skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Statements like that are not meaningful. Bananas and humans also emit radiation.

Flying in the upper atmosphere? Loads of radiation. A lot more than any phone.
App Script is great for knocking together ad-hoc spreadsheets that pull in data from your company's HTTP APIs.

It's the best thing I've seen so far for giving non-technical colleagues visibility into whatever organisation data you have that's programatically available. They already understand spreadsheets, so there's no complexity to overcome when they come to play with them. It's trivial to base the output on a few user-defined cells, so you can put together fairly powerful features without ever having to build a user interface. You even get to do stuff with the logged in user's Google account. And since the toy apps seldom get too big, JS that you write in your browser is the perfect low-friction development environment.
LoL++
It's good to do the exercise of doubling your salary and backing it out to an hourly to figure out what your cost floor is, but it's easy to show how this still gets you an under-the-market result: consulting companies can pay market salaries, handle 70-80% utilization, and still have strong margins.

The "correct" way to work out your rates is to raise them until you drop down to a target utilization rate by shedding the clients who don't value your work. It's awfully hard to do this in practice, but it gives you an idea of what you're aiming for.

As always, let me remind you: don't bill hourly. You are not a furniture mover.
U.S. CIO Approves Pull Request for Federal Website
And you can't get an SSN without a "valid reason". And apparently opening a bank account isn't one.
Those are good suggestions that can make a difference, but if you haven't tried IntelliJ you really should. I used eclipse for years. Wish I could get those years back now. Eclipse is great, but IntelliJ is better.
A handful off the top of my head:

RoverRide - http://ride.roversf.com/ - Ride Sharing startup

26plays - http://26plays.com - video playlist manager

Apply Bin - https://applybin.com - applicant tracker

Gander - http://gander.io - email management and syncing across devices

JSpot - http://joinjspot.com - Jewish dating site

For another 10 or so, here's a list of Meteor apps from Gander's blog:

http://www.ripariandata.com/blog/meteor-showers-10-meteor-po...
The author is making the same classic mistake of conflating concurrency and parallelism. The main difference here is that the author first creates a concurrency straw-man that he then compares to parallelism, but then when talking about parallelism he makes the same old mistake of conflating the two.

Concurrency is about modeling a problem as an orchestration of multiple things going on at once. It is an abstraction mechanism in much the same way as objects or functions. Whereas parallelism is a machine level occurrence like cache or registers. Not something to be ignored for sure, but not something typically targeted when talking high level abstractions.
don't expect that to last too long. the google talk android app updates to become hangouts, and the chrome extension became hangouts automatically today.
Assuming the structure is preserved, all the visual language still has not been.
Right, and that's my point. Moving from my baseline of Seattle to NYC is virtually guaranteed to raise your salary by far more than the $20K extra.

I've done the same math from almost everywhere I've ever lived, and both SF and NYC still come out on top. The market salaries in those cities do make up for the cost of living, and then some. The whole "SF and NYC are bullshit because you end up losing money after cost of living adjustment" argument is bull, specifically because the market salaries between it and other cities in the US doesn't bear this out.

> "I know some of the best developers in my college class have ended up getting paid 45k to 65k a year in places like Phoenix because that's what was available job wise."

Sadly, the availability of jobs is not very highly correlated with programming ability. And I say this in a non-snarky way. The top end of the software industry is very much an exercise in pedigreed degrees, networking acumen, and fake-it-till-you-make-it.

We're really not that much better than the business majors we like to make fun of.
Which bank?
USAA refuses to do it.
>If you actually read the article, you'd see the issue is not dislike of WP. The issue is that Microsoft is stripping off the ads that fund Youtube and its content, in violation the YouTube ToS. It also includes a button that allows people to download videos which is, again, a violation of the ToS.

Crossposting my own comment from another thread.

So, for years, Google's stated reason for lack of a Youtube client was that Windows Phone didn't have enough marketshare, and now suddenly it has so many users that it loses so many ad impressions because Microsoft's Youtube that the content creators are suffering because all the millions of freeloaders using Windows Phone?

i.e It doesn't care enough for the ad impressions on Windows Phone to itself make an app , but when MS does, the loss of the same revenue is the reason for sending the lawyers in and pulling the app?
Great blog post, and congratulations on your success so far.

My biggest problem so far with trying to work as a freelancer has been figuring out exactly what type of work I should be pursuing. I've got a pretty broad skill set, from back-end to front-end web programming in several languages, adequate graphic design skills, and experience with native mobile platforms. While having more skills is a good thing, I feel like it makes it more difficult to market myself successfully.

Has anyone else had this problem? Did you try to focus on one area that you liked the most? Did you pursue what seemed to be in greatest demand? Or did you find a way to successfully market yourself without limiting yourself to one type of work?
Strongest possible agree.

