skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: How to make the transition to freelance work
Just like the title says

I'm curious to hear from others in the community who took the plunge from a relatively stable/secure job working for someone else, to striking out on your own.

I'd like to hear both the successes and the failures, and things you wish you had properly prepared for before starting out. Maybe keeping your finances in order to make tax season a lot simpler was an issue at first, maybe it was forcing yourself to "hustle" to get work. How to manage time, how to decide when to farm some work out to other freelancers, etc etc.

I'm looking for any and all information from HNers who have made this transition (even if you ultimately went back to "steady" employment).

Thanks in advance
>It must be a huge pain even for Apple to work on such beastly monolithic app that does almost everything except the laundry.

For all we know, iTunes could be (and probably is) a fully modularised code base, with minimal cross module dependencies. The fact that we see it as one application tells us nothing about the underlying code.

Even the UI parts for different functionalities can be neatly modularized in different IB files, the only thing they all have to share is the main menu.
I think that's the wrong attitude to take. If you look at the mathematics there is really nothing so weird or magical about quantum mechanics or using it to perform factorization; you just take a set of qbits initially in an equal superposition of all possible factors, manipulate them through quantum operations such that the amplitudes of all the factors that don't divide the number go to zero, and then measure the state to force a collapse/entangle yourself with it, and the number you measure will necessarily be a factor. QM in general is really pretty simple and even obvious if you ignore the silly mythology and just follow the math.

As for the specifics, I believe we have working 4-qbit quantum computers, and shor's algorithm has been successfully applied to calculate that 15=3x5. But current approaches do indeed seem unlikely to scale up to 1024 qbits.
Sooo... basically the Asus Padfone but without the comfort of being made by a renowned hardware manufacturer and the nice feeling you have knowing it actually exists and you can buy it.

I see a bright future for this product[idea] indeed!...
/s
Have you used any of these languages? The Wikipedia list is overly simple at best.

The common thing that these all share is easy access to the world of Java code, much of which is very well written. The Java standard libraries are well-written and well-documented. There are plenty of high quality open source projects covering almost anything you need.

I am most familiar with Groovy and it is much more than a simple scripting language. It spans the continuum from scripting to full-on enterprise-level stuff. It adds all of the functional features we love to Java, language support for maps, makes it easy to create DSLs for specific purposes, etc.

I do not know nearly as much about the other languages, but almost all of these are in production use. I would recommend many of them.
It looks fine to me - not sure what the problem is to cause the rendering you see, or perhaps it's been fixed.
All ranks are biased. But I don't think four universities from UK can make into top 10. Cambridge and Oxford maybe, the other two not so much. Regarding the rankings from ARWU, I think Berkeley and Columbia is a bit too high on the list.
This will never work well because of a very simple fact, the phone experience, still one of the main aspect considered nowadays when purchasing a phone, would be seriously diminished when the phone is docked because you would have to use a bluetooth headset to answer the calls and it would be impossible to see who is calling you if you move away from the docked phone for a minute, because you won't probably carry a laptop around or because you probably won't take the time to remove the phone from the dock to light up a cigarette.
"IMHO Java's success today is more because of corporate inertia than anything else."

I don't think so. Java as a platform is a lot easier to manage than most other platforms, including Ruby and Python. Jars, in my experience, are much easier to deal with than Gems. Java has a set of advantages that aren't really replicated elsewhere. It's garbage collected and portable, but executes much faster than other garbage collected and portable languages.
It could be the Hacker News poster for this submission. You don't really see any other places that have such great spread.
This isn't my idea, but I can't remember who to attribute:

An even more effective way is to get a friend to ask your question, and for you to answer with something painfully incorrect. Immediately you'll have an army of pedants running to give actual answers.

(Unfortunately, sometimes I think this might work on HN too.)
It's because everyone is sharing the same link instead of sharing their own. The link on this HN page is the original sharer's URL
I once went to #debian on free node to ask about something or other... Asked politely, got abuse... Went to #ubuntu, no issues.
Incidentally, i had a discussion with a colleague(non techie) of mine, who wanted to learn programming so that he could make apps and earn money. People actually think if they learn programming or have an app out there in the market will get rich. At least this has been the reason I have seen quite a few people drifting towards programming, they see it as a shortcut to realize their million dollar dream overnight.
But the story out here in market is tough, bro! "It takes 20 years to be an overnight success."
I'm kinda the same. I don't really speak the word but I will write it if I'm writing a formal report/essay etc.
You are correct.

It's a financial agreement. Once you make all the payments, you own it. It's up to to you negotiate a payment plan that works for your business.
There's nothing wrong with you. You probably don't have enough visibility on the web. Having said that, these emails are annoying and uninteresting 95% of the time.
The abc conjecture, explained as a game
The biggest problem for iTunes is actually Windows. Imagine telling a new, novice user to download and install ten different applications in order to sync their media to their phone, one for their music, another one for their photos, another one for their podcasts and so on. That would be suicide.

iTunes is just bad[1] software.

