skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Perhaps some of the most enlightening years of my life were towards the end of high school, when my computer died. At the time I was going through a youthful phase of freeing myself from worldly attachment. I just didn't bother fixing it or getting another. All my electronics and possessions, save for my stereo system, some books, and writing tools were packed away or sold. I wore pretty much the same clothes every day.

At school, I got in trouble for writing my essays on paper, when they were to be typed. I had no way of communicating with my friends who were all using cellphones and IM, so I just talked to them at school if I saw them. If I wanted to play video games, I went to the arcade, and since I had no car, it was always a fun adventure getting there and back. From the perspective of others, I was becoming an outcast. From my new perspective, they were the outcasts - out of touch with themselves, mindless robots in an artificial reality.

I spent my time reading books, writing my thoughts down, sketching ideas, taking walks, observing humans and nature, introspecting, and developing my personal philosophy and plans for the future.

Eventually I grew out of the phase, bought a bunch of new stuff, including a new computer, and got addicted to the Internet harder than ever. It led to a lot of great things - getting better at programming, participating in a bunch of online communities, making money, sharing my work and thoughts, and finding inspiration from others. However, there is always a nagging feeling that my younger self is questioning my lifestyle.

No matter how far in the zone I am, how much effort I take to remove the distractions from my environment, how secluded a place I go to get away from it all - I cannot reach the level of clarity and the perspective from those days. Just knowing that sweet feeling that awaits once I am jacked into a live connection again, and hit the browser tab, is enough.

The crux is not a culture of distraction - it is that our culture, especially our technology, is too heavily skewed towards consumption over creation. To make full use of our humanity, we need to be able to take the time to look inside ourselves - we need to allow ourselves to be distracted from within. The Internet by nature creates connections outwards - perhaps balance can be restored by finding its inverse. An Intronet?

A computer, much like paper and other creative mediums, is an impressive tool for exploring and expressing the inner self. An Intronet may actually be a cultural shift in computing rather than a technological development.
Is this link bait or actually worth reading?
Are you really complaining about a difference of 50 cents worth of RAM, and saying you won't use Google Drive on that basis alone?
I have an obvious bias here (I have a cow milk allergy) but I will be very happy when the use of cow milk becomes nonexistant!
Mid-South 'Ghost Hunter' Charged with Domestic Assault
Static linking still doesn't help that much with version issues. For example how do you deal with other changes? One example is the Gnome world has gone from gconf to dconf. If you have private library versions then you'll get apps randomly picking settings in random ways, system files (eg nsswitch, trusted ssl cas), clipboard formats etc. (Arguably this does still happen to some degree but at least attempts are made to curtail it.)

The one other approach which works for some is not using milestones at all - just keep everything rolling. This is actually a far better match for how much of the upstream software actually works, and some distros have had some success (eg gentoo). You see rolling releases proposed every now and then (eg for Suse).
I can give an anecdote that supports this with Doctors. I worked in a cancer research group and the docs would always make comments about how many doctors smoked when they went to conferences out of the country.
>happy enough to use it

'Desperate' is a more appropriate term.

>"...not always possible to pay a designer until we're both happy."

In my opinion a fair amount of work should receive a fair amount of pay. There would be untold wasted hours invested in 99design jobs that were never won because of a trivial differences between two or three leading designs.

Graphic designers aren't pitching to invest time and labour for the opportunity to work. They're actually investing the time first and just crossing theire fingers.

I'm not angry at companies using 99 designs, I'm annoyed at the system and those who enable it, including the designers themselves.

If you have $300 to spend on a logo, there are hundreds of good designers out there who will take the time to get to know your needs and develop a solution that you're happy with.
Good question, nedwin

Background: I'm a freelance marketer (soon to be) in Honolulu, Hawaii.

My experience has been that freelance gigs for marketers come from 3 different sources:

1. Personal / Professional Referrals
2. Direct Outreach to Businesses
3. Craigslist / elance / community sites

## 1 — Referrals

Referrals are the best way to get a client / gig because someone is vouching for your experience. I generate referrals by asking clients if they know of other business owners for have a need for {skillset}.

## 2 — Direct Outreach

I wrote about this as a comment here (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4655212).

In short — manufacture interested customers by defining the types of companies you want to work with, making a list of companies that fit that criteria, identifying who is in charge of the department you want to work with, and set up an informational interview to learn about the company.

## 3 — Craigslist / Aggregate Sites

These sites suck. When a job reaches these sites, it's generally because the employer went through options (1) and (2) and couldn't find someone capable. These jobs have been picked over.

That said, I have some success browsing craigslist, seeing businesses that have listed an open position / a gig and emailing them.

