skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Protip: don't ever reply to ads that ask for a "ninja" or "rockstar." Look for the more boring sounding jobs; they will have fewer people competing for the job, so you can probably make relatively better rates.

Also, why do you only do remote work? Is there no one near you who needs a sysadmin? Could you travel? People value face-to-face interaction a lot more than online; if you only do remote work, then some guy in Bangalore can undercut your rates (hence the $20 an hour offers), and you're not really offering much over him.

And as the original article says, don't charge per hour. Charge per week, or per incident. And charge rates that make sense for that kind of time frame. Read the original article; it has good advice. Once you charge per week (or per incident, based on a standard weekly rate), you can start talking about "OK, you want to spend less, which things should I not do", not "Well, I think I'm worth $50 an hour, but since I need the money, I'll take the job for $20"

Yes, for systems administration it can work that way. Here where I work we don't really have any sysadmins (or everyone's a sysadmin, which is even worse). We have developers, and we have tech support who support customer systems, and we all kind of chip in on the system administration, but we don't have anyone who's job it is to maintain our own network. It finally got so bad that we've brought someone in to straighten it out. I don't know the details of how he's being paid, but I could easily imagine it as "it will cost $5000 for me to track down your problems, reconfigure your core router, set it up in a way that will be more maintainable in the future, and write the documentation for running that."
I am eternally indebted to you for filling my brain with the image of Andy Rooney (wearing a scarf and goggles) on a scooter, barreling down a New York sidewalk, pedestrians leaping out of the way in terror.
The weird thing with most of these reviews is that they're so predictable. Those who you'd expect to hate the Surface have, and those you'd expect to like it -- have (probably the biggest exception being Paul Thurrot).

I know several people will Surface's and I haven't heard of the app store crashing from any of them. And I use the app store on a standard Win8 w/o a crash in the months I've used it.

And of the couple of people I've read who have had app store crashes, they have been people who typically don't like MS products.

The Surface is becoming more of a Rorschach test than anything else. Did anyone seriously think that MG would like the Surface? Does anyone seriously think that MG won't like WHATEVER Apple ships next?
I wonder if YC would ever be able to fund a Hyperloop? What would that look like?
I think these guys need a reality check. They are at $149 and their direct competitor is the Sleep Cycle app. It is really well done, retails at $1 and, most importantly, does most of what's actually useful from their list. What's left is a physical form and a coffee pot integration. Is it really worth $148?

http://www.sleepcycle.com/
People seem to mention Elixir a fair amount, but I haven't heard of anybody building anything with it.

One concern: Is it even slower than Erlang itself usually is?
Ask HN: What are some tutorials to learn modern web dev 'correctly'
Before I get blasted and told to 'just google it,' I am not just looking for syntax guides, or even tutorials for specific web frameworks like rails or cakePHP. I have already done that, and there are a wealth of tools out there that are very helpful.
However I think it would be useful to see what types of framework independent concepts or design decisions are generally accepted as the way things are done.
Discuss.
Black Friday 2012 and Cyber Monday Ads Round Up
I'm working a lot on my open source projects, building a good portfolio. I'm hoping I can get to a point where I find something worth charging for, but for now I'm building tools on weekends and using a large and well-received portfolio to garnish some attention.

Great idea you've got there. I wish you only success!
How we built the new Exec iPhone App
I disagree. We have no idea what is in the pipeline. Every time I have heard Tim speak about his 'vision of Apple' it seems quite similar to what Steve had in mind.

We have no idea what sort of products they have in the pipeline.

They have a TON of cash.

