am not a native speaker which stopped me from posting earlier, but I still hope m points are clear and we will have a good discussion. I am happy to answer any questions.
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Concept videos are important. They are not saying 2019 will be exactly like this, but they are looking at potential use cases for various interfaces etcetera. When they come up with a idea they particularly like, they don't sit on their hands for ten years. They look at their idea of the future, then they start taking the best parts of that idea and implementing it in the products they are creating.

Since that video they have released or announced two products with the metro interface (Windows 8 & Windows Phone 7). Microsoft also has announced a version of the metro interface for the game console (Xbox 360). The part of the video where the guy takes a photo of the display and transfers it to a page is already possible in a less exciting capacity on WP. Take a photo of something, and it instantly shows up on your skydrive account. The children communicating through the wall display is a possibility today, but less impressive, with the use of a Kinect and a projector/screen. Microsoft actually has developed wall displays in their research division. They also announced yesterday that they will be partnering with a bunch of companies to provide the Kinect in enterprise environments.

Every good microsoft product already has implementations of an idea that is in their concept videos. The average person doesn't go watch their concept videos, so it has no negative effect on their image. Also, thinking of the future does not have to be a distraction from the present. Why is Apple doing better than Microsoft with consumers? They are not associated with viruses, IT departments, ugly products, and office suites. Microsoft = Painful & Not-Cool. Apple also gives their employees more freedom and they push products out when the market is ready, but only when they are ready for them. If Windows Phone came out instead of the iPhone, when it was announced and released, WP would have failed completely.
Alright, I think I understand the rules now.

You earn one "credit" for every dollar you deposit into a registered savings account (or every dollar you pay off a registered mortgage, or whatever).

There's no limit to how many credits you can earn, but there is a limit to how many credits you can spend: a maximum of thirty a day.

Credits are spent by putting 'em into a big slot machine which dispenses prizes whose value and winning probability are unknown. Hopefully you can get something, though.

The best way to game the system seems to be:

1. Move, say, $10,000 out of your savings account into your checking account

2. Sign up for saveup

3. Move the $10,000 back into your checking account, claim your ten thousand credits

4. Spin the wheel three times a day for the rest of the year and hope you get enough prizes to make the effort worthwhile.

Do I have it right?

edit: Aha! I found more information on the precise rules of the contest: https://www.saveup.com/rules including the probabilities of winning prizes. For instance, your odds of winning the two million dollar prize they're so keen on talking about are 1:170,230,452. On the other hand, your chances of winning $10 are one in 4133. There seem to be various different types of drawing which you can enter, but none of 'em seems to have better than a 1:1000 chance of winning even the most trivial amount of money (five dollars).
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My problem with Q+A sessions is that the ones that are from people in the audience to presenters (like the last portion of Ashton Kutcher's video) I have no clue what the audience members are asking since they don't have microphones.
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Have you read it? It would clearly appear you have not. And if not, you shouldn't be judging it, if you don't even understand (or address) the motivations behind those choices.
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Contract work only. No full-time or equity gigs.
Portfolio: http://www.bixbyapps.com
If you're getting paid to communicate with people using the NATO alphabet, you should know the NATO alphabet. (Or the company should hire people who know it. It's not strictly the call workers' fault that they can't communicate.)
Oh that vid was brilliant, I have been in presentation like that, intact I gave one the other that got extremely luke warm responses, and people staring at each other going this guy has lost his marbles.

My concept was this (pitched to the news agency I used to work for). I did some thinking about the next wave of devices and I thought I found a nice market that no one else had tried before.

We modify the RSS subscription interface where users can select categories for news stories they are interested, and email service already exists.

The RSS feeds already exist, and there are already staff curating the best of the best etc... they are pretty good feeds.

We then run batch scripts every morning, compile the articles into ePub format (essentially HTML), and push personalized pre-packaged news paper style format to subscribers. Target eReaders, tablets etc... turn a passive website into one that chases customers each morning.

Now this isn't difficult to implement, there is already a email service doing exactly the same thing. Basically all this service would do is wrap up HTML pages and build an index or two.

I felt like everyone in the room was the chap Ali G was talking to, they just wanted me to shut up ASAP.
I like Obama (for the most part), but he is the king of this.

