skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>a. Even though they pay only 20 hours of my time, they assume 100% availability. b. It gets awkward with them when they suddenly want to increase the hours but I have already committed my remaining hours elsewhere.

You need what's called a retainer agreement. It will specify an exact amount of time they have to pay you for every X, as well as specify availability and charge for it. It will literally specify what availability you have to give them, and how much they are paying, specifically for that availability, and that you are working for other clients and will not necessarily be able to change the terms of the agreement without several weeks/months notice.

(Additionally, retainers are often paid in advance, not arrears :oD, and charged wether they have work for you to do or not)
I think the trail led from Doug Engelbart and folk who were directly or indirectly influenced by his 1968 Demo as well as Ted Nelson and Computer Lib / Literary Machines.

Doug donated his personal copy of "As We May Think" with marginal notes to the Computer History Museum (you can download a copy). He wrote about Bush's influence in "Augmenting Human Intelligence" (1962) and talked about it in a Stanford University Oral History interview.

See http://www.dougengelbart.org/events/vannevar-bush-symposium....
Dish looking for programming for Web TV service: source
How redBus uses BigQuery to master big data
re: "you're a much stronger writer than on-camera personality" LOL, that's a back-handed compliment there.

I think he's aiming to get better at his video production and presentation skills, and believes video delivers more perceived value than just text. Text is not a course, it's an ebook. Courses are worth more than ebooks every day of the week. Perceived value > actual value when it comes to sales... Who's going to pay $2,000 (site license) for an ebook?

BTW, I love video and audio players that allow you to speed up play - 1.5x, 1.75x or 2.0x . Coursera has that, love it.
I was wondering what you mean by "many scripts rely on bash". If you write a script in bash it will work from zsh just fine.

I guess I don't really run into the same adoption difficulty other people seem to, since at work we use zsh instead of bash.
Hmm.. I think Phil was (rightfully) being sarcastic about the critizism over a short 4-letter domain. Airbnb was originally Airbedandbreakfast.com. Great launch guys! I'll certainly use it for my summer cabin.
Everyone is a beginner at some point.
> I am a highly experienced developer who has recently taken to freelancing.

If you are a programmer (not web designer) what you want is 'contract programming', not 'freelancing'. Your chances to get a direct contract with a big company (i.e. a company that can afford you) are minimal. Big customers don't talk to single persons. They only talk to other companies. You need to offer your service to one of those companies who will sell you to their big customers on demand.
Email has been very closely integrated with task management in Outlook for a while now.

On the same note, I've been hoping that Google would flesh out Google Tasks for a while now -- technically Tasks ties in with Gmail and Google Calendar already, but that integration is fairly primitive, and Tasks is still missing extremely basic things like search, labels, and a usable (non-widget) UI in Gmail. Of all the projects Google is letting stagnate, this one hurts me the most. I could make great use of it if it were more complete.
Iranian News Agency Plagiarizes The Onion
I am absolutely confident there is no shortage of good software engineers willing to drop everything and move to another part of the country for $500k/year. Absolutely no shortage. If you raise your wages, you will find someone to do the work. If you can't afford to raise the wages, your business plan is not viable. I mean, I could use a houseworker to clean my house for $1 per day, does it mean I should get my wish as well? Nope.

Skilled immigration is valuable for another reason though - the more talent in the leading industry the better it is for the country, and draining other countries of their talent is also a valuable competition tactics.
I only really understood my native language syntax until I studied foreign languages. "English Grammar for Students of German" was probably the best thing that happened to my English skills.
Andrew here from Taskbox. Thank you all for your interest. Hacker News is currently driving 27% of the traffic we are receiving on Kickstarter and we've already started to see some pledges. This is great.
I will care about companies complaining about too few H1B visas when they start paying equivalent H1B visa holders and citizens the same.
Used to work in tech in Portugal, it's not bad, but underfunded. My recommendation? Move to London.
The Adsense account was positively banned for linking to the Pirate Bay and Demonoid (sites that host infringing content and cracks) on every page of the site.