I like looking at businesses that post in the 'services' section (not advertising a need for a marketer) and then contacting them to learn about their business and offer my skills.
> you're going with your own (untrained) eye

Well sorry, but if I'm the client then I will damn well choose whatever design I like. It's not like a logo is only going to be seen by 'trained designers' who can 'appreciate' it.

"The Emperor's New Clothes" springs to mind...
All participating designers should read the terms for the site they're using (obviously) but in general they retain all rights to their own work if not chosen. The most common exception is for promotional purposes, i.e. if the site wants to run a campaign they can use your image without requiring any notification.
This one looks a lot like the current server fault logo

http://99designs.com/logo-design/contests/logo-stackoverflow...
I like the song because it's a catchy tune and that I understand a few words in English. If you can achieve success in anything besides music that catches on as well, it would be pretty amazing. Does anyone have anything else marketing-wise that in comparison that could be as catchy?
I think the OP was being facetious with the $2 per hour comment. In my experience with 99designs, the winner gets a few hundred dollars. Taking into account the fact that a designer may have to enter quite a few contests before he/she wins, that prize pool gets diluted for sure, but I'm sure the wage works out to a value greater than $2.
So does this one: http://99designs.com/logo-design/contests/logo-serverfault-2...

;-)
Sorry didn't understand your statement. If it takes 10kg of milk to make 1 kg of cheese. Than eating 1 kg cheese is like drinking 10kgs of milk. How then does milk give you more calories than equivalent quantity(in kgs) of cheese?
I see. I can understand—I have many clients, and I wear equally many hats. Executive was probably a wrong choice, project manager would be a better one. When I assume the project manager role, I also face the same problem. I could use this glorious source of extremely cheap labor when there is a need for low-to-mediocre quality of design work (think mockups, non-approved explorations), and by all means, I should. The fact that I don’t is completely a result of my personal and naïve beliefs, and I have no illusion that avoiding this makes me a better project manager—on the contrary, someone that could just do that would be a better PM than I am. Because a project manager, or an executive should not be taxed with morality, only legality: it’s societies’ and nations’ job to ensure the moral matches the legal. This is arguably the reason why there is such a thing called minimum wage. We could remove it, and there are certainly jobs that would offer lower-than-minimum wage as there are people that will gladly take them. Why do we inject inefficiencies into the system, then? That’s the underlying, open-ended question below spec-work, and while I have some theories, I am utterly unqualified to answer that.
Choosing a designer is hard. Using 99designs freed me from that task. The final comparison comes down to $300 for a logo vs. $300 plus the time and effort required to find the right designer plus the risk they'll produce something you don't like. I took the former deal, and I continue to think it was the right one.
I think the income listed is only for donations made to Wikileaks via the Wau Holland Foundation in Germany, while Wikileaks itself may also receive money from other sources.
One big opportunity is the differences in content between different language editions of Wikipedia. In many cases the content for an article varies widely between languages, and I still run across articles that are not yet available in English yet.
I wonder how much of it is due to having cows and harsh winters.

(as someone with lots of northern European ancestry and lactose intolerance, it's a fun subject. I can still eat cheese and yoghurt and half-digested milk, so it isn't much bother)
I cant wait to see 99developments created ! would be great to get 302 developments by 102 developpers for 500$ ! would save a lot of money...
There's unsweetened (and unflavored) soy milk. Don't know about unsweetened vanilla soy.

For the unsweetened unflavored variety, my local Whole Foods carries Silk, 365, and/or Earth Balance. All three have about 1-2 g sugar per cup, instead of 6-8g in normal (sweetened) soy milk. Some other kinds of milk are worse. I used to know someone who drank goat's milk and some other powdered milk that had 11g and 12g sugar per cup, respectively.

My cereal is moderately low on sugar already (6g per serving among 30g carbs), and it took some getting used to it with low-sugar soy milk, but I can't go back now. If I have to use "normal" (really: sweetened) soy milk, which is still only 6 or 7g sugar per cup, I can feel the sugar rush and it makes me mad.

It's made me hypersensitive to (added) sugar in most foods. I recently tried drinking some sweetened almond milk and I couldn't drink it. It was awful.
There are big reasons to be skeptical about the claims of Ornish, McDougall, et al., especially given the evidence that low carbohydrate diets have in improving major heart disease and diabetes risk factors.

I don't agree with the OP necessarily that agriculture led to the above diseases (agriculture is a very broad term), but it is true that these are "diseases of civilization" - such disease have conspicuously shown up under Western dietary influence. Cue Gary Taubes and his book, Good Calories / Bad Calories.
> I'm annoyed at the system

The system is the free market. I'm no Randian, but its pretty clear there is both supply and demand for 99designs.