I personally love it on the mac, but it's gotten bloated with the years. I avoid this problem by mainly using it for music, nothing else, plus I hear on windows is painfully slow. It needs to be rewritten and it's architecture rethought.

[1]bad in the sense that it may be overkill, because it hasn't crashed for me in years. Despite all it flaws, it always works.
Is "China-bashing" racism or nationalism ? There is more ethnic diversity within China than between southeast Asian countries.
As long as prestige factors heavily, Cambridge and Oxford are almost always going to be in the top 10; they're both almost 1000 years old.
Did I “break” a story before Mashable? Is this real life?
Mark Shuttleworth invests $1M in Ceph storage startup
Wacko in the Morning - 9/11 The Way It Was 09/11 by Wacko Bob
I think Apple is very thuggish, but can we lose the link-baity and dramatic titles ("Apple sues Polish grocery store over the letter A")?

I'm skeptical that even "A.pl" around a giant "a" with leaves coming out of it is enough to infringe on Apple's trade mark, but it's a much closer call than merely the letter a.
The current discussion[0] about the abc conjecture has a number of confused questions over what it's saying. This is a link to a presentation I found useful to say what the conjecture is about.

[0] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4502856
Data presented. Doesn't conform to your pre-conceptions. Do you reject data, or pre-conceptions?

Clearly a Sanford man does the former.
Thanks for taking the time to look at it and give such thorough feedback.

The name thing is the one thing that always seems to delight people; it's indicative of the care/attention we pay (hopefully) to the user throughout the programme. To arrive at names we started with census records of top baby names going back 50 years, and now periodically add to them with names people enter that we don't have. It degrades gracefully though if we don't know your name!

Noted re: speed of transition. We're adding paddles today too. We decided to keep all animations in synch, but that's a good call on waiting til viewed. We'll look at it.

If we can get permission from the journal we supplying the original paper would be a great idea, although a more accessible format might be better. You can read abstract on pubmed here: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22654196
We are only getting second- and third-hand reports, but the typical opener is to send a letter to the offender telling them to stop. Saying hello with a lawsuit gets expensive.
>The videos of their figurehead?

You mean the videos where he said he had nothing to do with 911? Or you mean the ones that were globally criticized for appearing doctored?

>need I mention the shoe bomber and the underwear bomber? Both were AQ operatives)

Haha! Exactly my point. The "shoe bomber" was a lunatic who worked with one other person and claimed to be working with AQ. I bet anyone who the CIA would actually classify as AQ never heard of this guy before his silly little stunt.

>Also, please learn what "entrapment" means.

I know very well what it means. Have you not been paying attention? The FBI has brought up two cases where they "caught" someone who was carrying out the FBI's plan with the FBI's materials and money after the FBI convinced them to do it. There is no reason to believe they would have done anything without the FBI's prodding.
Create CSS3 Animation Menus
Ah thank you, the boundedness requirement makes sense.
But you will fund Googles, Samsungs, and who knows about the component suppliers.

Taking a political stand via device choice is a bit naive.
A Suggestion to Improve Objective-C's new Autoboxing support
Well, it's not like a recognised army, more like a franchise operation.

But there were disparate terrorist organisations that co-operated and co-ordinated. Both with each other and with rogue states.

AFAIK, Brevik co-ordinated only with himself.
bah! homophobic bullshit should not be be reproduced on hacker news.
I like Java - and I say this as someone who mostly used Python for the last 10 years (I learned other languages for fun, but did most "productive" work in Python).

My main issue with Java a decade ago was all the bloat in the framework. Want to write a Web application? Just use J2EE and write a few factory factories. Or use the "lightweight" Spring alternative, that allows you to write plenty of XML code.

This bloat got much better during the recent years and a number of sane frameworks have evolved. Want to write a Web service? Use Dropwizward. A Web application? There's the Play framework.

Java as a language is pretty nice. Yes - it has its warts, but the language is relatively simple to understand and isn't missing too many important features (Lambdas would be nice). In addition the type system really helps a lot when having larger codebases. Yes - it's not perfect (type erasure, ...), but it mostly does its job.
From what I've seen watching British TV, I gather Cambridge and Oxford are divided into semi-autonomous colleges.

Do you share lecturers among colleges, or is there one college that all computer science majors attend?
That part where half the websites I use started giving me popups asking if I accept cookies before I could use the site was the part that I did not like.
Try using http://hnpickup.appspot.com/
Nothing against the US by these supposed "haters of our freedom".
Test dozens of Android OS versions and screen sizes from your browser
This has all the trappings of something that sounds like a good idea in theory but will most likely falter in the marketplace.