Steve Jobs was just a man. His vision flip flopped all the time. Apple is slow and very methodical in its product decision making. They make very precise decisions, and often these product directions are mocked initially, but that eventually changes.
وفاة شقيقة الرئيس محمد مرسي
وفاة شقيقة الرئيس محمد مرسي
Making.List.Now.
#Spam

No features, no details, no hacker tech. Just sign-up forms.
i really like the google docs as a reporting/monitoring outlet idea, it's not the gist of what your article is about, but i usually always had my own reporting wired up, seems like an interesting thought to use google docs for that. is that a common thing, do people do their reporting through google docs? going to try this out.
I have freelanced for almost 15 years in Europe and a bit of Middle East. I have done pretty well, charging easily 1K Euro a day, less in the last couple of years.

Last year, with a colleague and friend, we started our consulting company. The main reason for that being "let's scale!". We contacted a bunch of freelance colleagues we trusted and respected and asked them to join us as hired guns, whenever we needed more workforce.

Another reason for starting a company was that the developer profession is not rewarded as the experience increases. At least in Europe, a 3-4 years experience Java developer can make almost as much as a 10 years experience Java expert. And there are rate roofs which are hardly crossable, so even if you are really really good and have plenty of war stories, still the 1K/day roof is pretty hard to cross.

So far, it didn't go exactly as expected. We are doing ok, we have some clients (we are in the Java space, so mostly enterprise stuff) but nothing spectacular. We are having an hard time acquiring new clients and the long running European crisis doesn't help.

I'm working considerably more than in the past (weekends are a rare commodity, very long days, in short my work/life balance is critically crappy), so sometime I wonder if it's worth the hassle.

The scalability part is very tough: we hired one guy (who was a disappointment) and we use our trusted hired guns, who are often busy with their own consulting gig. Therefore, we are crazy busy.

Another problem is that the clients are really interested in our specific experience: that means they want to work with me or my partner, not with the company. This bit is hard to crack.

In short we are still figuring out how to go from here.

We will invest more in the web site and technical blog (we are also co-authoring a book) and we will hire one or two permanent devs (did I mention that hiring someone in Europe is bloody expensive, so that the 70% billable time mentioned in the article is too low?).

Working solo is easy, scaling is not. As a developer, you are faced with plenty of new challenges (finance, marketing, pr, negotiations, contracts, cashflow) - which is fascinating but damn consuming.
Elaborate prank? Or the drugs finally taking their toll?
Also consider that consoles have been largely unprofitable for Microsoft until recently. The console wars were a proxy for the set-top future that these companies were predicting. If consoles had to be profitable in their own right, Sony would have won a long time ago. Nintendo has been a niche for a few generations now so they don't really count (though I'm not sure how you'd classify the Wii here).
Google: Don't Let Trolls Exploit Flaws in the Patent System
> I live in a country where very senior developers often get confused and charge as little as 20 euro per hour

I've seen this in the US too. Talented devs charging 20-30/hr, while talentless hacks making $100/hr.

Your salary is not a function of your skills. It's a function of your negotiation skills, timing, and luck.
Or he could just call back, ask for a supervisor and negotiate a free repair. Nintendo is pretty good about this sort of thing. They routinely give free repairs even to people who don't really deserve one (e.g. continuous problems with physical damage caused by mistreatment of the systems). Way easier than taking them to court, where he would almost certainly lose.

Edit: Assuming he didn't ever do anything like install Homebrew on it. In that case, they won't repair it.
It's a cool idea, but I am fascinated that this is featured on HN. It's a site created in 10 minutes with a twitter bootstrap default style, and google spreadsheets powering the forms. Any web designer could replicate this idea in 15 minutes...
It is a legitimate request. Honestly we were quite surprised/baffled to receive it as well.
"Nose Tests" or "NoSetTests"?
Going to go with drivers again. The sad truth is closed source drivers can be as hit or miss as open source. By any measure I have tried, Windows 7 is considerably faster then XP for the gear I run, but only when proper drivers are installed (not the included Windows 7 ones).

It is annoying when you get something that's slower or doesn't work though. I was burnt by Creative with my Live! Drive and as such will never buy their hardware or software again, but I don't blame Microsoft.
Based on the description, it sounds like they're purchasing for themselves (founders purchasing individually, not pooling into a small group plan for a company).

