skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You, absolutely, nailed it.

The benefit with the value based model is you need to know your stuff to price it right for everyone. It's easy to consult a client once, hard to do it over and over. You're only as good as your last few projects and the best you can do in business is win some favor, loyalty rarely exists. Most of my clients have been with me for 4-10 years. They do my intros and referrals.

Pricing wise, sometimes when I'm asked to do something, I find out how long the task is taking an employee right now. Other times I come across a waste myself. Employees are quick to tell you their biggest mundane pains.

I estimate how many hours per week/year it takes, estimate their percentage of yearly salary towards, cut it down by 20% and use that as my value estimate on what to base it off.

It's realy compelling when you can walk in with a conservative cost of $X,000 a year for a particular task in a department and offer to get rid of it forever for 20-30% of it. It takes writing up a business case, having managers and employees sign off on it, and the trust and a track record to get it done. The customers that I've earned the trust of typically just tell me now to make sure I have a business case signed off on file and quit wasting the management's time with approval, and just report what I got done.

Screw that up once, and I'm toast. Keep it right, and it's good for everyone. Kind of like hiring a Lawyer and Accountant to get the details right. Would you lose your mind if your lawyer or accountant forgot a detail on your mortgage or accounting? Probably not. I just try to remember that's how much I'm being counted on and it definitely can have it's ups and downs.

I have worked Small up to medium enterprise (low billions) and nothing makes them happier when you can talk their language -- getting more done with the same staff.

My heart, though, is in SMB, there's nothing quite like it.
Sift.js: mongodb inspired array filting
> it destroys your knees

This is a myth.

http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/11/phys-ed-can-running...
This is the nature of languages, particularly scripting languages. Fundamentally, the creators of PHP are not representative of the mainstream users of PHP. That's a problem.

Just look at perl6.

Use the parts of PHP that matter most to you.
> I like to make things that solve problems

Then you're probably using the wrong language. :-)
If we're wanting to call the categories something else I can respect and probably agree with that.

All I know is most people start as freelancers, become contractors (more focused in an area), lead into consultants (enough focused experience to give advice and oversee it).

I've included one way I value based price above. It's simple, makes sense for everyone, and is measurable.
Lawyers are a special case. They bill in hours, because there is a near-universal cultural expensive that lawyers are hellaciously expensive. Within their firms, lawyers are managed so as to maximize their billed hours. No lawyer would ever, ever work a 12 hour day for a client and have their final bill not reflect those hours.

If you can bill $350-$450/hr in groups of 40-80 hours at a time without blinking, please disregard my advice.
Introduction to Backbone.js with JQuery
+1 for the Vibram suggestion. I had a similar experience, and running barefoot-style is a world away from hammering along pavements
Ehh, I'm partial to taking the time to building things right the first time. If you build it correctly, adding new features or changing out ones users don't like should be a lot simpler than rebuilding everything. Both the back-end API and front-end client will benefit from a thoughtfully planned architecture.

If you build an MVP, build a really solid foundation. Take the time to do it right. Build a minimal set of features but make your foundation rock solid. Then you don't have to waste time rebuilding when you can just add to what you've got. Will you be two weeks later to market? Perhaps, but you can now iterate on what you've got instead of rebuilding, which would most likely take a lot more than two weeks.

Building things with "we're just going to throw this out newayz" in mind is also pretty bad for morale. Everyone's smiles on the outside, but those developing are thinking "how many rewrites is this thing going to go through?"

Building right the first time will ultimately save time, effort, stamina, and make everyone happier with the product (customers and those building it).
and they all want a huge cut for doing absolutely nothing

That's silly. Acquisition and broadcast systems do not run themselves. I think the whole sports business model is exploitative and stupid, but hyperbole like the above doesn't help. Market segmentation is a time-honored business practice, but I get the sense that if the FTC forced the teams/broadcasters to adopt an open-access content model then people would be howling about government interference with private enterprise.
"Credibility"? Look up the Radon-Nikodym theorem. I suggest Neveu, 'Mathematical Foundations of the Calculus of Probability'.

