skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't think Patrick or myself ignore the starting point - albeit my book is targeting freelancers WITH clients.

I can't begin to praise the effectiveness of in-person networking. Chamber of Commerce, technology councils, and other business forums are some of the best places to start. My strategy is to find business owners with problems I'm capable of solving. Checkout this blog post detailing my strategy (it's at the bottom): http://planscope.io/blog/my-most-effective-newsletter-to-dat...
What's the process of raising an angel round?
Heh, I wish it "ensured stock". Twice now I've ordered for pickup, gotten the email telling me it's ready to be picked up, and gone to the store only to be told that they don't actually have it. (?!?!)

It made me swear off ever shopping at Best Buy again, but I broke that promise when they started price-matching Amazon prices...
I am from Africa - a continent of more than a billion people speaking around two thousand languages. In Africa, you find one of the first Christian nations in the word as well as communities practicing ancient forms of traditional belief systems. Climate ranges from scorching heat and arid desert to tropical rain forests. You find the very wealthy elite monopolizing all the resources as well as mass poverty. I could go on.

To make matters worse, borders between countries are artificially drawn by colonialists. That results in frequent conflicts and makes effective governance or business extremely difficult. Yet, almost everyone refers to Africa as one homogeneous (dark) unit.

Schadenfreude from your African fellow.
Then again, I think a fair number of Brits would state Northern Ireland (the difference between Great Britain and the United Kingdom) is part of Great Britain
All of these examples suggest that the way things are, is a direct example of the way thing should be; that there's some sense and reason for hardships that result from capitalism.

I can't agree that's the case. Believing otherwise is simply convenient.

--

As a postscript, it seems to me that many people believe the myth that absolutely anyone can make it if you try hard enough - an extension of what's been sold to me as the American dream. Of course, the corollary of this, is that those who don't achieve are victims of their own laziness and lack of motivation.

I can't state strongly enough how untrue this is. Once upon a time it may have been true, but now — even those born within the same country — enter into the world on a vastly uneven playing field.

Someone who is born into poverty is quite simply likely to die in poverty. Some succeed against all odds — however luck often plays a strong part in a person's effort regardless of the amount of effort they put in.

To state that most people who are victims, are victims of their own doing, isn't true. Again, it's simply convenient to believe so, because it removes the need for altruism.
Another aspect we should factor is history. Countries in Europe are in general much older than the USA. That is probably one of the biggest reasons for such rich diversity in Europe. Portugal has the same borders since 1249; Greece exists since the classical age; etc.

That is why I think that despite existing notable differences between those regions of the USA, they are on a different scale. Dialect, culture, food, general behavior, economy and (even) quality of life, of each country is affected by it's history.
What were the most useful things you learned in your job application and interviewing course?
Just out of curiosity, has anyone tried having a set of rapidly switching masks to prevent screenshots, so that at any single point of time, all the app can make a screenshot of is a few semi-random (but small) portions of the image? Get it up past 60 frames per second, with something like a noise pattern on the masks, and a screenshot may be pretty indistinguishable, while giving the image only slightly less quality for the end user.

Would require quite a bit of tweaking to get just right, but there is clearly a demand
Is It Time To Go Back To School?
Yes you have to ask for professional ID.
+1 to Pete's answer.

Since you are technical & have social skills, you might want to focus on trying out "hybrid" roles (e.g. growth hacker).
If we want to be really pedantic, orthogonal is an extrapolation of perpendicular from R^2 to any vector space with a dot product. But those generalizations came about in the 16th century. The original definition was just "perpendicular", coming from the Greek "orthos" and "gonia", meaning "straight" and "angle" respectively.

For some fun reading on the etymology of and history of the word/concept orthogonal, see http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=orthogonal&allo... and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orthogonal
Many Django or Rails sites are well within single developer range. They would sure beat Wordpress in the fulfilling department.
you've read it . did you?
About a decade ago, I had a QA job that I hated and that made me hate my life. Like you, I also didn't have any good ideas about what I could do instead. In fact, I felt kind of trapped, because I wasn't sure I was capable of doing anything else. It was a black-box QA job, and I'm not the sort of person who writes code in my free time, so the skills I'd acquired in college atrophied and I didn't feel like I had anything to offer employers anymore. I was depressed and scared about my future.

Around that time, my manager's manager bought a copy of a book called _Now, Discover Your Strengths_ for everyone on his team. That book changed my life forever. The current edition is called "StrengthsFinder 2.0": http://www.strengthsfinder.com/home.aspx

What taking the StrengthsFinder inventory did for me:

- It helped me understand my personal talents better than I had ever understood them before, and it encouraged me to develop them into strengths. Prior to reading the book, I had focused on being "well-rounded". This was very eye-opening for me and it completely changed my attitude about my career.