Then the Adsense account holder contested and received a positive explanation of: You offered links to pages on content-infringing domains.

No one, not even Google, wants to ban, or did ever ban, Adsense accounts, simply because the account holder used the Pirate Bay to distribute free stuff it owns the rights to.

I totally agree that there is a problem with the support channels. To me the REAL problem is: user breaking the rules, contesting, getting feedback about which rule he broke (the linking part), finally deleting the links, contesting shortly after again, account didn't get reinstated immediately, so user goes to the media and they twist it into an unavoidable, bad PR story of Google mistaking this guy for a distributor of copyright infringing material and offering no explanation or recourse.

As an aside: The Pirate Bay is inaccessible to many Dutch ISP users, when the courts deemed that the site mainly exists to facilitate copyright infringement.
When does a startup stop being a startup? [..] The company may even have reached profitability, but growth has slowed to low-mid double digit percentages.

A good article generally but I'm tiring of attempts to narrow the definition of "startup" to meaning an extremely high growth, unprofitable business. That's a type of startup and while those types of startup are common in this community, it's a myopic definition in general.
I agree totally with everything you said, I'd just add that I think companies are outsourcing the training of new employees, often, to college internships. Which is great if you are at Stanford and have lots of connections that implies, not so great if you are a community college student or at bumfuck state u
"Shortage of tech workers" or "Shortage of people who want to work at Microsoft"?
How do you do credit card processing without asking for a billing address?

Stripe.

Could you elaborate on that choice?

Stripe! (No, seriously: I have the capability of running things through Paypal but a) that code is from BCC and written when I was young and stupid, and I was afraid of breaking something if I just copy/paste ported it over, b) this keeps my accountant happy, and c) there was a non-zero "risk" of this selling five figures in a day with $1,000 charges in the mix, which would mean Paypal and I would have to have a chat, and that was a complication I just didn't need right now.)
Some of these features sound a little scuzzy to me. Phone number spoofing, thwarting callers' privacy expectations, and pretending to be somewhere you aren't: not so awesome.

Still, it's good to see competition emerging in this space.
But if that price was $2,500 I am sure there'd be a discussion with finance and budgets become involved. In person 5 hour courses don't cost that never mind web videos. Quite frankly, he wouldn't sell many at $2,500 - not sure if it's a 90% drop in sales but it could be.
As SquareWheel also said, the rape analogy is pretty tasteless. If you look a little harder, I'm sure you can find a parallel that isn't so cheap and crass.
This sort of thing is very dependent on a person's age too.

I know a lot of my peers would know what FAQ means and what a password is. Even some of the "less" tech savvy people. But late adopters who are still using 10 year old PCs usually don't know.

Before I hear claims of ageism, it is just a fact that a higher percentage of the older generations don't know how to use computers. It isn't ALL of them but they didn't have the benefit of growing up with computers as a tool, to the point where they become second nature.
That's all well and good for companies like Microsoft. In fact Microsoft can always hire staff into a foreign office, and transfer them to the USA after 1 year with an L1 visa (no quota), and train them as they go, if they so choose.
But this is not an option for small startups that have to move fast, and can't hire a larger B-team just because that's all they can find.
It's a market. The wages are too low if they can't get the number of workers they want, and they should go higher until they can get the number of workers they want.
I would just like to point out that the lack of turn by turn nav in Google Maps on iOS was an Apple decision, not a Google one. Nav has been available in Google maps on Android for a long time now. Hell, they have decent biking turn by turn.
Check the udacity lesson CS101 where you build a web crawler with google guys.

http://www.udacity.com/view#Course/cs101/CourseRev/apr2012
Thanks for the suggestion. Yes, replies are customizable.
I know a good bunch of 2 to 5 sized companies that would pay for that, all highly competent people (and able to do that themselves).