> If you have $300 to spend on a logo, there are hundreds of good designers out there

Note that this is a different service than 99designs provides, and to be honest, I much prefer the 99designs version. Better to get 12 good ideas without putting much effort in, rather than tracking down a designer who'll do it, having a few skype calls or coffees, and then taking what they give me.
Can you define the moral line that using 99designs crosses? I think it's a perfectly moral agreement between designers, those seeking designs and 99designs itself. If it is immoral to ask someone to produce work with the understanding that they won't get paid if I don't choose it, then we have profoundly different understandings of morality.

99designs most certainly lowers designer wages. That is not an immoral act.
FYI: I wouldn't have cared and definitely wouldn't have submitted had the article not been a rehashing of the HN thread
NYSE/NASDAQ trading floors closed tomorrow due to hurricane
AI is not an explicit subject like math and physics, which has solid principles. It's just about searching for a way of providing the machines an ability to "think", whatever the way you choose.

Different people understand the word "think" differently. Eg, for most people, AI is about algorithms, while for me, it is about recreating a human brain.

So, an overview is too complicated and multifarious, at least for me.
I think he's saying that the lactose gene would perhaps be somehow connected with other genes that might have more direct implications to sexual fitness. E.g. the lactose gene would somehow piggy-back other youth-continuing genetic traits.
Another issue to consider is multiple accounts. For example I have 3 Google accounts (1 personal, 2 for work). I also have two Dropbox accounts (1 personal, 1 work).

You are essentially in for a world of hurt because all the services want to believe you only have one account, or at the very least a one to one mapping between their accounts and user accounts on your systems.

Thankfully I was able to get dropbox running with two different dropbox accounts but with one user account on my systems. This was because dropbox has command line tools (for Linux only) so you can fake them out with different $HOME settings.

But on Android etc I am SOL.
With all of the hate towards Microsoft here i'm not really surprised of no mention of SkyDrive. It's working quite well for me. I never had any technical issues with Dropbox. I don't like their pricing model. The free account offers less space than my Gmail. The pro account offers way too much space for my use to even consider upgrading.

My other concern about Dropbox is that it took them weeks to figure out whether or not their system was compromised not long ago with the help of "outside experts." I don't know what to think of a company which hires others to figure out what's going on with their systems. That worries me a little.
Not only do developers get rep for posting answers on SO, it's a good intillectual exercise to challenge ourselves. Knowing something is one thing, being able to explain it coherently is another level of understanding that is very valuable to cultivate.

Similarly, posting on 99 designs is a perfectly selfish act. It's a great no-pressure exercise to hone your skills without having to worry about client requirements. I really don't understand why professional designers feel so threatened by spec. 99% of the time, 99 designs is a perfect example of why you should hire a professional designer.
Oh hey could you code the backend and frontend of my site for free?

C'mon, if you do so, you demonstrate your knowledge, you'll get famous, you'll get experience, and hey your schedule isn't booked with work right? C'mon, people answer questions on our site so it's totally the same thing! Collaboration!

My company has millions of dollars but yeah we don't have a budget for it. Don't ask me why, just do the work.

Wait, you want to get paid for that work? Jeez, you are one entitled person.
SpaceX ends space station supply mission with a splashdown
Official press release: http://www.spacex.com/press.php?page=20121028

Raw video of splashdown: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W_bF6ZciBxQ&feature=youtu...
The only challenge is distinguishing large deletions of worthwhile content from large deletions of crap. Both programmatically and philosophically.
Such a model wouldn't work because the backend and frontend of a site are far much more work than a logo.

That isn't to say you couldn't spend an equivalent amount of man-hours designing a logo. But it is to say that the designs on 99designs obviously don't have the same amount of work put into them, otherwise the site would be infeasible.

You can argue otherwise, but the fact that there isn't a business for this just like 99designs flourishing is enough proof for me that it won't work.

Also, if someone wants to make such a business, I welcome it. Doesn't mean I'll participate.
How much success are you getting from direct outreach?

Curious as to what sort of work you're doing as well...
Have a read of this article:

http://www.behind-the-enemy-lines.com/2012/04/feedback-unemp...

There's good reasons to believe that the portfolio that designers develop through 99designs is likely to be worth far more to them than the win itself.
I see a lot of this going around, particularly on this topic. Usually as part of an angry rant.

It's a common theme for most industries to want to control who is in it, how they buy and how much they pay. The whole retrospectively-name mercantilist period of economics lasted for centuries, and collectively reduced the living standards of millions, just because those in charge thought setting prices and reducing access to industries was a good thing. It wasn't until markets were opened up and anyone could enter or leave at will that things improved for many, many people.

The point is - you either agree with free markets for anything or you don't. It's hard to accept that it's OK for you to buy cheaper goods caused by some industry disruption somewhere else, but it shouldn't apply to your own industry. It's hard to accept, but you still have to.