The premiums bear this out.
Tips for marketing an iPhone app
Just finished making the first version of an iPhone app and have started press releasing it. I've found the whole app review thing a bit of a minefield and discovered that app reviews themselves are a business! We're doing the usual social stuff, talks etc and have also tried FB and Google ads. The ads haven't generated enough downloads to justify the expense. Would love any tips on this.
The app is https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/the-super-times/id509942440?mt=8 in case you have any market specific advice. Thanks! :)
We are talking engineering, right? Like making something, knowing it would break. You'd just make sure they are the people holding the trigger. Evolutionary dead end or not.

>There's a reason we don't have this ability. People are fond of life precisely because we can't feel the suffering of others, or for that matter, remember our own suffering for very long. A super-empath is an evolutionary dead end, which is why there aren't any.

We are fond of life because we emulate in our minds how it works and then translate those feelings to ourselves. Super-empath would work on a much more detailed scale. There are some context in which super-empaths could prove to be an evolutionary viable, but they are firmly in the realm of SF.

> Indeed, to understand this idea's history, study religion, the most ruthless and bloodthirsty human institution ever imagined.

I don't understand the idea of singling out religion. Sure it is probably outstayed it's welcome at this point, but it had a very important, positive even, impact on overall life of individuals.
Did Apple actually buy Color Labs?
Best options seem to be web services like Wave Accounting or Xero.

The same problem exists on the personal side: There does not seem to be any decent alternative to Quicken.
This sounds more like a publicity stunt by moot.it than anything else.
Computer Science: Illustrated Posters
Linux Rootkit Doing iFrame Injections
You know it's built this year because of its heavy usage of Proxima Nova :)

Overall, pretty clean, but could definitely be cleaner. I'm seeing four different button styles with no discernible justification for them.
Negative. Elixir should be no slower than Erlang as it uses the same data types as Erlang. Elixir tuples are Erlang tuples, Elixir function calls are Erlang function calls, etc.

In practice, you may find that your Elixir code is even faster than the equivalent code you might write in Erlang. Elixir encourages some things like compiling some logic into your modules. For example, Dynamo compiles routes so they're super fast. String.Unicode is compiled from the UnicodeData.txt database itself[1].

[1]: https://github.com/elixir-lang/elixir/blob/master/lib/elixir...
Legalizing And Regulating Pot: A Growth Industry
What does winning in mobile look like? Apple isn't interested in low price low margin devices. They sell premium high margin products. If apples market share were to freeze exactly as it is now with the same margins forever raking in tens of billions of dollars a year in pure profit, they'd be happy. Of course they'd be even happier with even more, but android outselling them 2:1 isnt a problem as long as Apples margins are greate by 20:1.
btw, if anyone is interested, one of the best books i have ever read is hayek's challenge (a bio) - http://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/H/bo362...

i was not (and am not) a fan of his economics (at least as seen in current cartoon-like views looking back), and cannot remember why i started reading the book, but it really is excellent (very well written bio with a fascinating subject).

and yes, he was a very smart guy who adapted his views as necessary.
Surely not "permanently" as that would violate the "limited time" clause for copyright enshrined in the US constitution ...
Also, take the title of yesterday's #1 article, and write an article about the opposite
# Language:

Making an app for any platform has a learning curve. If you know Objective-C, learning iOS programming is an easy jump. If, as in your case, you know HTML+javascript, making a PhoneGap / Firefox OS app will be an easy jump. If you learned Java in school, Android will be an easy jump. If you know none of these they're all going to be approximately equally difficult.

# Cost:

iOS - $600 Mac Mini + $300 iPod Touch + $99 developer account

Android - ~$350 PC + $300 Nexus 4

Firefox OS - ~$350 PC + $300 Samsung Galaxy S2 (?)

iOS is a bit pricier to get started on. No question.