At town halls, even when he gets a coherent question, he'll go into "let me explain the situation to you rubes" for so long that when he's done talking he's only explained the problem and offered no solutions.
This is pretty weak sauce. Most successful entrepreneurs either never break a law or never intend to. The activity of Gates and Zuckerberg barely rate as "mischief", the tech equivalent of letting 20 year-olds drink beer at a college party.

If you're regularly breaking laws in business, it's probably not a tech company. It's probably a restaurant, health services or construction company, where there are immense networks of regulation at every level.
Xubuntu 11.10 and my Netbook
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IBM Sends Watson Supercomputer to Business School
That's intentional. They'd rather not give out a bunch of Google Accounts usernames (which would also be a lot of Gmail users).
I think there is a world of difference in the "average total beginner" high school students taking a class to meet a district mandate, and the "average total beginner" self-motivated learners actually interested in computer science.
Politics under pressure
Why should it not be treated the way a mathematical result is? People invest time and effort into proving theorems too. It seems to me that software is ideas, like math is.
I'm not really convinced that this is a "Clueless Defense". That would be glorifying the job, like calling it software engineering. To the contrary, this essay seems to be quite self-aware of the "Loser" status, and saying -- hey guys, let's recognize what we are, and not delude ourselves into thinking we're something more.

Not saying I necessarily agree with this, but merely commenting on the interesting parellels. (I'm almost finished with the Gervais Principle series now, and it's fascinating.)
Admittedly, the example above is quite convoluted. Most of the config files looked like this, which is almost what JSON could look like if it was based on PHP syntax instead of JavaScript:

http://trac.midgard-project.org/browser/branches/ragnaroek/m...
Usually the law that gets broken is obscure and not intended for business in the first place. Social has a risk of running up against privacy laws whose intent is actually to prevent random 7-Eleven or Super 8 employee from recording you and then selling the video or distributing it among friends. These aren't really intended as "business regulations" so much as "ant-douche laws".
The original Calxeda reference design from last year was a 2U rack-mounted chassis that crammed 120 processors (and hence server nodes)

also:

HP can cram three rows of these [4 CPU --jsn] ARM boards, with six per row, for a total of 72 server nodes

From that I conclude that in their calculations 1 CPU == 1 server.
Tim Cook Starts to Make Apple His Own
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204394804577012161036609728.html
I taught myself programming from a book, too. We're super geniuses, yes.
I agree that competition is healthy and what I'm saying is I'd like to see a volley back from Fog Creek into the lower end of the market that Github seems to control.
There's a tradeoff in the naming of functions. If you have lots of functions named functionWhoseNameMakesItVeryClearExactlyWhatItDoesToItsParameters(), your code will end up being hard to read simply by virtue of the volume of text people need to read through. I prefer to have gist_of_functionality() with more details easily accessible in an obviously-placed comment.
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invite sent
24 Hours at Fukushima
It's an aesthetics issue. Not an important one, but I'm personally just not a fan of it.
Awesome. We just got rejected from YC for our jQuery Mobile app building and management product (http://codiqa.com/) but it's exciting to see big companies spearheading mobile web development, expecting future mobile web dev growth.
The other comments are wrong. Khan talks about it in his talk at linkedin and his talks at google. They want to add more teachers in the long run. If you really want to do this you have to take a subject you know well an make a small set of lectures on it and send that in. If they like it, then you have a change.

Khan does not like all this meetings and talk stuff. He want people to do the same thing he did. Just start and talk later.
I saw this video at HP in 1992 or 1993 or so called HP 1995

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pPKX5iuBvZg

I was 13 or 14 at the time and to me it was a bit of a "wow" moment. Not because I related to the topic (mostly this was manufacturing) but because of the interfaces and the speed of information dispersal. I remember seeing other concept videos (the famous AT&T ones, Apple's, Adobe, etc) and they were likewise inspiring.

I know reality is often the best thing to market, and Apple and the like have made reality as inspiring as a far future concept lately.

But concept videos from the late 80's -> mid 90's had a huge impact on why I'm in technology today.
If I were producing something to replace Facebook I certainly wouldn't announce it as such. I'd claim it did something different, extra, independently useful.

