skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I couldn't recommend hiring an accountant enough. They remove a fair amount of stress from what you do and they will save you money. You may have to pay them £80 a month, but that will pay for itself.

I don't normally plug services but there's a guy I've been using in the UK who's great [0]. He gives you a xero account to make things nice and easy.

[0] http://www.capricaonline.co.uk/
It turns a surface that mostly transfers heat into your attic into a surface that transfers less heat into your attic and a great deal of electricity into your house during the part of the day that requires the most air conditioning.

If you live anywhere that's hot much of the year, it's a great deal, dropping your electric bill precipitously and recouping costs often in 2-4 years in that type of situation (as opposed to 7-12 in less reasonable areas). Also due to the nature of how cheap the electricity is during the day, you can set the A/C low during the day "coast" off the temperature differential during the night closer to a temperature you'd like.

Bad areas for solar: Constant cloud cover, Lots of overhanging Trees, far northern latitude. I would not use it in Alaska, Portland or Atlanta for these reasons.
Thanks youngtaff.
I also googled a bit and found out http://loadimpact.com . It is very good . I did analysis of my site ( http://loadimpact.com/test/view/1262390) on this and that shows the effect of shared hosting on it. !!
The odds of you ever negotiating something like that from any company with funding and/or house counsel are effectively zero. The closest you'll get is severance, but note that negotiating an effective severance agreement is expensive and can get adversarial. (It's easy to get a severance agreement that does not really protect you).

By this I mean, don't look to contractual provisions to mitigate the risk of a bad-faith (or bad-in-effect) counteroffer. You'll either establish real trust in your employer or you should walk.
When Americans talk about Europe, they talk about Europe, this is the problem. Someone who knows Europe geographically and politically often means with "Western Europe" the European countries with a strong economy. (Why would you exclude UK?) Others might use this term to refer to all countries west of Poland. What I am saying is: even the term "Western Europe" is really unprecise.

And even if you only talk about Western Europe without UK, it's still a very heterogenous landscape. Please, why do you think the EU exists? Why do you think two World Wars basically originated in Western Europe? Germany is really different from the Netherlands. Everything is different, houses look different, cities look different, job market is different, just about everything is different.

I'm sorry, but almost everytime I hear Americans use the term Europe, the sourrounding statement is almost always wrong. To illustrate it a bit: imagine I would make statements about the continent America like: in America xxx. There is almost no chance that such a statement holds any informational value... :-)
...no takers? Here's a hint: it's largest city ranks 5th world-wide in number of billionaires residing there.
+1 on Strength's Finder. It is an amazing concept for finding out the words to describe what you already know: those things you love doing where you start something, then look up an 6 hours have passed by. My company has everyone do it and even sponsors a couples course to bring in the significant other of employees to take it. Does wonders for marriages too. good luck!
True, you're generalizing when you say "Europeans are...", but you would also be generalizing if you said "Americans are...", "San Franciscans are...", "Rich people are...", "Programmers are...", and so on and so forth for any group of people you can think of. Talking about a group of people is generalizing, and generalizing is a necessary part of life, because despite the fact that doing so may cause untrue things to be said about certain people, it is also true that generalizations are true about more people than they are untrue about. That's why they're called generalizations.

People say "vc's in the bay area understand startups." Is this universally true? Of course not. But am I ignorant for saying so? Not in the slightest, because in more cases than not, it is true.

So yeah, the guy's statements might not be holistically accurate, but who's are? He's offering guidlines, and I believe that's fair.

Disclosure: I have not yet had the pleasure of visiting Europe. It is possible that my opinions might change after experiencing life there firsthand.
If you see a UI walkthrough, they blew it
>"Roughly 95% of all German firms are family-owned. Of these, approx. 85% are managed by their owner."

Lol?! ;)
I was taught at my (European-based) business negotiation course that such generalizations as the ones mentioned in the article, are a basic American negotiation strategy to undermine European confidence. I was told that Americans are aware (most of the time) that their behaviour is received as ignorant and rude. After reading the article, I'm back to wondering whether my business negotiation professor was just prejudiced or is there a grain of truth in what he told me?
To sum up the comments: Stop generalizing about my generalizing.
There's CocoaPods for iOS and OS X (main site here: http://www.cocoapods.org; browseable listings here on my site: http://www.cocoacontrols.com/cocoapods)

There's Bower for client-side Javascript: https://github.com/twitter/bower
This is true. Coding isn't necessarily the fun part (though you certainly should not dislike it) - it's what you create with your code that I find to be motivating. Hopefully solving some relatively complex problems along the way. And then seeing people use the final product? Now that is a pretty cool feeling.
Not as well-known as some of the other examples, but our company, Lincoln Loop (http://lincolnloop.com), is successful and fully virtual.
I would love to hear if you tried Backbone before your build your framework. If so, what are your reasons for making it.
Hello! I work on the Firefox OS app store[1] . There are no officially supported Firefox OS devices yet- but you can experiment with the simulator[2]. Additionally, they will soon be able to run on any Android device with Firefox for Android installed. (certain apps work already in our Beta version[3])

Hope that info helps!

