skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
(a) Your lawyer makes you less money than a lot of software developers make for a lot for a lot of companies. Your lawyer is also considerably less scarce than a lot of software subspecialty practitioners are.

(b) Your lawyer is also cheap. Sell a company and see what they charge.

(c) I'm not saying it's wrong not to be charging $400/hr; I'm saying, if you want a representative sample of the spectrum of hourly rates consultant, $150 is much too low. There are technical subspecialties --- not business or vertical-focused --- that routinely beat $150.
Some professors at Yale had a similar idea and set up a charity that allows you to directly transfer cash to very low income families in Kenya. They're doing a bunch of randomized control trials (RTCs) which are the NGO equivalent of A/B testing for outcomes. Highly recommend them if you're looking to support something like this directly (no pun intended).

http://www.givedirectly.org/
Ok, that I might be able to see. I was thinking programming because that is what the poster asked about. I've charged in the $200/hr ballpark for project management work before, but, still, $400/hour seems way high for a long-term contract.
>(a) This poll tops out way way too low. Put the plus sign on $400.

I actually think the $150 point is a sufficient number standard deviations from the the mean to warrant a cutoff point. Sure some developers are making much more, but not enough to be interesting.
I did the usual thing and wound up working for a former employer at a much higher rate. It took two months to set up, including getting insurance. I bill hourly because that's what their A/P department requires.

My problem is that their chosen technology is not mainstream. I'm currently at a dangerous local maxima: they pay me very well for what I'm doing, but it's not very transferrable.
You are wrong, in that HN myopic "what is a typical bill rate" way. I don't find it difficult at all to be blunt and rude in making the point that you're worth more than you think you are. :)
White Americans love their weed. As a young Latino growing up in the ghetto it was hammered into my head that If I wanted to be successful I had to stay away from drugs and alcohol. And in the ghetto this correlation turns out to be very true since pretty much all losers do drugs and drink a lot.

Then I went to a state college and went to work in corporate America after graduation. To my surprise I realized that the majority of white American kids do weed and drink lots of alcohol. It made me realize that because they are middle class white Americans it means that they can afford to do stuff like that and still come out ahead compared to somebody in the ghetto.

In the ghetto, if you want to move ahead you cannot really afford to waste your time with weed or alcohol. You are already behind in your education level probably because of the crappy school system in your neighborhood so you do not want to add another problem to an already problematic situation.

It took me a long time to realize this.
You can use Selenium. Second link is an example of using it within the Play Framework (scroll to the bottom of the page).

[1] http://code.google.com/p/selenium/?redir=1
[2] http://www.playframework.com/documentation/2.1.1/ScalaFuncti...
If the 75k was done under specific terms why not use them for the additional 50k?

That would give you 50% of the company, a valuation could be calculated based on their profit they can use to buy you out?
It would be interesting to see the results of the poll run at another time, to capture more people from different countries. Sometimes there are more people from India on HN.
This is the case in the classes I teach. We use Git as the primary vehicle for submitting assignments and tracking work. I usually spend the first week introducing students to the Linux shell and interacting with Git and Github.
> "I don't know how to organize a bunch of things together!" seems like a silly reason to containerize every component into a separate root fs.

One good reason to separate every component is that it facilitates moving them to separate machines down the road, or scaling them separately.

Another good reason is that it reduces the out-of-band requirements of the components. "all the niceties" you have at your disposal may very well be specific to your distro, or your site setup. By contrast, docker containers only require docker, which is a single binary file. A developer needs to know his component will run anywhere, not just on your particular setup.
In 12 years I have had 3 clients go bankrupt on me and as a contractor you are simply an unsecured creditor. Good luck getting anything. I explored invoice factoring but the companies who do that want 3-5% which over the years is quite a lot of money.

I also learned that the net payment terms on my contracts with clients were as meaningful as toilet paper. Getting paid in 30 days was surprising, 60-90 was more the norm.

Ultimately I just started changing the terms with new clients - telling them that we could work on a typical net 30 arrangement at a top tier rate or I would give them a discount to buy hours ahead of time in 100 hour blocks and I would burn down against this. Most heard 'discount' and nothing else mattered. It is difficult to change a client to this model but if you can start a relationship from this perspective things get much easier.
I've done prepaid hours. It's good for cashflow and gives a lot of safety.

And I greatly dislike it. For some reason I don't understand, I am bugged by having to work down hours rather than simply work hours.
Google Presents Biggest Threat to Banking
I'm asking WHAT specialties are charging this rate in the technical fields, because I haven't seen them, so I'm curious.