They are just "outsourcing" the low-value stuff in favor of their core business.
+1 for snark?

Or are you being serious here?
Wait are you saying that there are fewer people working in health care in the US compared to STEM? I don't think that's true at all.
Your experience also represents the bulk of the problems I've had. I'm in the Chicagoland area, and the POI data and roads have been pretty good. But the search doesn't seem to prioritize nearby locations. If your search string exactly matches the name of some town, anywhere in the world, it tends to give you that result.
Raise the fee to $50k and apply it to the first employer that sponsors them only.

I think thats pretty unrealistic and I'm hoping that $50k was a typo ... my first h1b was by a small firm who would most definitely have turned me down at that price point.

An important change that I think could be made with the h1b would be to allow people to get into Green card status after 2 years of being in continuous h1b status ... irrespective of company. That way h1-b hires aren't used as pawns in lowering wages and abused because they can be forced to do things that an American hire would never do.
That is so awesome. I've never seen it until now.
They start off with a terrible random YouTube video crying over "GizModo propaganda". They then spend a minute on how they are not perfect, matched only by the following 9 minutes for showing how others are not perfect.

Then they tell everyone "you're just holding it wrong" and insult people with "X marks the spot" and "look at this beautiful line here".

I couldn't stand much more after that. That is not an apology, it's a display of arrogance. And some might very well claim that this whole Map thing is a result of the dysfunctional work environment people are under at Apple.
Thank you for sharing this, the Robocop reference makes me adore them even more than I otherwise would have.
That is correct. The iOS app will go live in October and folks are welcome to wait for that if they'd like. We're hoping to raise funds for expansion of engineering into web and android platforms via Kickstarter.
How Patio11 made me thousands of dollars
There is an externality to letting in more people though. The hiring companies get all the upside in form of more workers, but the public as a whole takes on the downside risk of supporting them if they're unemployed, retraining them if they're unemployed, integrating them culturally, etc. The public commits to educating those peoples' kids for free for 12-13 years and at subsidized prices for college, supporting them if they ever use welfare services, etc. It's not a clear cut: "more free, less free" situation, but a "who pays for it?" situation.
Paranoid Git Workflow: improve teamwork in big and heavy projects
So now textbook authors are forced to license their books in such a manner? Or is this a choice that certain authors can make?

If it's the former, financial incentives for textbook authors have fallen precipitously. So, the question is, who's going to write these "free, openly licensed digital textbooks for the 50 most popular lower-division college courses offered by California colleges"? Might the authors receive government subsidies? If this is true, then we're simply shifting from a market mechanism to a government funded model. Either the cost of writing a textbook won't actually change, the quality will go down, or we'll have many fewer options to choose from.
It seems to me he's doomed either way.

If he comes on here and says I built this and you all need to buy it right now, well then he's obviously just a salesman.

If he comes on here and says I built this, don't buy it if you don't meet these criteria, I'm not even going to try to sell it because I don't want to turn HN into a sales venue, well then, he's a obviously just a particularly crafty salesman.

So while I see what you're saying I'm not sure how you expect patio11 to discuss this on HN without appearing like a salesman to at least a few people.
Maybe the fee should be higher for low salary jobs, to prevent the visa from being used for bringing in low-wage employees for outsourcing firms.
> Employers would have to pay $10,000 for each employee that receives one of the visas.

How convenient for Microsoft, they're trying to kill off competition for foreign engineers from Startups in SF, NY and Boston that are starting to realize that they can get some really good H1-b hires to work for them
Sure, why assess the issue directly when we could infer things from a reaction to reactions to the issue?
the phrase that I use is "favoring aptitude over experience"
I originally became fascinated with long-form sales letters by reading "Mail-Order Success Secrets" by Tyler G. Hicks who made his fortune with those long classified ads you could find in any newspaper and with long-form snail-mail. You can find his works here: http://www.iwsmoney.com/mailorder.htm
As someone who's never given a speech at a conference before, but is very interested in sharing his newfound knowledge and love of Python, is there anywhere people would recommend reading up on the form or content of such a proposal?