# Provisioning and Certificates:

Yeah these are some annoying bullshit. I agree 100% on this point.
Something to smile about: A 5,000-mile walk across Asia, guided by Google Maps
I don't think anyone is expected to automatically understand what the icon does when they see it for the first time. Rather, with good icon design the number of times they tap it before they internalize what it does is minimized.
That's utterly unenforceable (not a lawyer though).

The users on his site are asking him for comment (via email), usually rowdiness about lawyers and him being greedy (or whatever) is floating around. Curious to see if he acknowledges it.

Without a registered mark though it's really just kind of huffing and puffing...making a case on moot being recognizable and moot.it hurting his name is ludicrous (in my opinion).

Ludicrous stuff like this happens all the time, like the C&D against Zen Magnets by Buckyballs a while back. Completely baseless but they sent it.
No, dear god. We need less self-promoting manipulators here and more substantive, authentic posters.
Pre C++11 you would use a scoped_ptr in that scenario. And for the record, the conditionals in that destructor are redundant, deleting a null pointer does nothing.
I am building a lot of stuff with Elixir, both open source and commercial, including a commercial system for a customer
Firefox for Android Now Available for Millions More Phones
Rare image of Super-Jupiter sheds light on planet formation
>If you're going to deploy a long running node application that is going to be running a constant load, don't deploy it to either: A really low budget VPS

My multi-user node.js chatroom (http://ponyplace.ajf.me/) sustains around 60 concurrent users at any given time on a $5/month (not oversold) VPS. It can sustain a lot more than that too (151 at its highest yet after a 4chan raid).

The secret I find is in not letting your web server gobble up your memory. Don't use Apache, for example. I use nginx.
In a way, you're both right. Chrome Extension development is far more difficult to get started in than it should be. The documentation is lax at best and it's only starting to heat up, and the trouble one can have with Chrome having to be restarted all the time for the changes to take effect on Ubuntu (and maybe other OSs, I don't know) is highly discouraging. On the other hand, you really don't need anything I put together in order to develop an extension, but it's useful for getting off the ground faster.
I agree, the education system in the US has several problems, some of which are being made worse by attempt to "fix" those problems (Race to the Top I'm looking at you).

I would point out that these kinds of things are about trade offs. As a society we are much worse off without a national education offering, even if it has significant problems to overcome. At this point in time, private health insurance tied to employment have clearly failed as a way for US society to have decent health care, as we spend more for lower quality service than most other nations in our economic class. Universal health care programs are not so much about a panacea, but something that doesn't suck as bad.
عيد الطفولة
True, we are having things coming up as we speak like profiles. But we really wanted to launch something to test the idea as we are continuously building on it. We tested this idea by doing this for a couple of startups already and are trying to see if we can sale this. Thanks for your support! I will keep you updated on our progress!
Smiletrek.org:
Very cool use of technology to enhance a very human adventure.
There is a lot of truth to that. But I would wager that 99% of the time you know what app you want to open and its just a matter of finding it. Typing a few letters of some part of its name is definitely a win here. Another nice solution would be for apps to have categories that they can install themselves into, and the user could filter by typing generic categories like "internet", "play video", etc.
I also like the idea, but as nemesis1637, google doc powered forms are far too minimal. To me, the whole site, company, everything, is too minimal.

When it comes to hiring, saying something like, "These are people you will want to hire. They have been vetted by startup veterans." Is a bold statement to make. But it's not a very believable statement, not from looking at temps.io. What makes a person a startup veteran, what companies have you done this for, how many, why is temps.io uniquely qualified to determine if a resume is bs or if the individual would actually be a good fit. Are you actually doing phone interviews to screen people. Are you meeting with people in person. Are you just a service that will collect resumes and send them to companies. As i'm sure people need work, you will get contacted. As companies DO need people, you will get contacted. But if anyone put up a site that had a standard sign-up with an extremely generically awesome mission statement, they would get contacted as well. People would sign up in the small chance anything panned out. This may even result in some sort of, "what do we have to lose" scenario for companies. But if you want to grow this into an actual business, provide more info on your site. Don't just answer questions in a comment thread, tell people why they should consider using temps.io on your website, without all the marketing fluff.
>We have momentum, private industry that is not tied to taxpayer whims, and a half a century of technology and advancement.

