skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It really is just a matter of charging more. Don't take more work for less than $n an hour. Grandfather older clients in if you want, or don't if they're not the type of client you'd want to work with long term.

As Patrick said in the article, there's no secret to charging more, except charging more.

I have a full time job and have intentionally priced myself so that I only have one or two side jobs at any one time ($125/hr for PHP). I am also not actively seeking any work, the last couple jobs have been from existing clients or new ones that have former clients working there now. Given my experience with intentionally raising prices 30%+ across the board and taking 50 hours/week off the table, I have little doubt there's practically a line out Patrick's door with CEOs holding $10-50k checks in their hands.
Somewhere in the brightly lit but somehow still dark recesses of Google, I am sure someone is writing a program right now that algorithmically generates games in order to distribute real world tasks onto humans. Just give it a spec in some map-reduce type query language, and up pops a new game on the Android store.
In an idealized world, and on a device of sufficiently low complexity, sure.

But when you have multiple services that all cover the same basic thing, your icon needs to transcend its very basic function. Yelp, for example, needs to look different than Urbanspoon. Twitter needs to be distinct from Facebook. Flickr separate from Photobucket.

The notion that the icon should be immediately communicative of the app's purpose is a nice one that just doesn't scale. Sure, you see envelope you think email, you see telephone you see phone. What happens when you see a TV? Is that your HBO app? Your ABC app? Hulu?

Any app of sufficient complexity would be better represented via branding rather than a pictograph of its basic function.
Humble Bundle : Time Schafer's Double Fine game jam
I can't vouch for any the actual content he is posting, but I can very confidently confirm this is his blog.
Basic Option Strategies, Part 2 - Options Pricing
This is how I see it. No one asked for Metro. Many people simply don't want it. It exists solely for Microsoft's benefit, because they want to move in that direction. I also would bet money that it's going to get harder and harder to live in a non-Metro world over the next couple years (if, that is, you are still using Windows).

I recall my Dad asking me if I was looking forward to getting Vista (back before it was revealed to be the train-wreck it was) and I replied that I wasn't. It simply had nothing I cared about. Windows 7 was the same way. Its improvements over XP are, IMO, few and of little impact. I do not find its performance to be consistently better than XP and its interface most definitely is inferior (but "Classic Shell" fixes that).

The only thing I've seen from Microsoft that was even remotely interesting in the last 10 years was Kinect, and I don't play the kind of games it's good for. Call me a hater, but MS simply doesn't have anything to offer me.

And like many people, if it weren't for games and a small handful of apps that I could live without if I really had to, I would run Linux on all my machines. However... Steam is coming to Linux and a good number of GOG games run in Wine, so soon there may literally be no reason for me to use Windows (at least when not at work).

Maybe it's the economic reality that Microsoft simply doesn't care about experts who have been using computers for 30 years because there are so few of us. We power users, experts, software developers and others may smugly abandon Microsoft because we think they aren't worth using any more, but Microsoft may simply think, "Good riddance, we don't need you any more."

I don't read what most people read, or listen to what most people listen to or watch what most people watch, so I'm used to it and that works for me.

But it's a little different with Microsoft, because they are still a very effective monopoly in some ways (e.g., Office) and even if you have no personal use for them, you can't completely escape Microsoft yet.

You've also got a good point, jsz0. Microsoft has completely forgotten how to compete. They are so used to forcing whatever they want on people and having them accept it because they have no choice. If they want to enter a new market, they used to just overwhelm the competition with their massive resources, and there wasn't much competitors could do. But it's not like that any more. They are behind the curve and falling further behind with every month. And as long as Mr. Too-Many-Y-Chromosomes is in charge, it seems unlikely to me that will change any time soon.
A funny easter egg in the Erlang Source Code
Yet. ;-)
Show HN: My first OS Project: Polytalk
There are so many accounts / bots on Twitter that just auto-tweet anything from TC (and virtually every reputable news site), it's hard to take Twitter count as anything of value the day of a press release as there will be a lot of meaningless noise.
I think you're getting the wrong point. TechCrunch is not a good source for acquiring non-technical users. However it can be good for getting your name out to investors (being mentioned in TechCrunch is better then never being mentioned in TechCrunch), SEO, and general brand recognition. So yes, don't try to get on TechCrunch to grow your users, but it's not a bad part of a larger media strategy.
This.

Also: Going with some mickey mouse plan is essentially a bet that you'll never be diagnosed with anything that is chronic during coverage. My wife manage to strike it rich with an autoimmune disease, and now we essentially cannot move nor change plans in any way.

(ACA will help a lot, but I still wouldn't put it past the assholes in DC to repeal it before it helps us.)
There seem to be a lot of comments centered on “wow, this sounds great – I wish I could charge more” or “how do I find these high paying contracts”?