"Rant" is an INSULT. The 'rant' was in the article complaining that they could not get their paper published. I got them back on track.
Apropos of nothing: I may learn things from HilbertSpace's comments, I may agree or disagree with them... but I never have a problem identifying them, usually from the first sentence.
I doubt they missed it, they just made the decision that most tablet users won't be using GPS. Most smartphones don't have GPS reception indoors, so tablet GPS reception is mostly a non-issue. It was probably a decision to either scrap millions in development cost plus delay launch, or just go forward with it.
As always, I am around to answer any PyCon related questions anyone might have!
This is about as worthwhile as asking "as a human, how much do you bill per hour?" Everyone has a different skillset, caters to different customers, and thus has a different reasonable range of what they can bill. Some freelancers may be doing little more than some simple cut and paste or configuration work, others may be writing operating systems from scratch, the rate they charge for those services will of course vary greatly.
What do you think of offering an hour block purchased in advance, then billing that block in daily/weekly increments? Provided the customer is onboard. It may not work for the worst of the worst evil AP departments but might help with the edge cases.

Vendor hazing ritual is a great analogy.
The article specifically mentions two laws to support its argument: SOPA and the NDAA. Neither of these has very much to do with the software on your phone or any other consumer device. The primary damage from SOPA is much lower in the food chain — in fact, it's at the level where free software is already dominant — and the NDAA has precious little to do with computers. The link to free software is tenuous at best.
Please don't use hashes for this. Use bcrypt (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bcrypt). Hashes are designed to be easy to compute, bcrypt is adaptive in the sense that it can be made harder to compute over time, so it's a lot harder to brute force. It also adds a salt by default.
"In this case, Google were subjected to this activity through media that encouraged bloggers to create what appeared to be paid posts, were often of poor quality and out of line with Google standards. We apologize to Google who clearly didn’t authorize this."

"Google were subjected to this activity through media that encouraged bloggers"

Wow, if someone could parse that, I'd be grateful.
Another possibility is to make your C program handle requests over ZeroMQ and stick it behind Mongrel2:

http://mongrel2.org/
> In Ruby, only nil and false are false, so you can use || to catch 0s and empty strings.

But there's still trouble with things like boolean configuration variables ...

> In Perl [...] there's the // operator

Thanks for mentioning that! [1] The // operator is indeed a clean operator, almost equivalent to COALESCE.

So we have Perl and SQL. Any other language with such an operator?

[1] http://perldoc.perl.org/perlop.html#C-style-Logical-Defined-...
PG: STOP these GD personal MOD attacks on me. STOP IT.
I'm looking at getting a Synology or QNAP server and using that for backups with a Samba based file sharing system. I have a server lying around, but a dedicated device would save on power consumption so I'm going to go with that.

I believe you can also backup your whole server to S3 periodically using their built in tools.
My grandfather left what's now Belarus with his mother and several siblings (their father and oldest brother had left earlier) in 1914 and came to the United States. Every time I hear anything about Belarus I'm thankful that they did this. Good luck getting out, and welcome to the US if that ends up being your destination!
Watch Manchester City vs Liverpool live streaming online.
That's quite the hyperbole there. Not sure it's completely warranted. I've never heard anyone seriously making outrageous claims about what they'd like, it's mainly "I want to watch one show/channel without being forced to pay for 199 channels I'll never watch."

That's pretty reasonable, I'd say. I subscribed to MLB.tv this spring and cancelled after one month because my market was blacked out the entire time. The technology is there, it works, and people are willing to pay for it. $9/mo for just baseball is a better deal for both me and the MLB than $50/mo for 200 channels I'd never watch through a reseller.