That's a pipe dream. For private industry to do this there has to be a profit motive, and in this case there isn't. There's no way you can make money going to Mars, and getting sponsored by Red Bull isn't going to defray the costs much. When Elon Musk says Mars is the goal, he means he's intent on providing a capability the rest of us will be expected to pay for.

>Yes, Mars is tougher than the Moon - but not that much tougher. Space travel just isn't as expensive as you think it is. Not anymore.

There's a hell of a lot more to a Mars mission than getting everything to Mars. We couldn't do it today even if the rocket was free. And it won't be.

Even beyond the obvious engineering problems there are still a lot of things we just don't know how to do in the constraints of the vessel. We have no practical way of protecting the crew from the radiation they'll be exposed to, for example. We don't know how to build an environmental system that guaranteed (more or less) to work for five years. We don't know how to keep astronauts in good physical and mental condition over those kinds of time frames. The list is endless.

Mars is like Apollo in the same way an Everest ascent is like camping in your back yard. You are grossly underestimating the difficulty of what you're proposing, which is why you find your tiny cost estimate credible.
Reminds me of this clip: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7WAwuSK36Gw

"Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit sniffin' glue."

I wonder if that dates me, or if "Airplane!" is a movie that is still relatively well-known with a younger crowd.

</off-topic>
That look-up just reports that the application became a patent. That status there does not determine its expiration date. Barring something exceptional it died over a year ago.
To me the hyperloop in my head would be a maglev train within a vacuum chamber, unless Musk has some kind of new tech in development in his research lab somewhere (not implausible if you ask me), but if i was going to build such a thing i'd probably have to do a working prototype first and it seems the easiest way to do that would be to use an existing underground train system, perhaps a derelict one. Then it would be much easier to create new infrastructure after its been proven to work.
"In September of this year, McAfee published a diary in three parts of his recent "adventures" in Belize on a private message board"

Does anyone have a link to the original source?
>Did anyone seriously think that MG would like the Surface?

No, but you might expect Paul Thurrott and Peter Bright to, if you were judging it on the basis of their general opinion of Microsoft.

The problem with ascribing opinions of the Surface/Windows 8/RT to one's general opinion of Microsoft and/or Windows is that so much of it is incongruous with what we think of as "Microsoft". People who like one Apple product tend to like most Apple products because there is a clear thread of simplicity and elegance that runs through them.

I'm not sure what thread has traditionally run through Microsoft products (lots of buttons, lots of choices, lots of legacy?), but the Surface, with its vertical integration model, and Metro, with its "non-power user" interface, breaks that thread. But then at the same time you have the desktop mode, which tries to maintain a connection to the Microsoft of old. So in conclusion it's a big mess and old biases don't necessarily apply.
What do you want to achieve before the world comes to an end?
A friend and my answer was a clear one: "We want to start a web app with 10.000 users". Some people think in December 21 the world will come to an end. What do you think? What is your one goal you want to achieve?
In the past, it sounded like he really wanted to see someone work on the idea, but was not interested in doing it himself. Now it seems he's coming around to the idea. This is really exciting.
Particle physicists confirm arrow of time using B meson measurements
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A safer playground for your Linux and Chrome OS renderers
It's sad that you think "writing stuff people want" is manipulative and faux.
It was an interesting read. The main professions he described, law and medicine, have certification requirements. I wonder if the author is envisioning having some form of accreditation? Without that how can one know who is a "professional" programmer?

I am not sure given the current climate of corporations exploitation that this is viable.