Here’s one way. It may seem obvious to many, but I think it bears stating.

If you are looking for consulting contracts that pay really well, focus on providing a service that helps companies make money rather than save money. In other words, help grow revenues rather than reduce expenses – people pay much more for that.

Here’s the reasoning: When business managers, executives, etc. are given targets, they typically relate to increasing revenues much more often than reducing expenses. Not surprisingly, increasing revenues is therefore “front of mind” for those with budgets to make it happen, and they see tremendous value in someone who can help them do that. The fact that a little automation in the accounting system will save a data entry clerk a few hours a month – hmmm...maybe next month.

Case in point - I remember reading a comment somewhere from a Google employee who was complaining that at Google, those working on the revenue generation side of the business (i.e. advertising, adwords, etc.) got all the “love and attention” in terms of getting the resources required to get their job done, while others working on more obscure projects had to put up with leftovers. Now I’m not sure if that is actually true at Google, but I wouldn't be surprised as I've seen it at many other companies – the “rain makers” are the darlings with dollars to spend, and the back office ops folks are left to struggle with fewer resources. All injustices aside, find a way to provide something to the rain makers.

The type of work that Patrick does directly improves revenues. If you are a DBA selling tuning services to help companies re-write gnarly queries for example, well, unless a slow performing query/process is directly impacting revenues in some way, it likely is a secondary priority in devops/support where budgets are tight and “learn to live with it” is becoming a way of life.
> We'll build you an automated test suite that ensures the most important parts of your application never break again. [emphasis added]

This is an unsupportable claim -- it cannot be done. The Turing Halting problem, and its connection to Gödel's Incompleteness Theorems, prevent it from being possible.

All the above claim tells us is that the people behind the claim are ignorant of the most basic principles of computer science.
> Samsung is the only company in the Android ecosystem making any money

Says who? LG, HTC, ZTE, Asus made billions too, not as much as Samsung obviously but it would be unfair to ask all of them to be as successful as Samsung or Apple. Point is, plenty of hardware (and software) companies are making huge profits on Android.
Hm, I guess the point of contention would be the "to update beliefs"?
Exactly but the ban starts on January 1, 2014. You can safely start COBRA now, since with the recent election there's no chance the law will be overturned before then, and little chance within the next four years. After that it'll be pretty well entrenched.

Here's a timeline of Affordable Care Act provisions:
http://www.healthcare.gov/law/timeline/

Note that the law not only ensures you can get insurance, it prohibits insurers from charging higher premiums for people with preexisting conditions.
Unfortunately there aren't any particularly efficient ways to do immutable values in JS right now. readonly properties tend to behave in poor ways (like silently discarding attempted writes, or slowing down jitted code) and immutability forces you to create way more object instances than you would otherwise (which, as the post mentions, tends to perform poorly due to the relative immaturity of JS GCs.)

At this point I consider this to be a bigger problem than it was when I wrote about it [1]. On the upside, it's possible to use tools like Emscripten or LLJS to produce JavaScript code that doesn't suffer from these downsides because it doesn't rely on the JavaScript GC or heap, but that introduces its own issues.

Ultimately, JS engines either need dramatically better garbage collectors or, the language needs to evolve to the point that an ordinary piece of JavaScript isn't going to place tons of pressure on the collector. Proposals like Binary Data [2] will help pave the way here but it may ultimately take the addition of value types that behave like structs in C/C#.

[1] http://www.luminance.org/blog/code/2011/06/18/performance-ch...

[2] http://wiki.ecmascript.org/doku.php?id=harmony:binary_data
But in terms of writing functional computer code...how much are you actually writing? Is this code merely to wireframe/prototype something? Or is it an actually deliverable that the company will build atop?

Depends on the engagement. There is code I wrote running in production at some clients. (Might want to keep an eye on the FC blog, as I expect there will be something interesting on there eventually, but until then that isn't my story to tell.)

So given a hypothetical company... what is your strategy for convincing them that you can tell them something they don't know?

I tell them something they don't know, and continue doing so until I win the engagement.

With specific reference to Fog Creek, I was active on their forums for a few years and folks there read my blog, so I wasn't exactly starting from a position of We Totally Don't Know Anything About You on the credibility ladder.
I think it is highly unlikely that spacex or anyone else disassembles and reverse engineers the satellites they are paid to launch.

Maybe they look for a reentry shield and radioactive emissions or something, but I don't think it is much of a risk since the blowback from trying to sneak a weapon into space would immense, the risk of discovery is high (satellites weight much less than nukes or kinetic weapons) and you will have just given the world community all the evidence it needs to prove you did it (nuclear weapons and satelite payloads are very traceable).