Admittedly, my lawyer is general practice, so, yes, what they charge is based on that. But, still, $400/hr for a long term contract for a programmer/developer is very high for the majority of the US market from what I have seen unless you are working on Wall St. as a specialized Quant or something.
Hard to believe an article on this topic fails to mention airline deregulation[1]. When an industry transitions from mandated prices to open price competition the profit formula changes. It is logical that carriers would prefer efficient, reliable, high capacity planes over faster alternatives post deregulation. Also, given the small number of plane manufacturers and the huge costs of R&D to bring out a new plane, it is unlikely a manufacturer would invest in building a supersonic jet that does not meet the current operating needs of its clients. Maybe Elon will do planes next? The average altitude of Tesla and Space X's vehicles is probably around 35k feet...

[1]http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/AirlineDeregulation.html
Why does every company need a  CRM (Customer Relationship Management)?
Agreed, in those places you need to have a min wage that's higher than the poverty level and higher than any wellfare traps.
98% of VCs Aren’t Dumb
What about the low end of the scale for a multi-skilled full-stack developer proficient in one or more server-side scripting languages and frameworks as well as JavaScript/CSS? What's the minimum pay that would be acceptable?

Edit: I am a 1 year exp developer working for a consultancy focused on obtaining business through a major SAAS. We develop applications on said SAAS platform, and I am paid to integrate and use scripting with the API for this companies clients. I am moving towards an independent, freelance compensation model as I feel I would be underpaid otherwise and have no time to pick up my own clients if I don't.

Is <$40/hr too low? This is what I've been offered.
How do I start earning money with only the items you listed?

I need a PC, internet connection, VPS server, appstore developer account, and smartphone.

Your list doesn't have any of those.
Not to mention working in Paris is like working part time here. 35 hour weeks!!! Mandated by law too. Of course this might also be why there isn't a vibrant startup culture.
I usually write a macro (defn-typed) that generates pre- and post-conditions (contracts, essentially) for crucial APIs when I'm working in Clojure.

It's not as good as static analysis at catching all type errors-- if that's what you need, I wouldn't recommend any dynamic language-- but it does mean that most type errors will be caught in unit testing, with minimal recurring work.
Add to "expert developers with domain expertise in finance" also "cryptographic security specialists", "hardware reverse engineers", and "high-end SEO". There, you have 4 subspecialties of software development. Can we agree that the poll tops out too low now? :)
I'm guessing you're the sort of person who doesn't like debt in general. Because that essentially what it is: a debt that you can't immediately repay.
Honestly, yeah. In Economy, I don't even have enough room to open up my laptop. And I can't code on my iPad.
Mind is drug
I don't have a degree and have no intention of getting one (not because I think getting a degree is worthless in general, but rather I feel it is worthless for me at this stage).

I did go to college for a few years but quit to work at a company I was co-oping at (which presumably was against the rules of the co-op program the company was in with the school, but I never gave it much thought back then).

I'm currently nearing 40 and don't feel that the lack of degree has negatively impacted me. Of course, YMMV depending upon career arc -- I'm still coding, and have no interest in management roles.

Also, one of my multiple moonlighting side projects is volunteering at a nano-engineering lab at UCSD working on writing Go code to control a UV-light-based polymerizing nano-scale biomaterials 3D printer. Nobody there seems to care I don't have a degree, nor has it come up negatively at my current or any of my previous jobs.
I can think of at least 113 other reasons as well. I'd imagine a fatal crash would have had much more impact on consumer attitudes towards the Concorde than it would towards other, more "conventional" plane models. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_4590
I'd love to hear others comment on how the Drupal community compares to other Open Source projects?

I've been involved in the Drupal community and it's run very well, the community in general are very patient and always willing to help new users get started.
Check out what the Minerva Project is doing. It will combine online courses with physical "campuses" around the world where students will have access to peers, mentors, and maybe internship opportunities (the socializing part of college that's equally as valuable as the knowledge, IMO).
> Getting paid in 30 days was surprising, 60-90 was more the norm.

I've seen this before on HN. It's frustrating that it still happens. Obviously, if they can delay paying you to 60 or 90 days (but still get paid themselves at 30 days) they make money, but it's sleazy. Perhaps people should start naming and shaming companies who do that?

Luckily, the EU has law about this.

(http://www.wragge.com/analysis_7177.asp#.UaFeT9LryDE)
The [EEE] strategy's three phases are:

Embrace: Development of software substantially compatible with a competing product,
or implementing a public standard.
Extend: Addition and promotion of features not supported by the competing product
or part of the standard, creating interoperability problems for customers
who try to use the 'simple' standard.
Extinguish: When extensions become a de facto standard because of their dominant
market share, they marginalize competitors that do not or cannot support
the new extensions.

How does this fit in with what Google is doing? Where are their non-standard extensions to XMPP (or RSS, etc) that weren't supported by the competition?

XMPP was essentially a non-player before Google used it, and it'll return to being a non-player after they leave. There's no big strategy needed to accomplish this.