- It encouraged me to find ways to play to my strengths in the job I hated, with the goal of finding a way to enjoy it more.

- When that didn't pan out, it gave me the courage to start looking for roles that might suit me better.

To make a long story short, since then I obtained a graduate degree that would help me develop the talents the StrengthsFinder identified, and I've had two quite different roles that both played very well to my strengths, to the point where I would call them dream jobs. It's difficult to describe just how much happier I am now than I was ten years ago.

In short, if you are looking for ideas, consider the StrengthsFinder. It seriously pulled me out of a rut, and I've seen it do the same for others as well.

As for the question about whether you should quit... consider sticking with it until you figure out what else you want to do. I didn't stay in the QA job I hated, but I did stick with QA while I was working on my Masters because it paid the bills.
> Those two are scary

Yup, quite, but I tend to believe that the trend of jobs being automated only to be replaced with new information technology/creative/human interaction jobs is going to continue, as it has for the last century or longer.

It might be difficult to imagine a future where there are enough jobs to keep everybody occupied, but then again, it was probably the same when automated manufacturing made line workers largely obsolete; computers made typists obsolete; farm equipment made much farm labour obsolete, etc.

What the missing jobs took away in jobs have been largely offset by improved standards of living for everybody, better infrastructure and an economy that provides a stronger social net that fewer people fall through; high-paying technology jobs that power even more progress for humanity. We're living in the most prosperous, peaceful, socially equal period of human history, and I (along with many experts) only expect this to get better.

Interesting Ted talk that talks about this: http://www.ted.com/talks/peter_diamandis_abundance_is_our_fu...

Edit: Quoted section of OP's comment that I was replying to.
Muscular Hydrostats for Games
Linux is my main and the operating system I use (Laptop, Phone, Server and Media Center). It is fun to see other people trying to hack Linux to run on obscure or minimal systems but as a daily user I think the biggest achievement would be to run Linux more efficiently on a regular machine and not on obscure system.
I highly doubt you'd ask this question without being a successful freelance web developer. So instead of talking to you about skills, I can offer some business finance advice in general: CONTROL YOUR FINANCES!

I've learned a lot from the Easy Numbers blog (http://billysbillings.com/blog) by Billy's Billing. They share financial advice for entrepreneurs – including freelancers. A great way to save money from having to hire an accountant because you'll know what to do for yourself. Best of luck!
You might want to try support at your company for a period of time. It sounds like your company may be agreeable to it, and it's easier than you might think.

After communicating with users for a length of time, you might find that you're passionate about it. You may also respark your love of building things, now that you've interacted with users. You could also find that you hate support and user interaction -- figuring out what you _don't like_ is just as important.
Assuming its a Rails or Sinatra app, building an iPad app based on JSON output would be fairly easy. I could easily see you making some extra revenue by selling it for $0.99-2.99
Aha thanks, a sneaky change from See SHEET to consult SHEET.
> Also, is it legal to just put a blanket on the guy, pretend he's sleeping, and then deal with it when you get to your destination?

Not to sound insensitive, but I wonder what the alternative would be? Declare him deceased and then do what? See this comment elsewhere:

"If possible never declare a decease onboard , first you could be wrong!, and it is a bureaucratic mess. Is better to keep trying CPR till the emergency team can take care of the patient."

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4973578
Some thoughts on organizational complexity
I agree. Since this is coming out of research out of a university, I would be more inclined to guess that (at the time at least) this was actually innovative and new work. The fastest way for a paper to be rejected is for it to have been done already, or even for it to be "obvious to anyone" with basic knowledge in the field.

Also, I don't see why the fact that it's advancing existing techniques or that it's just math somehow makes it less important. There are whole fields that are just math, such as computer science originally.
Sure, "shouldn't," but in my experience the second case is far, far more prevalent, using Machiavelli and Sun Tzu as management techniques, keeping good people on board as well as a lower burn rate than they would if their board allowed them to proactively secure their staff..
This is such a terrible comment that I flagged it. There is no way to go from what 'twoodfin wrote to "I see you're one of those types that think the president can torture children"; you had to make several assumptive leaps, all hinging on identity politics, in order to make that inflammatory and thoroughly stupid claim.

If you actually read what 'twoodfin wrote without immediately flipping the breaker in your head labeled "David Addington", you'll find you can't even discern his take on executive branch powers. What he's saying is on its face so true as to be banal: Congress cannot in fact pass laws that alter the balance of powers erected in the Constitution.