Then I'd gradually enhance what my service did, until people using my service realized they no longer visited Facebook because my service did what they wanted better, and didn't do the unwanted cruft that Facebook did.
Eric Filiol: First Feedbacks from H2HC and our TOR Attack
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It has been gradually changing. At some point I suddenly could not find Contacts. Turns out it was hidden under Mail.
How to use a compiler. Basic shell of a Java program. That statements occur in a sequence. Practice with getting details right. Mathematical expressions. What variables are, and how assignments to expressions differ from formulas (in Excel, say). If statements and conditions. The concept of "incrementing" a variable or accumulators in general. Loops in general.

See for yourself: http://cs.leanderisd.org/current/cs1/assignments.html
At the risk of dumping yet more karma, let me rephrase more constructively. OpenBSD has focused on security from the beginning. Precisely for that reason, and considering all the audits they run, it feels like, if OpenBSD has used (up to 4.9) shell scripts for security(8), there mustn't be any compelling reason against using the shell. Surely they must not have them.

I realize this was a changelog and not an article, and probably due reasons were found and discussed by the team. I still feel, nonetheless, that "For additional security, security(8) was rewritten in Perl" is either too short (provide a brief reason such tedunangst's) or too long (omit half-baked reasons and simply provide the fact that "security(8) was rewritten in Perl").
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One small, unimportant and low priority suggestion would be to change the layout of the browse page (http://packagist.org/packages/) to a more "app store" type layout. I think something like the ubuntu software center or new chrome web store would really look nice.

Obviously i understand that these codebases dont come with fancy artwork but most have a logo at least that can be used.
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Parachute Web Design is looking for a developer to join our team for a minimum 6-month commitment. We want someone who is ready for a little adventure and who is eager to do great work and learn along with their peers. We are looking for experience in HTML, CSS, JavaScript and preferably in .NET.

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Sophismata
- Yeah, I just don't like it. But it's a minor niggle.

- Sorry, coming from the CakePHP world, we just migrated to PHP5.2. And yes, using < PHP5.2 is common enough - fucking CentOS - that we should still support it. I also work with Lithium, which embraces 5.3 as much as it can, but I don't see the need for doing so in all cases. So yeah, you can be harsh, but I'll be realistic.

- If all I'm working with is the phar, sure. But if we downport to 5.2, nay. Also, PHP frameworks tend to not depend upon each other's libraries too often. I don't see your CLI implementation being pulled into an official Zend package manager for example.

I'm definitely following along on Github, and have been for quite a while.
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I think a lot of resourcese are used to translate the videos.
To Sustain or To Disrupt: Apple vs Microsoft
Why the Occupy Wall Street Movement has Libraries
My class is an honors elective, fulfills no state requirements, and there's a waiting list to get in. My kids are already pretty motivated.

You really, really have no idea how difficult precise logical thinking is for an average person.
The more stuff I read about augmented reality, the more I feel like I am in a world created by William Gibson. Anyone else?
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The mob motion reminds me of Liquid War.
Details about their algorithm at http://www.ufoot.org/liquidwar/v5/techinfo/algorithm
Timely! I was just looking around for such a thing yesterday. Thanks.

On a related note, is there a wiki or site which collects blog posts on doing things in a language? Having a list of relevant (and community approved) posts generally in order of how a newcomer would encounter them for any language would be an amazing jump off point...
Which is the best way to learn those operators. The shortcut "/" to get to the search box is probably what I use the most, and writing "from:john to:mailing-list" is such a great time saver, if you compare to other mail clients.
> I really don't think you'd need comments in the package file, but that's not why we picked JSON.

What's the harm in letting me decide whether to add comments? Also it's the first place users often look; why not allow me to add useful information? Also, comments have been a big part of programming for decades, and not allowing them without a suitable replacement for annotations is a big step backwards.

> JSON was nice and easy because it's provided natively by PHP, unlike Yaml. Also we were inspired quite a bit by NPM, and I guess that played a role, implicitly.

Yaml can be done in pure PHP so it should not be hard to embed a YAML parser, and I think it would be worth it, to provide something that programmers have taken for granted for decades. Also yes NPM is successful but that doesn't justify copying bad design decisions from it.