This is not to say I support Google's recent decisions, but then again, I had already moved off their applications (Reader and Gmail) way before the shutdowns started, mostly due to the methods used to push Chrome.
Total number of hours from start to finish is commonly displayed. If you want less time traveling, it's trivial to choose that when it's available.
Correct, it's technically a liability on my balance sheet.
I have to think the only reason trains pretty much died as an industry in the last hundred years is due to government fiddling or poor infrastructure maintenance. In a trifecta of balancing cost to time to carrying weight, trains should almost always win, with cars never winning in any of them and planes winning only at time investment.

Yet we all drive cars (which win in being personal transport where free wheels in 2d on tarmac is much more portable than steel wheels on tracks in 1d) even though they should cost significantly more, take longer (if we had even a reasonable bullet train at 150 - 160 mph, not even close to the 260mph Japanese / Korean lines) and carry less (especially compared against fuel consumption or just the raw bearing weight of car frames and rubber tires against rail cars).

An amtrack ticket from NY to Austin is $800 round way, and 50 hours each way. I can rent a car for $100 a day, and do that drive in 40 hours. So I save time, it costs the same when you factor in gas, and the only benefit is I can read a book on the train. Which is a nice plus, but not double the price worth.
Ok, that kind of specialization may make some sense then for that rate. I was just inquiring because I had never seen a rate like that on a long-term contract before. I've personally run the typical gamut of development and project management contracts charging anywhere between $100/hr and $220/hr, but nothing heavily specialized (yet, anyway).

Thanks.
People's Express Airline. A low-cost airline from the 1980s.

From what I understand, a perfectly viable procedure was: walk to the gate, wait until they call out "all aboard", push and shove for the good seats, take off, pay in cash when the crew comes around to collect tickets.
I think the English word you're looking for is "nepotism."
This.

Chromium alone puts them in the plus column standard-wise. Usually apps are judged on merit, yet in Google's case there is the misconception that they have to defend every engineering decision they make.

I don't see how this is a hot topic seeing as every other IM is an island, and quite frankly if it means directing more resources towards projects like Google Fiber, personally I think it's more than worth it to sunset GReader or move away from a limiting standard.
This is an interesting everything-old-is-new-again trend. The original Blogger actually published static web sites over FTP.
Hmm, sounds like you have a fairly large namespace instead of separate ones?
Slow-paying clients are pretty much a universal constant of business. I have the good fortune to be billing a large bureaucracy with weekly payment cycle, so they do in fact pay within 30 days. All I had to do was spend 2 months on paperwork and a thousand bucks on insurance :)

For small businesses, putting off payments to suppliers can be the difference between making payroll and going bankrupt. You can hardly blame them.

I make a point to pay as soon as possible, on the theory that this will improve the service I'm getting from other professionals ("Let's do Jacques's file first, he always pays promptly and we need the cash").
I should have made the link to the document on XMPP on Mobile Devices more explicit: http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0286.html. In short, the use of compression in the TLS layer negates the oft stated verbosity of XMPP. It really isn't the problem you think it is. More info: http://stpeter.im/journal/1384.html. I might be a fanboy, but I do know what I'm talking about.
Submarines need to be heavy. A major reason they're so cramped on the inside is because they'd float too well if they had more internal space. The weight of reactor shielding is basically free in that context.

Airplanes need to be light. Tons and tons of lead shielding is a harder proposition there, especially where every pound of shielding is one fewer pound of bombs you can carry.
Do you mean for me rhetorically, or in my peer group? Rhetorically, the common emotive argument against social welfare programs is that they enable the poor to do drugs all day rather than doing productive work (I suppose this is also an argument against drug use). Personally I feel that contradicts reality, and since marijuana use is a fact of life among the people I went to college with I think it's useful to bring it front and center now and again.

Why weed itself? Well it's an analgesic, euphoric, prosocial, psychedelic, stimulating, sedating, relatively non-addictive plant that will grow in most parts of the world, may actually be healthier for you than not using it, and to top it off has been a cornerstone of youth culture for fifty-odd years. One's mileage may vary, but it is hard for one not to see the appeal.
That's awesome for you. I wish that had been my experience. I will share with you (one of) my stor(ies).

I had been working at a big company for almost five years with no degree and asked my boss "what's next". He arranged a meeting between me and the technical director for our division.

During the course of this meeting another employee reveale to the technical director that I did not have a degree. The technical director refused to talk to me (or even look at me) during and after that meeting and it became apparent from that point forward that there was both no way for me to advance and that my days could be considered numbered.

Your milage may vary. Until that conversation I was a valued member of technical staff that had taken on a variety of leadership roles, authored white papers and was on very good terms with the senior technical leadership in our customers. The lack of a degree killed it all.
Yeah, I remember the days of "arrive 30 minutes early for international flights just to be on the safe side". Now the "rule" is you can't even fly if you arrive that "late" for an international flight.
Sorry but NONE of what you said is true or frankly makes any sense.