Commoditization of products and services happens, and if it happens to you, you've just to got to suck it up and get on with it. Hectoring or whinging to your clients is a no-win strategy. Doubtless many restaurants have been killed by McDonalds and low-cost, low-quality meals, but the public vote with their feet and dollars.

In the case of 99 designs, most of the designs are below the floor level of the cost of engaging a designer. If I were a designer, I would hope that 99 designs provides a gateway to people using more design services, rather than doing without or (worse) doing it themselves, which is the far-more frequent outcome.

In the case of new companies (like stackoverflow once was) it makes a lot of sense to just get a little bit done in order to get launched. If it's successful, there will be plenty of money later on to form proper relationships with real designers.
That was so long ago, I'm pretty sure the (then 3, counting Jeff) developers weren't even getting paid yet. Might still have been running the site on a (single!) box under somebody's desk. Was still a few months til the private beta started.

I'd imagine (since I wasn't around at the time) it was more of a choice between "pay nothing" and this, Stack Overflow had no income until after launching (ads I think were the first thing) and no funding for years after that.
The the talk goes on about GitHub and then Git, so the title could be structured a little better; I don't use github as much as I use git, so here's the link to the second part of the talk -- http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v...

There's quite of few intricate git parameters I didn't know about, so here's my notes for almost all of them:

git add -p [ a logical way of staging hunks ( diff entities) ]
git checkout - [ '$ cd -' for branches ]
git branch --merge [ show all merged branches ]
git branch --no-merge [ not merged branches ]
git branch --contains [ which branch contains a particular sha ]
git checkout BRANCH -- path/to/file [ copy a file from a different branch ]
git log branchA ^branchB [ show commits in a that not in b]
git fsck --lost-found [ show deleted content that hasn't been gc'd]
git diff HEAD --stat [ force display commit message ]
git blame -w [ shows who changed each line while ignoring whitespace changes ]
git blame -M [ ignore move commits, display only code changes ]
git blame -C/-CC/-CCC [ ignore different levels of move/rename and only display code block creation or modification commits ]
git config remotes.mygroup 'remote1 remote2' [ group multiple remotes ]
git status -sb [ colorize status, remove fluff ]
git diff HEAD^ --word-diff [ colorize and highlight word changes instead of producing line diffs ]
git config --global help.autocorrect 1 [ convert 'did you mean' messages into action, questionable usefulness ]
git config --global rerere.enabled 1 [ remember previously merged commits when merging repeatedly with same branches, i.e. master -> long running dev branch ]
git config --global color.ui 1 [ command that I keep googling on stack overflow whenever I setup git on a new machine ]
git commit --amend [ modify commits that haven't been pushed to remote ]
git reset --soft HEAD^ [ retains commit diff as 'staged' as opposed to complete erase with --hard ]
git shortlog -sn [ count number of line diffs by author? committer? ]
git commit (--amend) --author "Author Name <author@email>" [ attribute commit ]

A minor nitpick about the talk, is that the speaker tries to humor everyone and most of the time it falls flat, I mean calling everyone who can setup SSH keypair neckbeards? It's a little more cringeworthy than funny, and thanks to moments like this the attitude of the presenter comes off as a bit presumptuous.
This has been my experience as well. Google Drive is indispensable for editing, sharing, and collaborating on school files, while Dropbox has that "just works" quality as far as storing and syncing my personal archive.
I have the opposite anecdote. I was talking to someone who was smoking a few weeks ago, and I could not recall the previous time when I had even seen someone smoking. I have never seen a place where so few people smoke!
Conversely lactose intolerance could also be unattractive. As a person who is mildly lactose intolerant I can confirm that if I were to drink a tall glass of whole milk I would be a very unattractive person to be around, at worst you'd simply pass out from the assault on your sense of smell.

Side note: a possible attractive quality of lactose tolerance is an increase in calcium intake which can have multiple positive effects on the overal health of the individual including some outward indicators, stronger teeth for example.
Sexual selection would operate on a different (neotenous) trait, and the lactase production gene would come along for the ride.

Genes and organsisms are complex beasts, so traits will often be clustered together. An interesting related experiment is one performed on foxes, where they were bred for 'tameness' and gained a whole raft of other dog-like traits: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/807641/posts
I was really asking more out of curiosity in contrast to the freelance programmer question.

I think there are a lot of similarities between freelance programming and freelance marketing though there seem to be more cowboys in marketing, perhaps.

Thanks for food for thought!
Is this plain stupidity or was corruption involved?

The thing that annoys me most about this is the political "equal opportunity" drivel.
Well, the start of dairy wasn't in a cold climate, so I don't know about that. There was clearly some advantage in being able to digest lactose. Maybe it was the occasional winter that had to be lasted through, and having a cow or goat to milk helped out. Anything that weeded out the competition would have done.
Some parts of the milk are discarded when making cheese.