> Also, it is a fact that every format has haters, and we couldn't have picked something that makes everyone happy. So we picked one, and I'm sure people will be able to live with it.

This one's easy. Ignore the haters.

> Now I do recognize the fact that some people may not be used to JSON (though I find it quite awkward - even narrow-minded - for web devs), and for that reason I added some syntax checks to warn users of common mistakes in their JSON file, because while PHP has native support, all the info you get from it for malformed JSON is a null return value and "Syntax error" in json_last_error(). We also plan to have an init command that will allow you to build a package file interactively.

With JSON you get experience from it but still trip over it all of the time. Libraries choke on trailing commas, as well they should, because it's a serialization format, not an editing format! Using JSON as an editing format is wrong. Here's a pull request I sent about a trailing comma issue that prevents a repo with 176 watchers from working. https://github.com/atmos/smeagol/pull/15/files

...but you're not creating a new a bad design decision, you're copying a bad design decision, that was copied from somewhere else. And I commend you for coming up with this, as I think the pros outweigh the cons.
It's certainly a risk. I think of concept videos as being a close cousin to a technology demo -- stuff that conveys the idea about where you're trying to get to, even if you haven't gotten there.

I don't think that technology demos and concept videos are ill-founded in general, but I certainly agree that they can be. Microsoft Surface was a technology demo for quite a while, then it became a product... and then almost nobody bought it. It still looks cool. But while Microsoft used multitouch to build a cool thing that nobody uses, Apple used multitouch to change the world millions of devices at a time.

Then again, Kinect started life as a technology demo, too. And now it's a technology demo that's in the living rooms of millions of people. Without the demo, it would probably have been difficult to gather the resources to produce such a transformative product, even if it did get greenlit as a response to the Wii.

So I think it's more fair to say that they can be good or bad, and I think this applies to concept videos too.

If they have a plan of attack for the stuff in that MS concept video and the video helps them shepherd the resources to actually build it, then I think it's a good thing as long as it's something people actually want. You're right that there's a lot of fluff in there like the super thin bezel-free phones, but there's also plenty of things in there about embedding smarter context (Siri takes a modest step in this direction, and it's a great one), simplifying communications, and pulling different user interaction paradigms together so that it's not just "X or Y or Z" but all of the above, focusing on whichever one or two are the most useful at the moment. If MS can use this video as marching orders, and deliver products that do that, we all win.
SICP doesn't introduce assignment until two hundred pages in.
Each CPU is a separate node in this configuration--separate DRAM, IO, etc.
The video remix ‘Supercut’ comes of age
It's not that hard for the Obama spin machine to respond to this. "Blah blah blah, of course we take all suggestions very seriously. In fact we have already done [something unrelated]. We thank you for your interest. Give us money."
This. is why Itanium server revenue has exceeded entire AMD server revenue in recent years.
I set my alarm and sat at my desk on Saturday to watch the streams live (which may say more about me than I'm comfortable with), and my recommendations for the three to watch (if you don't want to watch all of them) are:

* Max Levchin's talk. I'd never seen him talk before, but I thought he was great. I thought he had a good mix of cool insider-y founder story and useful advice.

* Matt Mullenweg's talk. I'm not a huge fan of Wordpress, but I thought his talk was incredibly personable (he comes across as a ridiculously nice person, which is kind of heartwarming).

* Ashton Kutcher's talk. I was among the people who were surprised by him. I don't immediately assume everyone famous is an idiot, but I wasn't sure if he was going to be able to target a talk to an event like this. I think he did a really good job.

By all means the other ones were good as well, but those are the three that I see myself watching over again in the future.
How do you do the code obfuscation? rubyencoder or something homegrown?
The blog doesn't work on iPhone 3G btw.
Hiding in a fridge protects from debris and direct radiative heat from the blast, both major killers. So yes, the Indiana Jones approach could help. A more practical variant, of course, is the time-honored "hide in the basement" approach, which doesn't require you to compete for space with hastily-evicted perishable food and plastic racks.
Compared to other formats, it looks like it's missing braces at the top and bottom of the file. YAML gets around it by not requiring trailing commas and not reminding people too much of another format.