Chromium will likely be less standards based now that they don't have the tow of the other WebKit companies keeping them in check. Case in point: SPDY.

Google is not the only company who has to defend every engineering decision. The reason it is being discussed is that it is fitting into this new narrative of Google being less interested in standards and more interested in their advertising centric walled garden.

And finally Google can do multiple things at once. It isn't an either-or scenario.
Ask HN: What would you want in a jsFiddle/CodePen alternative?
I recently wrote a tutorial on the subject and it got me thinking. So, what would you want?
>Even the best functional programmers I've seen fall back to some kind of exit-or-exception semantic in the None case. So we've kind of re-invented the null pointer exception, by having cases where the easiest thing to do in our program in response to some failure is to just abort the program.

The difference here is that the programmer is making a conscious choice to violate the option type by writing a partial function which escapes it. It also makes very plain and clear (via type annotations) which functions are allowed to fail and which are not (pure functions). With NULL pointers you're basically making every pointer in the entire program an option type with the potential to crash if you haven't written the boilerplate to handle it.

Oh and by the way, Haskell's Maybe and Either types are monads which can be handled very elegantly via do notation, simple combinators or monad transformers (MaybeT and ErrorT).
It's not the first time government officials in Venezuela have said something similar.
They say that the constant power outages (in one of the largest oil producers in the world) are because now the venezuelan people are so well off thanks to the govt that they have more money to spend on air conditioning,refrigerators,etc...
Same reason why you cannot buy a car in a dealership (and used car prices double year after year), why there are constant shortages of basic food,etc.
Submarines are supported by buoyancy as a result of water displacement, so they can be a lot heavier than aircraft which are supported by lift generated by air moving over the wings.

The noise on a modern airplane is due mostly to the 500MPH airflow outside, not the engines. (Edit: a turbofan engine powered by nuclear-heated air would also likely be about as noisy as one powered by burning fuel)
Basically, the path to $400/hr is to just keep upgrading your skills, keep networking and keep walking up your rates. There are businesses who'll pay without blinking.

I see senior PM jobs quoted in thousands per day.
Can we speak a little more as to how you indicate that a half day is the minimal billable unit? My clients are happy to pay my high rate but I can't imagine ever suggesting to them that anything but an hour would be the minimal unit at this point.
Yeah like I mentioned YMMV, I'm sure.

For some people getting a degree might be the right choice, especially if they intend to get more into management in largish companies.
I'm kind of willing to debate this.

Is the big difference between like:

m.foo_meth() // may throw NullPointerException

and

m = getSomeM()

match m with Some x -> x.foo_meth() | None -> raise NullPointerException

that in the second case, the exception raising is explicit and in the first it is implicit? I kind of get that I guess, it just seems that it's a similar level of verbosity to deal with it whether or not you allow null pointers and you will, I think, always bottom out to some similar kind of code pattern for error handling...
1. Microsoft/Facebook (and maybe more corporates) didn't play by the rules. They don't believe in "give and take", they just do "take, take,..". Google didn't like it so walked out. Instead of showing the sportsman's spirit and instead d of carried on despite of all the follies they simply left having pissed off. Good decision.

2. Universities, organisations? The number is too small to be bothered about, esp when compared with the likes of the two above^. They would rather innovate and try to lock-in users into their own platforms rather than hoping someday Cuck might turn the benevolent saint.

3. Whatever you say but unless you are short of manpower and talent it's actually easier difficult to innovate in-house sth proprietary and not when you've to conform to a "standard" and that too when the rewards are [1].

4. Even I don't like the move but it was a business decision and this one made a lot more sense than killing off GR.

The surprising fact here is, we hardly see anyone criticizing the providers that chose not to share back. We, keep on saying "no problems with XMPP" and "even though MS and Fb were not giving back, Google should have just let them free-load after all it's a do no eveil corp".
Huh.
That's an interesting thing to consider. It's hard to judge tone across so much time, but it doesn't seem to me that he is truly gleeful at the prospect, but merely views it as necessary, or useful. It doesn't have the implied "I can't wait to grab my gun collection and fight off the ATF/FBI/police/whatever" that I've seen in other contexts. But that perception could just be colored by my preconceived notions of who Jefferson was.
Yeah, I just think that at every point in your program where you will have a Maybe the failure case could be as inelegant to program execution as raising an uncaught NullPointerException, and escaping that involves a lot more work than using a language without a NullPointerException.

Maybe I should write more Haskell code, but this has definitely been my experience with OCaml...
SPDY is an open protocol, and Google is working towards standardization of it. Plus, many other browsers have implementations of it based on Google's protocol specification, so it's not true that SPDY is an example of Google becoming less standards based.