Considering how cheap you can get a laptop or tablet these days with a much faster CPU, more memory etc than a smartphone.

Also considering that it's going to be a pain in the ass to go around hooking/unhooking your phone from every device that you want to use. The software for each device is likely to need to be different too or provide a farily sub-par experience, leading to a lot of confusion.

Also , if you lose your phone you're not just losing your phone but also the brains behind all your other devices.
In what way is .DS_Store necessary? Littering files in visited directories is an unacceptable and offensive way to store user-specific preferences. Put that crap in ~/.finder or something similar.

If .DS_Store is a dependency of HFS+, that's enough reason for me to wish for a filesystem replacement. I don't care if it's ZFS or not.

Obviously, there's a lot of hate for .DS_Store and there has been for years. That Apple has never addressed this is a sore point for a lot of people.
There is an inherent simplicity in HTML / CSS / JS that can be easily forgotten and difficult to replace. Each has its responsibility: Organization, Style, and Function

I agree in the simplicity of HTML and CSS if we're talking about simple websites. I've found that for more complex apps, and especially if you're using features of newer, half-specified standards (with style prefixes etc.) things can get a bit out of hand. One thing I want to point out is that you can separate your Dub code by style and function if you want to, although I can understand if you do not want that option.

Thanks for the feedback.
How many people know that you are a programmer? For a while, every social occasion I went to someone wanted to talk to me about building their startup idea. I eventually started hinting at things similar to this post.

Some people get a kind of "shocked" look when you tell them the "I could just build this myself, what do I need you for?" line. Of course, I never meant any disrespect (though some did get quite defensive: "You can't just take my idea!"). Most people are simply unaware of what it takes to start a business, much less a tech startup.
Get started with geofencing on iOS
A springboard on top of a springboard?

Look, it doesn't actually have to be so many apps. I'd split it into "Music", "Videos" and "Devices" for the synched data.
Dirtier Lives May Be Just the Medicine We Need
By that logic, Google will cease to exist!
Seems like the Whatsapp iOS password generation isn't that different from Android.

Via google translate:

Granger also asserts that the same method is not applicable in the case of iOS devices, and which today still do not know the password generation algorithm for these devices.
A little fun, a little intrigued, I decided to take a look at the app for iPhone and how would generate the password. Well, the principle is the same, but this time the MD5 hash of the IMEI is used reversato the MD5 hash of the mac address WiFi interface (en0) taken twice.
Sorry you chose to go to a mere #15 university, bro.
It's the reason why i prefer walking rather then bike
> (...)compression at the SSL level. HTTP also includes optional compression, but this one applies only to the body of the requests and responses, not the header, and thus does not cover the Cookie: header line. HTTP-level compression is fine.

Guess SPDY is also subject to similar attack -- given that it compresses headers just as well.
In my college there were four computer scientists in my year. We had two lecturers in the college, who gave us tutorials. Then we join the rest of the computer scientists throughout the University for lectures.

And the colleges are more than semi-automonus - they have their own academics, own money, and they do their own admissions.
cool track (Angels)
Link to a clear statement of the question, expressed as a game:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4505264

This is a technique John Horton Conway uses a lot, expressing conjectures as games, where two (or more) people try to do something in turns to make, or not make, something happen.

Useful idea.
I didn't see this as picking on China. I thought the opposite. I thought they were saying that China is among the countries with the best chance of doing it, and then listed their specific shortcomings that are preventing them. And everyone has shortcomings.

A shrewd Chinese businessman could look at this list and find ways to improve his company's chances. Who else has that advantage right now?

I think it's a mistake to look at criticism as a bad thing. It's information we can use to improve things, and sometimes an outside view is very helpful.
I dont test my code but when I do, I do it in production
While it's certainly not their focus, MIT does have some surprisingly good humanities programs.
When you prop up an ipad on it's corrugated cover-case thing and use a bluetooth keyboard with it, what's to stop the same?

(Not hating on ipads, just saying this is not a problem that's been "figured out")
They could break up iTunes under the covers and maintain a legacy 'unity' interface for a cycle or two.

And the sync problem is solving itself as iOS devices continue to migrate away from iTunes as the repository manager.
Graph Databases vs. The Human Brain
> People think the binary is "bloated", while in actuality it's mostly templates for photo books and such, that doesn't get loaded or impact performance at all if you don't use them.

A huge hunk of it is in databases for the location features, too.
It also doesn't work well under water.
Check out i3. It can do what you want (if I get what you're writing).

I never liked tiling window managers using the master-slave paradigm (like xmonad does) precisely because of the problems you both described.

http://i3wm.org/screenshots/ (check the screencast and skip to 2:55 for examples of the different layouts)
At one point in time I was the person writing these emails. Now, I'm the person getting these emails.