[1] https://marketplace.firefox.com/

[2] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/firefox-os-si...

[3] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.mozilla.fi...
Wumao dang (50 cent party) invading hackernews?
having a full time job and trying to launch a freelance career is not easy. its simpler to save up money and take a few months off work and work on your freelance projects like crazy. no matter how simple and mundane your regular job is as a human being you cannot realistically work for so long and expect to have a fresh state of mind to work on other projects and produce 100% quality outcome efficiently. talking from my own experience.
#1 would probably be asking for a pilot. There have been a number of tests on simulators, and pilots licensed for smaller aircraft have a surprisingly low chance of being able to land a commercial jet.
Have you thought about moving to the sales side of the business? I would suggest pursuing a sales engineering position. You get the best of both world- technology and meeting new prospects/customers.
You were implying that CA and LA have more varied internal culture than do Bulgaria and Romania, else you wouldn't have made the comparison - it would have been redundant to what loxs had said.
Daydream: Interactive Screen Savers
Like what? Rails is great for APIs, because APIs, especially RESTful and Hypermedia APIs, can literally be a standard webapp with JSON views instead of HTML.

I've never built a SOAP API in Ruby, so maybe Rails wouldn't work with that very well. XML-RPC might also be a little tough, but I honestly can't think of any significant difference between a "traditional web app" and a RESTful API. They're a perfect example of code reuse in MVC (or Model2 if you want to be pedantic).
Congress has the power to declare war. The constitution says nothing about spying, congress can ban it if it wants to. People such as twoodfin and yourself that claim that the president is unrestrained in these types of issues from any congressional oversight are basing their arguments on the convoluted "unitary executive" Bush-era legal doctrine that claims that once congress authorizes war the president can do anything he wants without any oversight, and they say congress authorized the current war in 2002's AUMF in Iraq.

FYI, you're supposed to flag comments for being spam or offtopic, not because you disagree with them, from the site FAQ: "If you think something is spam or offtopic, flag it by going to its page and clicking on the "flag" link. (Not all users will see this; there is a karma threshold.) If you flag something, please don't also comment that you did."
This link there:
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Apps/Marketplace_Pa...

Makes me think that there is still some work to be done to solve the issue of attracting folks who want to make some money from their apps...
> People seem eager to find some magic, half-hearted shortcut to reaching certain goals. There really aren't any. The best advice is often the kind you don't want to hear.

Often yes, and in this case probably especially so, but I'd like to make a general comment here as I hear this sentiment repeated in many other situations: in general, this is not true. The entire technological progress of humanity is based on this simple assumption: there must be a better / faster / magic way to do this, even a half-hearted shortcut, so that we do not have to work much to get what we want. That's why we invented... pretty much everything. We can call it "looking for half-hearted shortcuts" or "optimization", but it's the same process.
iOS gives no access to these buttons. It looks as though this code just polls the photo library and checks if a new photo was created.

There was a different version going around earlier which checked for touches being disabled, which happens during a screenshot (but this not the only time iOS does this, I know it happens during the standard navigation "push" animation, and wouldn't be surprised if there were quite a few other standard system actions which disable touches)
interesting that cocoapods is a ruby gem ;)
They don't allow you to pass through a custom id with each customer? That way you can record the referrer and customers actions on the site and tie it back to the sale, if they allow it.
"So many developers think their craft is enough to succeed as a freelancer or consultant; the truth is quite the opposite."

Couldn't agree more. When you become a freelance developer, you are no longer ONLY a developer. You're customer service, sales, accounting, business development, and so much more. Coding is now a portion of what you do, not ALL you do.

I actually recently started matchist (http://matchist.com/talent) to take care of the "constantly finding clients" aspect that I remember from my days as a freelancer. We find you quality work that will pay you on time, every time (because we also facilitate the payment process).
I've had that thought about going to the same old desk writing stupid code... typically just making rich companies richer and not making the world a better place in any way. Totally unfulfilling. BUT.... there's a difference between not liking that and not liking coding.

If you were to work on a coding project that was filled with interesting problems, and fulfilled some core value of yours (maybe making the world better in a way you care about) would you still say you don't care about coding? If so, then yeah, look for something else... If not, then the answer is simple. Find a new job that's inline with your needs or start your own company.
Traitors visited here too. lol
Just to be clear, you don't need an $800 console to develop for OUYA. You can start with the ouya SDK which is supposed to be released tomorrow. Then when the console actually launches in March, you can use that as you would a dev console.
Not a skill per se, but more of a habit: Googling everything first before asking anyone else.