I used to pirate music. I'd usually only listen to an album a few times, then put it on the shelf to listen to more new music. Buying a song didn't make sense in that regard. Then the Zune Pass came along, $10/mo for unlimited music, virtually no restrictions. I could listen to a song once or twice, shelve it, and grab another. I got my Zune in 2009, and that was the last time I ever pirated a song. Now if only the rest of the entertainment industry could catch up.
Why Dart is cooler than JavaScript
Correct. All the major sports organizations work this way, and it makes sense from a standpoint of comparative advantage. Of course, it's horribly monopolistic and anti-consumer, but on the other hand consumers could also start patronizing other sports leagues instead...except they don't want to.
i always recommend this article instead: http://norvig.com/21-days.html
Regardless of how you slice it the celebrities were integral to the marketing strategy of Zaarly from the start. They added credibility & interest that would not otherwise be there, not just on twitter, but on a national level. You talk to some news editor and ask them "some tech startup that's going to do some marketplace thingy just launched..." & they're going to say "yeah, so what?" if you respond "well Ashton Kutcher liked it" the editor is going to say "Now that's somethin' we can write about!". Also every fluff piece in the future is going to mention the celebs, who knows what that does for SERPs & traffic.

Yes there were other social media & offline marketing strategies. Yes there was a lot of hard work but you cannot escape that the title should have been "Successful & seasoned founder with cash to burn & celebrity connections garners 100k users in 3.5months." It's still impressive & he used his connections & resources wisely. Kudos. My beef is less with Zaarly & more with the title of the article.
> The Mindbody Prescription by John Sarno

The central claim of this book (from reading Amazon reviews) seems to be that chronic pain may be caused by mental/emotional distress. To me, this seems like a remarkable claim, and I'm super-skeptical without some kind of evidence.

Out of curiosity, does the author offer any such evidence in the book? Are there other books on the topic?
Peeqshare looking for community manager
We are looking for a community manager for our application Peeqshare(http://www.peeqshare.com).<p>Peeqshare is a platform to discover and share products in small mom and pop stores around you. They have so cool products but there is no way to discover them and thats exactly the kind of problem we would like to solve.<p>Store managers and users can upload pics of items that are on sale or new and share it with customers to improve revenue.
Arnor — a marketplace for Django projects
> In short, HN has a chicken shit MOD that routinely attacks my posts but makes no comments.

How do you know it's a mod? couldn't it just as easily be a random HN user who has enough karma to downvote?
Yeah, i vote for that one; i try to code in little modular pieces; and if a connection is needed i try to make it as short and simple as possible.
Definitely starring this for future reference, may come in handy as node.js gets more popular. Thanks!
It's interesting to see the iterative thought process of a designer as they go through and make changes. I wonder if it'd be a good way to learn design. How about Design Year? :P
Who says we're here to learn?
It takes very little coding knowledge to be able to provide massive value.

I learned to program SAS and get a job in about 2 weeks. I had a very strong Math background, but next to no programming background.

6 months later, I'd automated my job, my department's jobs, and another department's jobs.

You can argue that this doesn't count as real coding-SAS is certainly much easier than Ruby. But the point is that it was quite possible to learn enough to provide millions of dollars of business value in a couple of weeks.
http://www.peeqshare.com
All movie tickets cost the same. Here's why they shouldn't
Agreed. From what I've learnt (so far)...

Knowing which ideas to execute, when is the key.

Knowledge isn't power, acting on that knowledge is.

Similarily, Ideas are worthless without education.

There's a funny email I saw once about a consultant finding a faulty gauge amongst hundreds in a nuclear plant or something. He charged $10,000 for finding the bad gauge. Customer got outraged. So he modified the invoice. Fixing the gauge - $1, Knowing which gauge to fix, $9,999.