Of course someone could get a satellite launched that maybe has enough fuel to change orbits slightly and could be used as a weapon against the space station or other orbital assets. The difference between a satellite and an orbital missile is software and maybe a small delta in fuel.
I write ruby (though I haven't done much rails yet), and went to literally dozens of SFRuby meetups. Yes, recruiters did swarm in a few times. However, it was a massive waste of time, hopes and energy since every single one of them was looking for a senior engineer. Interestingly, the last SFRuby meetup I went to at Carbon5, where we all had to introduce ourselves and what we did, about 5-7 of the twenty some people there were unemployed.

I've actually had better success finding work through HN and through friends of people I've worked for before (once again no help to someone just starting out).
As far as centrifugal advantage, SpaceX gets 88% as much launching from KSC in Florida. There's also an advantage for geostationary satellites (you avoid an inclination burn) but I'm not sure how large that would be.
Link to the company looks less relevant since the article says it is loosely based on something that happens years ago.

There's a link to the company under the author's name on the top right, though. :)
Skewed News Tutor
I'll definitely throw five bucks for an account.
Skim the API docs -- that's what got me to actually understand Parse.

It's an extremely full-featured, full-stack platform. Think a less-general Heroku. The API makes it look kind of like MongoDB + blob storage + push notifications, but with really nice abstractions for things like account management.

It also has a "Cloud Code" feature that can store and execute custom JavaScript server-side on their end.
Ignoring TechCrunch (and other high profile blogs) is bad advice.

Right, the traffic you will get from them surprisingly low, but they are a fantastic source of instant social proof - After all, you must be good, otherwise they would not cover you, would they? ... ;)

A TC logo/quote on your home page can improve conversion rates for years to come.

This social proof is especially useful if you are self-funded, and can not show off your "Received X millions from Sequoia/YC/Whatever..." badge of honor.
Another way of saying this is that "Things change. They change in all fields.In technology they change faster than most anywhere else."

I'm not sold on split teams, but I am sold on finding the right people no matter where they are. Another strategy that works is using remote workers as leverage. Lots of neat things happening here.

I live in the U.S. When politicians say stuff like "We need to keep more jobs from going overseas"? I don't even know what they're talking about. We should make things in a more expensive fashion and force ourselves to buy them? We should make all of our workers noncompetitive? We should make the world economy conform to our ideas about how things work instead of how they actually work? None of that makes any sense to me, so I'm at a loss at what an intelligent person would be doing telling me these things.

As economies continue to get more virtual, we in technology will see how the flat world plays out ahead of folks like doctors and realtors. Interesting times ahead.
The test suite is really only a small part of the service, the other half is the included training along with a set of rules that developers should never be allowed to deliver code with broken tests.

I completely agree that the test suite on its own doesn't give much, but I envision this to be more of a training course with an added bonus of a deliverable.
To bring his dogs back to life for a few minutes each in order to see what they saw in their lifetimes? Then they'll have all of his secrets!
This is absurd -- "moot" is a common word, not a trademark or copyrightable property.

http://fairuse.stanford.edu/commentary_and_analysis/2003_09_...

A quote: "Copyright laws disfavor protection for short phrases. Such claims are viewed with suspicion by the Copyright Office, whose circulars state that, '... slogans, and other short phrases or expressions cannot be copyrighted.'"
You are correct, but mostly because console lock in simple doesn't matter as much. New console doesn't play your old games? Your old games probably suck more than the new ones anyway. New office suite can't open your customer spreadsheet? You're fucked.
> If anything, the responses by the community only prove there's still a problem with diversity.

I agree that there's a problem with diversity but believe that it's a white persons problem. Once they're done convincing themselves that they're not racist, the rest of us can carry on talking about ruby.
Ask your dad to cite some instances of little guys who benefited from the patent system working as designed.

I would then direct his attention to the case of Robert Kearns. (See http://www.me.utexas.edu/~me179/topics/patents/case3.html for basic background.) Even though he was legally in the right and won his cases, after legal fees, time, etc, he still lost. (He did win more than his cases cost, but I've heard that, thanks to inflation, he actually lost money. And even if he didn't, he still made considerably less than he would have if he hadn't devoted his life to the lawsuits.

"The little guy" is a convenient fiction.
> they need to improve their stability and offer better uptime

What's their track record here?
Nexus 4 vs iPhone 5 benchmark test results
I wouldn't say the difference is corporate purchasing. One important reason why consoles are special cases is that there's no data that needs to be migrated from one machine to another. You just buy new games for the new console and you don't care about the data on the old console.

There's also no data that you share between 2 machines or 2 users.

Migrating from Windows to Mac used to be a huge pain because you had to move your data. And also it was beneficial to buy Windows if people were e-mailing you Word docs and spreadsheets so forth.