For example, I am considering adopting a kitten. Most people's impulse would be to call up one of their friends who have cats and ask them what it is like to own one. What I did instead when the thought occurred to me was going on Google and typing in "should I adopt a kitten?" Within an hour, I had all the necessary information to make an informed decision.

Same thing with troubleshooting pretty much any kind of issue, whether or not it is related to computers. My iPhone has an issue where it turns itself back on when I turn it off. Instead of taking it to an Apple store like most people, I Google'd it and within 5 minutes found out that it's caused by a hardware defect. Then I made a decision that I can live with it and don't want to go through the hassle of getting it replaced.

Some issues are harder to handle this way. For example, I slept for 12 hours straight once, and woke up with a bad headache. So I google'd "too much sleep headache" and found out that it might be caused by multiple reasons, from hormonal imbalances to dehydration. Next time I want to sleep for that long, I'll see if hydrating myself periodically will prevent the headache. There wasn't one definite answer, but I still learned something.
I think that's the reason why. Also if there's no physician on board but there's an EMT/nurse, you wouldn't know that from the passenger list.
Plus it's entirely possible that even if there's a doctor, she isn't listed as one.
Originally the american GPS system had a encrypted higher-precision signal for military use, and and an open lower-precision signal for civilian use, which could be independently shut off. One day they decided to open up the full precision to everyone. I don't know if the Chinese system is set up similarly, but it's a possibility that the military gets different data from civilians.
I am in the process of leaving an excellent job.
I am well paid.
The work is very enjoyable and meaningful.
The people I work with are excellent.
My team and I have huge freedom to innovate.
The company is stable.
I do not have to work huge hours.
The work my team and I do on a daily basis is highly regarded.

Why am I leaving? When I arrived, in 2009, I decided that I was not going to work anywhere more than 3-5 years, simply because I had worked in my previous company for 12 years, and it took me 'too long' to shake free of that.

That's the discipline that I am working through right now. Everyone around me has known from the beginning about that arbitrary time-limit. They know I'm actively looking. They know that I'll continue to be exceptionally transparent about the entire process.

Honestly, I've been very happy with this process. People know where I stand, and that reduces anxiety. I've been paying down technical debt with a pure passion for the past few months, which would probably not have been possible without as much communication.

I'm probably going to end up getting an additional pay raise when I leave, which is fine, and I'm happy to get it. But it's not why I'm leaving.

I'm leaving because, for me, it's time. :)
This might enlighten !!

http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/23634/while-there-is...
We have medical service, and they are called in an emergency if necessary(is not like they are in standby just for a plane to call them), but usually we first ask for a doctor onboard. It seems that AA first call their doctor as a procedure, it has surprised me, but it´s pretty logical if you ask me.
37Signals and Github are two of my favorites
Do you have a receiver that works with all four systems?
Why I don't use Interface Builder
Exec Cleaning, or the challenges scaling a real world business | Justin Kan
There are some bizarre comments in this thread. Does China have PR people that are paid to just comment on random news articles about them with praises in broken english?
Goodbye Google Reader
I agree, having a full time job and a freelance career is not easy. Having also done this myself, I always felt somewhat guilty about moonlighting. Once you decide you want to go freelance, my advice would be to start saving money so you can get a 3 - 6 months "salary" saved up, and during that time start trying to line up work and get your portfolio ready to go.
Oh, look. Now I support the torture of children too! You're not even reading comments; you're just slinging muck.
Play A Tale in the Desert.

Most MMORPGs don't know how to handle user input because users are basically trained as destructor bots rampaging the landscape by the game itself, and the designers haven't figured out how to move away from that. ATiTD moved away from it successfully.
I don't think it is douchey at all. 99% of people using these devices don't give a flying monkey fuck about replacing default apps. There is a very small segment of the population that uses all of the features of a device. Also, "Power User" is not a new term by a long shot.
I disagree completely, or in large part at least.

There are places where using any DSL designed for building HTML is not that great of an idea, for example when using external template files or writing large chunks of simple HTML.

However, there are necessarily places where you need small snippets of HTML embedded inside your JS/CS code and where it's not worth creating external file for it. Then you have two choices - either have your snippet as a long string (with ugly manual concatenation if it spans multiple lines in JS), which introduces another language inside your JS file or, on the other hand, to use programmatic builders of DOM. In a context of small script this would have only advantages were it not for extremely verbose default DOM API, but this particular problem was solved many times now, for example in MochiKit[1] quite a few years ago - and now in CoffeeKup.

I use both types of generating markup - if it has more layout elements than embedded data I use external template files, however if it contains many more logic specific elements, like variables and class or id names I tend to generate it programmatically. Terseness of such approach makes modifying it easier and faster and being able to use a full blown programming language instead of constrained templating one makes it much more efficient to write in the first place.