If there's one thing my gut says has changed for the worse since I joined, it's the cant away from supporting people who build things to tearing them down.

I asked in a "how do we improve HN comments" thread awhile back if Paul Graham could just add this to the guidelines, but it got drowned out by all the nerdy feature requests and didn't get much discussion.
It's odd that it's US only because Google Wallet for Digital Goods has been international for quite some time.
Bad Design is Sometimes the Best Design
Yeah, they can't seriously expect to compete with FaceTime and Skype adoption rates if they continue trying to force users to engage with their terrible social feature crap just because they want to make video calls.

Then again, Google's playing a very long game here with Plus (and Android, and self-driving cars, and a zillion other things). Who knows if it'll work out in the end. What I do know today is that it's rather annoying.

I'd just like to be able to vidchat with friends from my chromebook without having to get all my friends to fuck up their youtube accounts.
"Given that the software industry is already a horrible place to work"

You say things like this a lot. I'm willing to accept that I may be naive, but do you think that those of us who have had primarily positive experiences (and I know a few, not only me) just incredibly lucky?

I've been a programmer for 13 years and have worked at failing startups, moderately successful startups and big companies. I've mostly coded but have also managed small groups. There's some amount of bullshit in every job, I think, but I haven't found it to be disproportionate compared to my friends in other industries.
I wonder how Google would react if the websites that fuel it's search database started having TOS terms for search engines like "In your search results, you must also display the advertisements on the pages that you scrape".

A few sites doing that wouldn't have any effect. Google would probably just remove them. How many websites it would take for Google to actually pay attention though? 20%? 30%? 50%?
MtGox took the position, and legal argument that they where not trading a monetary instrument of any kind, and at least early on that was a plausible argument (although probably not a winning one) because they characterized bitcons as a product or commodity. I do not have to qualify as a money transmitter if I buy and sell bags of rice even though one could possibly use that as a mechanism to "send funds based on customers' instructions". In fact other then the merchant services I cannot send money to another Mt Gox user, but the bitcoin client provides that functionality and Mt. Gox does not control the client.

They shot themselves in the foot a bit when they started adding merchant services. Nevertheless I think they technically answered the questions correctly given the legal position they where taking that bitcoins are not a monetary device but a commodity. IANAL but I play one on TV, and they may still have some traction on that argument since bitcoin is only recognized as a currency by popular opinion not by legal decision.
I don't see why this is such a big deal. I've been able to send money via gmail for a long time now! My penis is bigger, I can get drugs from Canada, my hair has grown back, and I've discovered long-lost wealthy relatives in Nigeria!
Is there any need to ask for First or Last Name? Why aren't we just asking for Full Name? Why complicate things?
Yes, I have no argument with you that it is quite slick. It seems the benefit still does not outweigh the cost though. I can't even imagine running into a critical issue with paying customers demanding answers from me while I am subjected to Google's customer service. Plus there's no way to failover from App Engine to some other platform if your app is locked into the "App Engine Way".

The only thing I would consider using App Engine for at this point would be a school project or something.
OK, maybe next time just submit the blog post instead :)
In what I see as the best case scenario (reasonably approximated by my school experience), cool kids can do nerdy things, but they are without doubt "cool despite those hobbies/interests". The cool football player can be on the rocket club and nobody will question him about that, but neither will it be scoring him any "cool points".

Maybe that is how it should be, but I am inclined to think that STEM-type clubs should be glorified and looked up to.
I think the safety culture is, if you can't prove it is safe, you may not assume that it is. This places the burden of proof on the other side. I don't see any more quantitative arguments from you.

This conservative approach is a pain, it's slow, it's expensive. But it's hard to have such a safe environment for commercial aviation without a similar culture.
I think that, at this point, the only Google service that still supports standard, interoperable APIs anymore is Gmail. All the other ones have been discontinued or are in the process of being discontinued. I wonder how long it'll be before Gmail gets closed off.
PHP's popularity comes from the fact that it has good documentation, it's easy to deploy, there are lots of ready-to-use solutions written in it and its core API has many methods to solve common problems.
That one is great. But books are fine, even if they weigh more than an ipad.
This is echo chamber mentality. Why does request-an-invite imply little startup? It just happens to be a strategy startups regularly employee, but why is it only legitimate for startups? Your criticism is hard to parse any other way than that you don't like Google, so whatever they do you find an interpretation of how their behavior is disingenuous and annoying. How the wider consumer world will view this is an open question, but I very much doubt anyone but the tech 1% will even have this thought cross their mind.
Yeah. Fuck that guy for publishing code for us to look at and maybe use.
Also directly under the line "Google Wallet is now integrated into Gmail", accompanied by screenshots. I wasted time looking for it, too, before coming back and seeing the "* ha ha not really" text.
How do they update the app if Google doesn't give them access to the API? They need to kill it and millions of Windows Phone users will be left with no legal YouTube app.