Thanks!
Why would anyone go to so much trouble to make lambda calculus difficult?
Selling your stuff(books, videos, seminars etc) beats any kind of advertising hands down.
Selling your advertisement spots yourself is the second best, if you can pull it.
Affiliate programs seem to do well for some bloggers.

If you are after an ad network, there's no one that can beat Adsense, I am afraid.
Another important thing to consider is your target audience. If you are designing a site like github that targets developers then you can probably assume they know what a FAQ page is.

I think that overall, this article isn't highlighting sins, but more pet-peeves. I get annoyed by some of these things as well and I think good website designs should incorporate better options. But unless you present me with a study that is broken down by generation on who doesn't know what a FAQ is I'm going to have to throw the BS flag here.
I got the impression from a single conversation I had with Google back in January (please take this as the single data point it is), that they really did re-route the entire organization to focus on Google+, and were prepared to scale back efforts on Google Apps for at least a few months. For reference, the conversation was about them seeking 3rd party vendors to fill in the gaps in their offerings.
@patio11 - Typo: "The course is on sale for until October 5th"
Google Launches A New Tablet-Optimized User Interface For Flight Search
A plea from Pandora
I've talked to people who have IOS6, and the consensus is that the maps are fine in California, and completely useless everywhere else.

In Finland, a guy I know got directions that told him to go through a road that hasn't existed for 6 years.

Also, most of the market for iPhone users are city-dwellers, and most of those don't own cars. Having good timetable/route planner for public transit is very important. As I understand, Maps doesn't work for that at all.
Got it figured out, turns out .rvm/bin ended up in PATH which screwed it up.
I think that works if you follow a link from another app, but not if it is a popup from safari? Or maybe they changed this in ios 5
To my dismay CS240h was not offered again this year, probably because David Mazieres is teaching CS140 (Operating Systems) instead.
What would be really interesting would be a client-oriented preview interface from these guys.

http://www.brightsideofnews.com/news/2012/8/10/teamup-launch...
Search ios6 Maps in Denver for airport. Top result: Stapleton, closed in 1995.
I'd say both. Silicon Valley has no shortage of jobs. But Microsoft has the money for lobbying.
The fact Colour raised $40M is irrelevant to the fact Colour is struggling. They just keep making bad products.
Maybe Microsoft should open some offices in the Midwest.

I moved out of the Midwest because, while there was work, it was sparse, and frankly, not interesting. There are decent paying jobs but I found the ceiling was low compared to other places. I would have preferred to stay. I saw many excellent friends that have languished there because it's culturally unpleasant for many Midwesterners to move away from their families.
This is the way I teach programming. Do the same simple thing in ruby, python, c, awk ... now another slightly less simple thing.

I use standardized terminology for each language feature and explain how languages are optimized for certain kinds of tasks but often have essentially the same features.

It makes the learner start with the question of "how does the syntax work for language feature x?" rather than asking "what do I type to get the computer to do x".

I think the cross language approach is generally what LPTHW tries to do but it uses python and English.
The letters do read quite similar. Steve's original letter was addressed to his employees though, which sends a different signal IMO.
The stack ranking BS is (allegedly) a thing of the past, and the rain in Seattle is overblown. There are plenty of US cities that get more rain than Seattle.

I won't challenge your opinion about Steve Ballmer, though.
It's not just wages, but the time it takes to find and employ a candidate, especially when the H1B quota is exhausted, and a foreign candidate cannot start work until late 2013.
Am I misreading? It says:

"However, this did not preclude examiners from employing common sense. More recently [...], we explained that that use of common sense does not require a “specific hint or suggestion in a particular reference,” only a reasoned explanation that avoids conclusory generalizations."