Also, I'd like to point everyone to Nagare[2] and it's DSL for creating HTML[3] - it's pythonic equivalent of coffeekup and it's cute :)

[1] http://mochi.github.com/mochikit/doc/html/MochiKit/DOM.html
[2] http://www.nagare.org/
[3] http://www.nagare.org/trac/wiki/PresentationTier#imperative-dom-building-api
"but I broke that promise when they started price-matching Amazon prices..."

I've yet to try them on this. I'm curious - do they actually match Amazon every time, no matter what? When they first announced this, the press releases seemed to indicate that each store could independently decide not to honor on a per-situation basis.
In high school, I did all kinds of fun projects for the heck of it.

Today, what I do is basically just for me because I'm in prison.

To understand me, imagine you die and go to heaven. You have a computer, but only you can use the programs you write. You have all the time in the world. You could do great things. You don't have to bother with documentation or compatibility. That's kinda sad. You write documentation just for pretend, like you had users. Once in a while, you get a half hearted urge to write something. Mostly it's heart breaking depressing -- you've made a party and invited guests but nobody shows up, so you invite homeless people.

God rewards based on work, even unproductive work. It is not crazy to work just for God to pay you, though reason says nothing happens. Some shit is nasty hard labor. AC97 might qualify. I have the earlier generation (PC Speaker)and the next generation (HD Audio) but not the AC97 generation. My HD Audio works more or less on my machine but not in VMWare. I made a wirewrap D-2-A/A-2-D ISA card on the side when in school, so I got the thrill of speakers, microphones and digital noise. It has zero fascination, for me now. I've done filtering, FFTs, DSP to my hearts content.

I did stepper motor controllers and robots to my hearts content.

I've had a lot of fun over the years.
Ask HN: An internal catalog of web app stack versions?
I'm looking for a solution for maintaining an internal catalog of websites and web applications, which are being hosted on multiple different servers and software stacks. This catalog should be able to notify the admins when new versions or security updates of stack components are available. I would like to see in one glance how stale the app dependencies are becoming over time.

Typically, the stacks in my case are Node.js, Python, Ruby or PHP based, so it should be possible for a catalog system to scan the official repositories (NPM, PyPi, Gems, etc) for new versions of packages and compare that to the apps' currently installed versions.

Any ideas how this could be done, besides just coding a system (or a bunch of scripts) from scratch to do it?
+1 to your +1. Strengths Finder was eye-opening for me. It clearly identified some areas to explore that well suit my intellectual curiosity, in a way I haven't thought of before. Mind you, I haven't done anything with this knowledge, but at least I know what I'm not doing now!
I'm surprised that I haven't seen anyone mention cold-war divisions yet. While not American myself, my impression is that frequently 'Europe' often means 'cold war ally states', the places where American boomers could easily travel during the explosion of tourism. At least in casual conversation, that is - directly asked the question, you could get a wide variety of responses as shown in these comments.
Article on Business Week: "Solar Energy Is Ready. The U.S. Isn't"

http://www.businessweek.com/news/2012-10-25/solar-energy-is-...
Which insolation maps? I find this hard to believe. Compared to SW USA (or even the east coast), Germany's insolation is pretty bad. The subsidies are all the only thing bringing solar to Germany (or even Spain for that matter)

See: http://maps.nrel.gov/SWERA
He's trolling.

The article was well written. Obviously not everything someone would need to know to start freelancing is written in this article, but it does present some very valuable information.

Thanks for writing and sharing.
Background: contractor on and off for years. Just moved from permanent to freelance; a totally different world from contracting.

There are a couple of things that have really worked out well for me this time around.

I left an agency - and I took some of their clients with me (don't worry, it's all above board). They have clients that are too small / too complex for them, but perfect for me. It's a great arrangement - the clients already know me, nothing much changes from their point of view. Best of all, they're already used to paying agency rates.

I'd suggest that if you're working at an agency you ask around to see if you could do the same. It really can work out in everyone's favour (particularly yours).

Secondly, I read a lot of patio11's advice [0] so I wasn't scared of asking for much higher rates than I ever had before.

[0] http://www.kalzumeus.com/greatest-hits/
This can be a really useful website that could potentially earn you _interesting_ money.

I'd take your first few $15 and reinvest it by getting someone on oDesk to go through and fix stuff.

* First section I looked at was 'Brakes'. First article is about the windscreen washer. Then there's two articles called "Adjusting the Brakes /1" and "... /2". Why two?

* In the first there's one massive unreadable paragraph. In the second there's paragraph-length titles.

* I'd also look at getting your oDeskers to put the images in interesting places within the text.

At the moment it feels like an OCR dump of a book rather than the amazingly useful website it could be (and thus it feels like an SEO AdSense site).