And then you need the entire support ecosystem and the employee base who understands Windows, which wasn't relevant to consoles.

Small businesses and individuals are just as swayed by this as corporations.

Phones have some of these issues but not all. If you could buy an Android phone, and then instantly sync all your Apple account data to it, like the music you bought, your contacts, and the photos you took, etc. then it would be a different story. But that's never going to happen.

Even FaceTime is an example of introducing a network effect. It's more valuable to buy an iPhone if your son or daughter has an iPhone so you can FaceTime with them.
I watched the video. How does one add user account support? For example to handle multiple users in your example task app.
Internal Videos Show Why Microsoft Kin Cratered
I live in a country where very senior developers often get confused and charge as little as 20 euro per hour. In comparison, my higher rate seems ludicrous and I have trouble with people.

Yes, I am working on moving and yes I do work mostly with remote clients. But you know how it is, clients feel much better when you can take them out to coffee.
Do you mean "functional" as in "it actually works" or "functional" functional?
The cynic in me is reminded of the Segway at this point. I'm not calling bullshit on this, but I'll wait to get excited when something is actually shown.
Be a Grim Reaper
Can you spare an invite, good sir?
Do you have a section on your website for families? I couldn't find it.
This doesn't have to do with HN or bloggers. This has to do with the general populace. Have you been in Facebook off late? Whenever I see some pictures of anyone there, there's always someone commenting "you look gorgeous", "wow, you look smashing". Or people saying "we had the best time ever", "I did mind blowing stuff" etc etc.

This is just the language people use these days. Wodehouse would be very happy that he is not a part of this generation.
An iPad Lover’s Take On The Surface With Windows RT
Seriously. kind of baffling that he even decided to try this!
I find this comment offensive in that it doesn't even consider the possibility of talks from non-sentient objects. I take personal offence on behalf of rocks, gym balls, mass-spectrometers, pastries, table-lamps and all under-represented objects in the ruby community.
The Gaza Strip Cyber War
Different businesses have different criteria to evaluate their tools by. OCaml has had some limited success in the financial market, and I think Scheme may have as well, due in part to the ease with which high performance code can be written that closely mirrors the formulas they're used to working in anyway.

For your run of the mill business, ease of finding developers to do the work, and ease of finding maintenance developers not just today but 10 years from now is a much larger consideration. In addition for publicly traded companies (or management that's too weak to stand up for their choices) picking a "accepted" language to do their work in offers a certain degree of deniability should the project fail (the outdated joke about no one ever getting fired for choosing IBM seems appropriate here).

I think, when it comes down to it, the relative merits of the language itself are actually a fairly minor consideration for most businesses, they simply go with one of the industry standards because it involves the least risk on their part. The only way I see that changing is if more companies take a strong stand and publicly push less popular languages into the spotlight and make a strong case for the advantages you can see by embracing them.
I would use this if you gave me a product that I can use to run my own mail (and not a service)
One problem with geoengineering is that it doesn't neatly negate effects of increased CO2 - it's hard to predict exactly what will happen. If we triple CO2 and install space glasses that refract sunlight so that it misses the earth, what will happen?
Maybe the refraction and CO2's radiative forcing will cancel itself at some latitudes on some days. But in many other places and climate conditions, they won't.

For relative climate stability, by far the technically simplest and most straightforward way would be just to stop burning coal and stop projects like tar sands and oil shale.
Indeed. I guess he simply trusted on his big name on this. Tried to scare.
HealthNet in particular appears to be prone to decline coverage for preexisting conditions. All insurers currently do this, though, so unless you're a single man in your 20's, getting insurance on the private market is a royal bitch.

To get a feeling for the problem, consider that common reproductive health issues in women, like endometriosis or uterine fibroids, are both extremely prevalent and actuarially unacceptable to insurers (they correlate with expensive surgical interventions, which aren't common but are common enough for insurers to wave women off).
No thanks! I'm sure this is a great article and all, but I'm good!
Any chance you can add F# to the supported languages list? It runs just fine on the same Mono/Ubuntu setup you have for C#. All you need to do is install from the Github distribution:
https://github.com/fsharp/fsharp

If you have any questions about setting it up, send a message to the `fsharp-opensource` group (https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!forum/fsharp-op...) and we'll provide whatever help you need.

And if you guys do add F# support, send out a tweet with the `#fsharp` hashtag -- many F#'ers watch that hashtag for F# news/announcements.
Apple and the Desire for Control
That isn't true. I was on a Delta flight to JSConf in Portland in 2011 when Osama bin Laden was killed and was watching it live as it was unfolding. Just this week I was flying to/from LAX and was Citrix'd into work to deal with some issues. I was getting roughly 300kbit up/down on the last trip. The whole plane has about 3Mbps bandwidth.