I don't know how much damage Yoo and Addington's misconceptions about the limits of executive power did to the country. Like you, my guess is "nonzero". But I have a pretty clear read on how damaging comments like yours are to the discourse on this site: immense. Stop it.
For information on the various satellite navigation systems available:

GPS (United States)
GLONASS (Russia)
Galileo (European Union)
Compass/ Beidou (China)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellite_navigation
For a fun application, this trick is used in a proposal to encode extra randomness into the 0x20 bit of each character of a DNS query (to increase resistence to poisoning attacks):

https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-vixie-dnsext-dns0x20-00
Even phones, if they want to be sold in Russia, integrate GLONASS and GPS now.
I think email is overwhelming for most high-communication people, but also that most people are kind of stuck with it, and there's a lot of friction in switching between platforms. Gmail is certainly the default platform at the moment, but not because better ones don't exist.

Trying to build a better email seems tough. Unified inbox is kind of interesting. Gmail as a platform is very interesting -- I've been using apps like StreakCRM and find them very compelling vs. standalone apps.

Lighter weight and social messaging (facebook, sms, whatsapp, snapchat, etc) seem to be making an impact on messaging, particularly for younger folks, and i bet cannibalize email, both in terms of volume and time spent.
How I'm Learning Ruby on Rails
Create A Widget Area For A Certain Category
Another Chrome Extension Found Tricking Users
I tend to get PDF workshop manuals, print off the pages I need for a task and put them in plastic pockets to stop them getting destroyed in the rain.
With S3, yes. However, the CloudFront CDN works great for gzip now with web-backed distributions, assuming things are configured properly on your end.
Real estate: if data centers could not stack servers vertically I imagine there'd be a business to renting out rooms in your homes to Google!

Also transmission to places where real estate is cheap is costlier than you'd think, largely due to red tape.
Bundler for ___?
What is the bundler equivalent for your various development stacks?

I'm really getting into rails and I appreciate how much easier it is to add and remove libraries/gems . When I was learning Java however, finding and managing libraries was a pain, and there'd be no chance I'd scour the internet for an updated version down the line. I understand that Maven is a thing, but that led me to wonder what other development stacks use for this same purpose. Other than Bundler, Maven, and node.js's npm, I'm unaware of any.

I've also dabbled in game development with Unity3d, and the situation there is even worse, most of the libraries I find are one file of code, and make no mention of dependency management.
I'm lucky enough to be a solo developer working on an interesting freelance project at the moment. Just a 4 week project but I'm working on data collation of various gambling APIs. The work is out there, we just need to work out how to find it.

Then again some people might not find that work interesting - you might prefer working on bigger projects. I think that successfully implementing large scale software projects is an interesting challenge in itself. It certainly presents problems I don't know how to solve :)
"Where local laws permit possession and such use is legally sanctioned, pump-action and semi-automatic riot shotguns in common law enforcement may also be available on the civilian market,[citation needed] and such shotguns are a very popular means of home defense for many of the same reasons they are preferred for close-quarters tasks in law enforcement and the military."

Merits of the recommendation aside, it is a very common recommendation made by many, not merely shotgun dealers.

There is a popular school of thought that suggests a shotgun does not need to be fired or even seen to be an effective home defense.
> If you asked most Americans ... they would say

How do you know what they would say? Aren't you wildly speculating, while at the same time inventing answers to imaginary surveys?

I really dislike this kind of argumentation. This thread has a huge amount of Malcolm Gladwell-esque gut-feeling-generalization-disguised-as-indisputable-fact, but it adds nothing and only serves to validate the OP's point, which is that generalizations are bad because they are usually wrong.
Networking certainly is high up there. That's coupled with having clients who love you and want to refer you. Plus if you're international, it helps SEO-ing well because I've certainly found myself searching "freelance ruby on rails developer" or "freelance ruby on rails develeper [city/country]" and found great leads instead of combing something like ODesk or Elance.
I don't see how they are at all related. For one thing, I can pretty much guarantee you that the difference in GDP growth between the fastest growing European economy and the slowest is leaps and bounds larger than the same difference between states. For another thing, for many businesses in the US, it's fairly trivial to relocate should things go south. Not so for moving between countries in Europe.
So, "friend of a friend" is all we have for this? Hearsay? I'd think that if this was anything more than received wisdom that there would be more concrete stories about it.
If the concern is that the executive is hiding facts from the legislative or judicial branches: those branches can appoint special prosecutors, independent counsels, or whatever it is you want to call them. There's obviously no foolproof mechanism by which anyone can absolutely ensure that the President or his team or the DoD will divulge information, but there are facilities the branches can use to hold each other accountable.
13.7 Million Total Views & 300K+ Social Shares After Reddit Content Experiments
29c3: Not my department (Jacob Appelbaum / ioerror) [Keynote]
Well is not so glamourous after all. A friend of mine is currently working in Oman, he has told me that there are tons of american pilots working there as the salaries can be double than in the states. For young pilots the salary can be as low as 1000$/month. So there is lot of emigration in this profession.
If you really would like to enjoy flying, just try soaring!. Much more safe than paragliding (more expensive too and less convenient). Only the plane and your ability to extract energy from the atmosphere. Awesome!. Of course being in North America you must try a flight in a warbird!
iOS and iPhone hardware since the 4s has supported both aGPRS and GLONASS. Qualcomm snapdragon parts also supported both (so the S2 maybe?)