The flip side of this is when knowledgeable consultants don't get things done quickly. If you're going to hire someone at $5 overseas for 1000 hours, why not just pay someone more capable $5000 locally to get it done in a month (160 hours)?
A look at node's HTTP parsing code, 1500 lines of hand-coded and rather pretty C, makes it clear that Ryan Dahl cares a lot about HTTP in node doing the Right Thing.

https://github.com/joyent/http-parser/blob/master/http_parse...

(This is also very handy for people writing HTTP servers and clients in other languages, since it's independent of node, and really fast and feature-complete.)
Get Yourself Some Ionized Water
(I feel like this is probably a frequently asked question on HN, but I'm throwing this out here anyway)

As a full-timer working for a big corporation, where would I even begin to start getting freelance work? I'm thinking about a change in my career path and see freelancing as a potential way to go about doing that, but I'm honestly scared about where to even start.
Grouped real-time chat on OpenStreetMap
Aahaa. Thanks, I hadn't really thought about it from negotiation perspective. So far, it's been a negotiation of scope: a client have set budget and we negotiate scope down to do it in budget. I'm probably not good enough negotiator/seller yet to get to the price negotiation phase: so far it's been that either client goes immediately away or we end up negotiating on scope.
RTD is the easiest way to do this. It works wonderfully, is free, and if you use GitHub's project hooks in your project settings, the builds start almost immediately after a push.

I used to do what this post suggested, but got tired of managing all of the gh-pages branches as I changed/added new projects.
I doubt it's personal. Most of us upvote useful signal (like http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3420657, which has not been grayed out by a negative score) and downvote useless noise (like any yelling about voting) regardless of who wrote it.
I'm just a random reader and member of the community, and I haven't consciously down-voted you in the past, but I absolutely down-voted and flagged this comment, and the one in response to Knieveltech.

I don't know who you are, I don't have anything against you, and I haven't voted either way on your main comment, but I really don't think such name-calling and vitriol are appropriate or have any place in a community I would want to be a part of. I don't think such comments add to the discussion, or are in line with the guidelines linked in the site's footer. So I've voted according.

Hopefully that helps explain where some of the down-votes are coming from.
It might just be a bit of software-pleasing dance, but (this is secondhand information, fwiw) the usual practice for doing "weekly" work seems to be to just agree on an hourly rate and then agree that you're going to bill them 40 hours for "one week of full-time work". So saying "I'm going to work on this full-time for the next 3 weeks" translates in invoice-speak to "I'm going to send an invoice for 120 hours of work at $agreed_rate", treating "40 hours" and "1 week" as just alternate units for the same quantity, rather than sending a detailed statement that you spent 2.5 hours on Task A and 4.5 on Task B. So I guess it's effectively weekly billing in a roundabout way. (This is mostly Lockheed-type companies that I hear about, which seem to treat single-person consultants as effectively "outside employees", and only like to negotiate custom terms with giant consulting firms like KBR.)
That's what PG's HN MODs do also, and then they attack, usually without any comments. It's PERSONAL. It's a SCANDAL.

There is STILL not a single, meaningful comment in rebuttal to anything I wrote. Not a one.

I outlined for CS profs how to get published, and the HN MODs got their bowels in an uproar.
The main difference between these and Project Euler is that these are far more "programming" challenges, whereas Project Euler often boils down to brute forcing a solution once you've figured out the one or two mathematical tricks to reducing the problem space.
"Poor, poor CS profs: They can't get their research papers published. "

This does not seem to be the OP's complaint, and I am quite surprised that this is what it seemed like to you. I am not a native speaker of English, and so it is quite possible that I missed this nuance. So:

Which part of the original post implies that _this_ is the OP's lament?
That plan sounds like half-assed voodoo, but it kind of resembles the approach that qmail uses for security, which is actually pretty neat:

http://cr.yp.to/qmail/qmailsec-20071101.pdf
btw it's opensource: https://github.com/mapchat/mapchat
It does, but Obama's focus has been on social issues i.e. pushing for the healthcare bill at all cost but at the same time supporting the post 911 security machinery and paying only lipservice to civil liberties. Just imagine the outcry a Bush/Cheney government would have drawn by signing a "no trial for Americans" act and adding a "but I won't eat the cookie, promiiiiiise" reservation.
Red Hat to add 1K new employees as cloud business surges
You might be sitting too low, and holding your arms up with your shoulders rather than at your elbows. Keeping your shoulders back seems to help too, another of those things that everyone should be doing but few (myself included, the vast majority of the time) actually do.
The attacks are from downvoting, not upvoting. Only a small fraction of HN users can downvote. With so much downvoting, it has to be the MODs who are doing it. It's so consistent that it's a personal attack on me.
OP here. I'm wondering if parent commented in the wrong thread or something. This is completely irrelevant to what I was saying. You somehow seem to think I was complaining that it is hard to publish papers. No, that wasn't even remotely, _remotely_ related to what I was saying. The rest of my post is even less related.

I would like to hear some actual commentary on the issues I raised. If you have a problem with CS research in general, that's fine; I suggest you do a separate post about it. Thanks.
Ruby 1.9, the current production version of Ruby, is not vulnerable. Rails 4, the next version of Rails, will require Ruby 1.9.
Apps downloads hit record high in last week of December
Sure. That's why I added the "imaginary" qualifier to the savings.

I just wanted to clarify that the savings the other commenters talk about were taken from the server point of you.
>The only thing closed source was the Luna desktop environment.

So the only thing that was closed source was the part of the system that the user directly interacts with. Gotcha.

Andy Rubin's definition of open is the one that a lot of the hacker community can abide by:

https://twitter.com/#!/arubin/statuses/27808662429

It's impossible to do anything similar with WebOS right now.

>I fail to see how your last point proves anything, all points considered.

The kind of people that care about being able to hack on a system want full access to the system. Android provides that. The fact that Android is running on devices that the manufacturers of those devices never intended to run Android proves it.

People that want open devices will generally prefer open software. There's absolutely nothing befuddling about that.
WebOS is the standard Linux kernel with a new desktop environment. If you can get the Linux kernel running on a device, throw on a WebKit browser and you've got WebOS. That's how its so easy to get Debian/Ubuntu running on a Touchpad with a simple chroot.

WebOS aside, support the maker of (more) open hardware. Support the people who give you full control of your device by default (even if they didn't initially give you the source for their WM).
I can't believe how happy this news makes me. I'm smiling ear to ear :>
I guess I agree things could be simpler, although the cries of "garbage!" were a bit much. I wrote a wrapper function around urllib2 about 5 years ago and haven't looked back.
A good part of it might be that my upper-arms are essentially straight down, so it's just biceps. Holding your arms out / forward will tire you out, and it's pretty easy to do that in a lot of desks / setups, especially if they're too high. That, and I tend to move around and/or stop and think a lot. In part because I should, in part because otherwise I get stiff. That tendency to not sit still for long has helped in a lot of other ways too, though it makes me hate long drives :|
A few books that helped me keep my soul and be productive in consulting:

Crack my head open for re-flashing

- An open heart - Dalai Lama

- Love is the Killer App - Tim Sanders

- The Man who mistook his Job for a life

Consulting:

- High Impact Consulting - This book taught me to only do tiny but really painful items for new customers to build momentum. By getting short term, high impact/pain point items out of the way, it clears the table to say "This consultant has learnt my business and why we do things the way we do". Big projects land themselves. I call it dating before I get married.
Ask HN: What's a good practical web language to learn?
Hello fellow hackers. I have 12 years experience with PHP and MySQL, what I am wondering is, what is a good practical web language to learn?

I have thought about learning Node.js and MongoDB. Also even thought about Python.

Please give me practical reasons, not "X is better than Y because I said so".

Thanks!
I think you'd do better as a female consultant, women are our superiors in every way. :)

- Raised by a woman to not be a mommas boy.