It is hard to be an entrepreneur when you can't make things. If you're good at selling, you still need something to sell.
>Or, was it because the US correctly assessed the USSR's threat and planned accordingly?

Absolutely not. Read/watch some Noam Chomsky and/or various BBC documentaries like "The power of nightmares". The USSR was falling apart. Yes, they had nukes and could have nuked us but the threat was vastly overblown precisely for the reason the GP states: to give us a boogy man to be scared of.
Corrected link:
http://jeffreypaulwheeler.com/Master%27s%20Thesis.pdf
> it amounts to an advertisement of a free service available

No it doesn't. Especially if it's unintentional.
The worst part of the whole experience is when you realize that there still is no visual indication in a Firefox tab when the page it contains is running a video or Flash script, or otherwise is making noise in a way that the browser engine can detect.

Do any other mainstream browsers make it easier to find the tab that's responsible for making racket without madly clicking through all of them and/or closing every open browser window?
>All it does is make things more confusing causing customers to drop off.

So what you're saying, is that it becomes more expensive to use cookies for bullshit like user profiling and you have to think about whether or not they're goddamn necessary for your website?

Sounds like the law is working correctly then.
What about Sociomantic, a Berlin Startup which is focused on innovation and just got an ex-googler.
allthingsd.com/20120910/ad-tech-startup-sociomantic-labs-grabs-google
Want better quality products? Be a slave to your development team
confirm ff15 stuck at 100% ubuntu 12.04
Don't dishearten him. I think this is more location based. As someone in Tel Aviv I get a lot of these. Friends in less "Startupy" regions in Israel don't.

To be more general - these "founders" know they have a bigger chance to find a technical-co-founder (I'm using that very liberally) is in a place with lots of programmers.
Some amazing things have used reddit as a vehicle. You have to take the good with the bad.
Hermes birkin bags
Exactly. But this isn't the same as the scrollview bounce. Especially try doing a slow grab and letting go near the edge; the sudden artificial bounce is jarring and strange.
> "You know what is worse than using one app to handle 15 tasks related to your media/app collection? Using 15 apps to do the same."

Funny, it works out just fine from the iOS side.
And that's even when I consider additionally managing podcasts in downcast, comics in comixology and reference PDFs in goodreader.
It took me a second to get the wave line (I thought it had something to do with time relativity, since there was a time scale) but it looks like the line is a literal 'string' of distance measurement just wound back and forth to compress it. If it's an accurate compression, I thought it was pretty clever and impressive.
Exactly. This is the thing that frustrates me the most about the reporting about Iraq and Afgan wars: anyone who fights back is part of the terrorist organization. I imagine if Russia plopped down bases, artillery, tanks and so on on american soil, citizens would probably attack them in the hopes of driving them out. That's not terrorism, that's defending your country from an unwanted foreign invader. Some might say that's the duty of any able bodied citizen.
The difference here is that I might reasonably be expected to be taking my laptop with me on road trips which could get bumpy. I.E. this is not that much of an extreme case.
Java was an incredibly popular language in 2001. I had been using it in commercial apps for four years. It was around 2001 that I was managing a development team and was introduced to Python. About that time, I also began to realize how expensive Java development was and how many more interesting ideas were happening in other languages.

While it was clear Java was popular, it was also clear it was stagnating under the beurocracy and the weight of its corporate champions (small changes and backwards compatible at all costs). It also became clear that there weren't going to be many repeats of Java's initial ideas.

On the insights, I probably give Java more credit for than pg would because they pretty much all exist in lisp, but Joy packaged them for "easy" consumption. Arguably, the most important was the JVM and the notion that bits didn't need to run on the metal directly. This was well known to the lisp and smalltalk communities but shunned more generally, but Java made it acceptable across the computing ecosystem to run in a VM. This really opened doors for languages like Python and Ruby. It would be interesting to know if they would have been as popular without Java and it's corporate marketing machine telling developers VM are good.
That's what I think they would do. They are going to rewrite iTunes, but nothing radical, and just wait for iCloud to replace it.
...or be subject to stochastic enforcement. Anything not predictable is inherently risky and likely to be avoided by the more risk averse. The actors engaging in more risky behavior then become the prototypes for bad behavior and a justification for tougher enforcement and more laws.
> Return Apple to its roots with minimalism - does a photo manager have to be 707 MB? Does a music player have to be 270 MB? If something’s not needed, get rid of it

That!
The "stream" animation is very laggy in Firefox 15, but works fine in IE9, so I guess "In collaboration with IE" is more "optimized for IE"...

I kinda like the music though, and the social experiment is nice. I'm assuming the massive spike in sharing that stems from the US is actually this post right here!

It would be nice to have some solid stats, as well as some info on my own share. With the mass of wires it's hard to tell whether someone actually stems from me or not.