Also, if you're referring to the comments on WPCentral, of course, it's "Windows Phone Central" where obviously fans and users of Windows Phone who got frustrated for years with the lack of a quality YouTube app on their phone hang out.
I don't know about you, but I always had the "Want to try MapsGL?" link down in the left sidebar.

Now, since I did have MapsGL enabled, it says it's been integrated into the new Google Maps that's being previewed here.
No, it applies per process: whether or not it came from a dynamically linked library distributed as part of the system is irrelevant. This is why UIWebView is slower outside of Safari.
Something interesting is going on here. If you log in to Plus, you can use New Hangouts _right now_. And they _do_ interoperate with XMPP users _right now_ -- I just tried it.

So does this mean the rollout is not complete, and what they rolled out as Hangouts today is not what they'll ultimately roll out? Or does it mean -- as I suspect -- that New Hangouts is XMPP under the hood, but they plan to flip the 'interoperate' switch to 'off' once they think nobody will notice?
A potentially stupid but relevant question as I'm just getting my feet wet in the consulting arena: does discipline matter at all when it comes to this doubling/tripling of day job rate formula?
While everything this article says is true, I believe there is a difference between looking at it specifically as versus.

While I will admit my bias towards Google, I feel like perhaps what he was saying is the way they look at it isn't like "We're going to be better than Apple" but that they step back and say "Okay. Apple did a good job at this, we can learn from them - but how can we make this the BEST xxx"

Which is a vastly different mindset. Much different from "One-Up"ing an opponent.
One of my biggest hopes in life is that someone with good project management experience puts something up on kickstarter to build really really good clients for a federated videochat/messaging system (could even be based on xmpp) for every single major platform (osx, windows, android, iOS, WM, html5/browser) so that we can finally ditch all these terrible walled gardens (SMS, Skype, FaceTime, iMessage, BBM, Google Talk, AIM, WhatsApp, Facebook Chat, Twitter DMs, ad nauseam) once and for all.

If you do it before I find the time, please don't forget the end-to-end encryption and synchronization of read items across devices.

It's frustrating because so many are so close. iMessage/FaceTime would be the end-all if it were federated and supported on multiple platforms, because they came the closest to getting it right (but stopped just short of doing the thing that's best for customers versus the thing that's best for Apple).
Would it be better to take the money that's being put into hyping STEM and reinvesting it into us K-12 education? Rather than having all of these extra programs to convince kids to move to STEM careers, make the current grade school programs more rigorous so that when they get their diploma hopefully they will have been through a lot in their schooling to be better prepared to take the rapidly changing new jobs opening up in today's society.
Here is the link to the website to check if a company is registered as an MSB. Yes, Coinbase is registered as an MSB http://www.fincen.gov/financial_institutions/msb/msbstatesel...
"Mathematics is based on logic, which doesn't need phenomenal "facts", just logical consistency"

The problem is that for most interesting math, we can only assume without proof that there is logical consistency.
The issue is that the app is not displaying ads, which is against the TOS.
Just to clarify: If you think you need a client because you are currently using an XMPP client with your gmail account, then you do NOT need to switch. See bullet point 1 — XMPP _clients_ are still supported.

XMPP _federation_ is going away :(.
Drop of activesync meant google don't have to pay a license fee. But your right, the world revolves around you.
Do you have any idea how much ionizing radiation simply being in the upper atmosphere exposes you to? Whoever made that claim apparently doesn't. They probably don't know the difference between ionizing and non-ionizing radiation either. Which means you should not pay any attention to them.
It's an incredibly quick way of getting something out there.

If agility matters, I've not found anything that beats it. You might not want your service running on there as you scale, but it's enough to get a few thousand users onboarded as a proof of concept.
I love this - now I can just set it and forget it. We're customers of ZenPayroll and they've been top notch with everything they've rolled out.
Doesn't Microsoft do samething to Goolge though?
I think the chrome app is one aspect of a cross-platform solution. But what if I'd like to chat without opening chrome?

I'll cross my fingers for a Hangouts API that allows me to write a standalone client. However, if chatting through a semi-broken browser extension (or memory intensive gmail tab) are my only options, then I guess the service isn't for me. I think the reason I'm annoyed is that I have a lot of important contacts on gtalk, so migrating away will be a challenge.

I know change is inevitable, that the service is free, and that they want to offer a better product. Perhaps my use cases are just too expensive to support in the long run.
"The more you can learn to help the client work through ambiguity..."
This assistance implies expertise beyond just being a code monkey; higher-level thinking and problem-solving should definitely come at a higher price.
Stop right there and read your own post carefully.

If those groups are indeed "political opponents" of the current administration, then the IRS has good reason to believe those groups are "political". Political groups have a different tax status than a group that is a church or other non-profit fraternal organizations. That is the law, and the IRS is correct to scrutinize them, in order to properly ascertain what category they fall under.