Edit:
Also, what about bad ideas? Just because someone didn't demonstrate a specific method doesn't mean its non-obvious. Suppose I decided to pop an alert box on end-of-scroll for touch devices. It's a stupid idea. Do we want to grant a patent to someone just because no one demo'd such a bad idea?
Yes it would.

Someone Goldman, JP Morgan, etc, manage to fill their entering classes just fine each year. You think those companies have a stellar public reputation? No. They just pay enough to attract the kind of people they want.

If MSFT paid more, they would attract people away from other companies, they would attract people away from the banks and from the consulting firms, and they would encourage people to go into engineering instead of business or law or any of the other fields with more upside potential.

Engineering companies have this bizarre aversion to competing on salaries and competing for workers, as evidenced by all the no-poaching agreements and non-competes that go on. In banking, consulting, law, medicine, etc, salaries get bid up to deal with constrained supply. Blackstone isn't paying fresh grads $300k out of the goodness of their hearts, or because they think it's "fair" but because that's what it takes to get the kind of employees they want.
The One Habit of Highly Effective Deer
A few of my friends here in Seattle call Amazon the "travel agent for developers" because so many people relocate to Seattle to work for Amazon and leave immediately after they no longer have to pay back their moving expenses.
Calling this a "supercomputer" is a misnomer (though it's a sexy one), because it makes people expect real high performance. As many have pointed out, a single GPU could beat this thing easily in terms of performance. It's really a dev platform for shared-memory parallel computing, mimicking some types of supercomputer architectures... which isn't to say it's not awesome.

I've seen similar projects in the distributed-memory space (tiny clusters like Limulus[1], MicroWulf[2], or LittleFe[3]). These things are great for educational purposes, and the low cost makes them a lot of fun for classes and workshops. LittleFe, for example, supports distributed-memory and GPGPU programming and teaches you about clusters, and the educational program at the Supercomputing conference lets some educators build one and take it home for free.

But for professional work, I think a workstation-class PC, maybe with a GPU, is always going to win out.

[1] http://limulus.basement-supercomputing.com/
[2] http://www.calvin.edu/~adams/research/microwulf/
[3] http://littlefe.net/
Looks like a backyard, not a park.
Yep, that's what I'm saying.

I'm too lazy to look into this, but intuitively it makes sense to me. Healthcare is basically an "exception handler" (default state of humans is to be health), whereas STEM is the "real code".

I would expect more "real code" than "exception handlers".

Also sq. ft. of physical space devoted to healthcare (e.g., hospitals) seems to be far less than sq. ft. of space devoted to STEM (e.g., office parks).

If dig up info to disprove me, I would be very grateful to get a correction to my worldview.
Google Updates Gmail For iOS With Support For The iPhone 5′s Larger Screen
Sept.28th, 2012 - Golden Tate Catches AIDS, Miraculously
I lived in Canada for two years on a "working holiday" visa, which eventually ran out. There are two reasons why I moved to the US:

- No-one really seemed to be doing startups. More importantly, there didn't seem to be many investors, either. I understand that is changing these days, but it's not surprising that companies don't move to Canada when the support infrastructure isn't there.

- No companies wanted to sponsor me. Most had never done it before and were very nervous about the idea. American companies approached me and offered to sort out a visa for me. The difference was like night and day.
I totally agree with you on this, but I think that is a separate issue at least in that it doesn't address immigration, but I do think that it touches at the heart of the problem.

Companies like Microsoft are willing to give kids out of school $100k/year to move to Seattle, San Francisco or New York, but why not Vancouver or Toronto? The Toronto-NY connection especially feels like it should be much stronger, with Porter you can fly between the two cities from downtown for well under $200.
And https://www.flowdock.com/ is still going to be around, with way better reliability, IRC support, more and better integrations & much more. :)

A Grove.io importer was also added yesterday: http://blog.flowdock.com/2012/09/27/import-your-grove-io-acc...
I agree - I often just give up and read the source to figure out how to use advanced features.
Great tips, I'm a full stack dev at a big company and never even thought about giving freelance work a try until this