Faster time to fix translates into longer battery life. Whether this matters in practice for much of the Continental US I don't know.
Not ambitious !!!
If it makes you feel happier , I will say , Linux, Gcc , valgrind .... all were NOT ambitious projects. But everybody knows what the FACT is !!
Red tape is a big part of the cost in the US and a problem that needs to be solved. Every locality and state has its own requirements, inspections, licenses etc.

A solar industry insider told me one of the worst solar markets in California is Palo Alto. Wealthy, green, suburban, techy: how can this be? The city runs its own utilities and makes it hard to install (apparently).

Regulations need to be streamlined.
Picking The Right Tie Knot
Follow-Up to 3 Million Verizon Records Leak
The Perfect Pairing : How to choose the right tie.
Try product management. If you can understand both people AND tech aspects of making software products, you'll be golden there.
I just checked and you are completely right, is any one with a medical training and a professional ID as an accreditation. It is just we call for a doctor as a generalization, but is wrong and we should be more precise.
If your story is any way indicative of SOP, it sounds like a counteroffer should come with an employment contract with time and termination restrictions.
I am extrapolating from myself.

Ask a kid to "Draw Africa" and you will get a wildly different picture than if you ask the kid to "Draw Egypt". Clearly the child is not generalizing all of Africa; the child does not include Egypt in the internalized perception of what Africa "is" even though they know full well that Egypt is in Africa.

This isn't some sort of strange emergent phenomenon, it is nothing more than the result of how places are portrayed in popular media. "Egypt" and "Africa" are distinct destinations, despite the (well understood) geographic reality.

It shouldn't be a controversial statement, I am not saying anything that is the slightest bit profound.
Let's not forget MySQL AB, which predates all of these companies.
Thanks a lot.

Btw, I found out some pretty nice online tools.

https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed and
http://loadimpact.com
>>Taking care of yourself is 50% lifestyle and 50% luck, and unfortunately that split shifts unfavorably with every passing year. Ailments are inevitable, no matter what you eat, or how much exercise you do.

While some things are definitely out of your control - you may get hit by a drunk driver tomorrow and be incapacitated, for example - your lifestyle can protect you from a lot of the randomness out there. I would say the percentage in the Western world is more like 95% to 5% [1]. You mention ailments, but ever since I started exercising and eating right several years ago, I haven't gotten sick at all beyond some headaches here and there, and one instance of food poisoning. Before that happened, I would catch cold on a regular basis because my immune system was weak.

[1]Now, this would probably be different if we were living in, say, Congo, where the environment is a lot more chaotic and individuals have a lot less control over their own well-being.
It's my understanding that at Mozilla you can choose to work remotely or in their office, so I imagine they shoot to make everything virtual to make that as seamless as possible. GitHub is largely distributed too [2].

I'd say that Automattic, the company that this poster works for, is pretty well-known and successful (makers of Wordpress, Gravatar, etc.).

Also, DuckDuckGo (where I'm an intern) is mostly distributed, though you might have to stretch your definition of well-known to include us. :)

[1] See around 1:30 in this video (I can't remember where I actually read about this): http://careers.mozilla.org/en-US/
[2] http://zachholman.com/posts/how-github-works-hours/ , http://zachholman.com/posts/how-github-works/
js/html games are a pain to develop. I can develop a game much faster with , flash yes , flash and i'm going to stick with that.

Assets are handled , sounds are handled and i dont need to test it on 4+ browsers to see if it works. I get a dynamic strong typed langage, a drawing soft and an animation soft , which is all i need to develop complex games.

- Do i care about mobile ? i can release my game as an native iOs app or air packaged app for android, i get exposure through app stores and can use native device capabilites to enhance user experience.

So yep , it's proprietary , but i chose ease of dev , deployement and fast dev cycles over theorical open-ness and awesomeness.
> Spend some time in Marketing, Finance, etc. etc. The non-programming roles that require an understanding or programming are often in Product/Project Management.

If you want to stay in a technology related field, just not programming, I think this is the right thing to do. Talk to your boss and explain your stance. As a company, they are probably more willing to keep employees because you already understand the products, processes, and the people you work with, and you would offer a good point of view in a new department.

Some options could be developing or giving training, high level support, sys admin, db admin, product management, project management, marketing, sales, etc.

If you don't want to stay with the same company, it might be difficult to convince another company of a career change without experience in it.
I think at the moment you can probably charge enough to at least break even on same day. As the article says most people don't need it so those that really do will probably pay a premium or depending on the item will go to the store.

Prime with amazon is pretty much next day/ 2 day shipping on everything? Which is likely already very fast for most people an most purchases.