Slam dunk for the IRS, right there.
What do you mean by discipline?
When the graduating seniors start panicking because they can't find work, the underclassmen see the writing on the wall. Complaints about unemployment on reddit make the communication channel even stronger.
Twitter and Facebook can do and have done the same thing to other 3rd party developers, too.

This like saying Google is not on equal footing with Bing on social media integration, because it doesn't get the type of API level that Bing gets from Facebook.

Does Google want to "maliciously" block Youtube from WP8? Yes. Does Facebook maliciously block Google from getting any of their deeper level API's? Yes.

So now can we also stop pretending Google owes anything to Microsoft? I wish the situation for all platforms was different, too, and there was a lot more collaboration between them. But I also understand why Google is doing this. It's retaliation for all the crap Microsoft has done against Google over the past few years, too - the anti-trust lawsuit, the Gmail ad, the DroidRage, the Scroogle, the patent license extortion from Android (and Chromebook) makers, and on and on.

So I can't exactly say I feel sorry for Microsoft, because they are not innocent, even though they try to play it like that in the media. But this situation will become worse for any user that isn't fully committed to one platform or another, and that's just the unfortunate reality of the tech war today. Maybe it will get better in a few years.
So what you're saying is that there's another app - MetroTube - that also allows users to view YouTube videos on Windows 8 and Windows Phone that hasn't been removed. Congratulations on disproving your own argument that this is an attack on Windows Phone!
Hey Jack, thanks for sharing.

I couldn't find an email address in your profile or website. So, on a separate note... I've run into a couple bugs on y'alls app.

<List of things apparently fixed in latest update>

Oops!
True, it was possible. But that seems even more rare. And in this case, not true. I didn't dig deeper but it seems he ended up with a hyphenated last name at some point in life... possibly at birth. That also seems rare since even when a woman hyphenates her last name with her husband's, the children usually get the father's last name.
If by discipline you mean "type of work" then no, it doesn't matter. If by discipline you mean "self-discipline", ie. "how much time you actually spend working in a day" then it does matter, with the caveat that clients pay for results, not time-in-chair.
It's kind of funny in a depressing way how everyone seems to think it's perfectly okay for MS to violate the YouTube API's TOS just because Google doesn't want to make an official app.
Hmm. Can I filter by amount of cash attached? That will make things easier to organize.
Not if they say it's in "beta" for the next four years.
I hope those image macros were intended to be cringe-inducing. Because they are.
Human Cloning Moves Small Step Closer
Maybe. But the fact is PHP as a language is messy, albeit some frameworks have made it better (i.e Laravel). I'm assessing Wordpress because of it's praise by many people when it's not well built (have you looked at the codebase?). Just look at the author and history of PHP, the author hates computer science, and it was derived from Perl as a templating engine, not something I'd hold as quality. Nonetheless frameworks have made it better but I still feel the platform is broken and often attributed with newcomers to web development.
It's realistically priced right now, and it's an underdog in the market, positioned as a commodity. Raising prices would kill it stone dead.
In my (very limited) experience I found that you should focus marketing yourself for what you do best. There'll be plenty of other stuff you can do for the same client once your foot is in the door.
I'll bloody well decide whether I have capital letters in my name or not. That's sort of the point, here ;-)
Somewhat unrelated rant:

I'm liking zenpayroll so far, but going to a payroll site (even the blog) and getting mixed https/http content raises flags for me.

If the blog doesn't need to be SSL, don't use SSL. If you want the blog to use SSL (it's redirecting), make sure all your external resources are too.
Hey Mason, appreciate the feedback. Actually, all of those bugs are fixed in the 1.1 release which came out on Friday night. So just update and you'll be all set!
Internal Microsoft video lampoons Google Chrome
Yeah he's the condescendant one, sure.
Why words like "moist" sound so gross
Rackspace has great support if your definition of support is taking a ticket and getting back to you in 2-4 hours.
Google Now is the Future
Passed the Turing test, I'll be damned.
Considering the number of "undeclareds", a lot.

To a very large amount of people, college is "just that place you go after highschool but before becoming an adult". I like to think that most of those people wise up or drop out pretty quick, but it seems pretty undeniable that a lot of people at least start the process without the appropriate amount of consideration.

If you want to do a quick ad-hoc study of a population with massive selection bias, just find the daily "I was told a college degree would get me a job. I was lied to." post on reddit, inquire if they researched the job market before picking their major, and watch the "I picked my major for person satisfaction! give me a job!" replies and downvotes roll in.

...actually don't do this. It is very frustrating.
My guess is this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5714557

I think google is going to kill off gchat/xmpp entirely in favor of hangouts eventually. :(
YouTube users make a living off the ads. It is just as much about their rights. Google is the only one who can defend this on their behalf, and they should, down to the platforms with only 1 user.