skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is in addition to specialisation, not instead of. Not picking on you, but I feel sales and other 'soft skills' are severely undervalued by many otherwise talented hackers. After a certain point of technical competency, the ROI of learning right brain skills is much higher. Getting better at negotiation could quite easily get a 20% rate spike.

Letting someone else worry about selling you, is how a developer worth $2000/day only makes $600. The person 'selling you', is also 'closing you' at the lowest they can get away with.

Being 'marketable' is basically a sales task as well. You may well be a specialist in some domain, but so are another 100 people claiming to be so. In big enterprises especially, the job most often goes to the person with the best 'story', not the most qualified.

This is a good intro
http://www.contractorcalculator.co.uk/negotiating_rates_agen...
Was this abandoning caused by the technology falling short, or for some other reasons? When did it happen? Would the mathematical notation evolve in the same direction if there were tools like Bret Victor suggests available? That's a very interesting question I don't see tackled at all.
Imagine just how much "radioactive pollution" these engines were putting out if even the military wouldn't use them.
I blogged a response: http://jarofgreen.co.uk/2013/05/why-programmers-should-learn...

Basically, I think it's important to teach Git (or other Version Control) to students because what you are really teaching them is good development practices. These take time to learn and get used to and Uni's absolutely should be teaching them.

The whole issue of "students should be able to teach themselves git" is a bit of a red herring, IMHO.
Compare the walk ability maps for Houston ( http://www.walkscore.com/TX/Houston ) with San Francisco ( http://www.walkscore.com/CA/San_Francisco )

Oh and by the way, Obamacare is coming big-time to California: ( http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/23/california-health-i... )

In all, 13 health insurance companies will sell products on the exchange, and premiums will range from 2 percent more to 29 percent less than what comparable plans cost this year, the agency said.
Depends what you mean by "unit tests".

I tend to test drive the vast majority of my code - prototypes and all. So I end up with a unit-ish test suite.

I rarely write tests post-coding for initial prototype work.
mod_python is more like CGI than PHP. What was missing was reversing the whole paradigm from "Start with a programming language, and add HTML generation" to "Start with an HTML page, and add little dynamic bits" which is what PHP did so amazingly well that it is still more or less the top server-side programming language despite its many deep flaws.
Being angry doesn't help you make good decisions. This post highlights the author is pretty junior in his thinking.

Even if he has a good business.
hnofficehours?

(he enquires curiously)
>Aside: Presence is so chatty, that some mobile clients simply don't handle presence at all. Take WhatsApp for example.

One could also take Hangouts for example. :)

anyways, very informative post and good anecdotes, thank you for sharing.

my understanding of the XMPP spec is that (assuming the server follows the server-client spec, anyways) there's no way to unsubscribe from your contacts' presence notifications and keep them on your roster [and therefore able to be contacted without reauthorization, usually.]

can you confirm/enlighten me? thanks!
The story Businessinsider refers to is at Businessweek:

http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-03-28/how-samsung-...
>It is designed to estimate the amount of time it takes to run an algorithm using a data structure like a linked list instead of a different one like a binary tree.

Wat??
Excuse me, but it seems you have no idea what you're talking about.

>Consider this, that you really cannot get a good estimate of how long any algorithm can run because you got other factors in play

That has absolutely nothing to do with the complexity of the algorithm. Also, it _can_ be estimated, too.

I wonder if you're trolling or just clueless
Bootstrapped CPC rule of thumb: MRR/25
antarctic satellite IRC?

best i:line ever.
In the extinguish part, what got extinguished were the competitors', not Microsoft own products.
Ideally you would want to be in a niche that will directly influence revenue, makes it easier to sell your service for a high price.

patio11's post in this thread is a good example (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5769870), increasing conversion rates for X will directly effect the bottom line by Y. As long as the price you charge is lower than Y, you should be able to sell it.

Other than that, specialized knowledge is always handy of course. I know of consultants doing compliance/IT systems for banks, highly profitable since the banks only change IT systems every 10 years or so and therefore it makes no sense to keep the cutting edge expertise in house but there are enough banks so they always have work.

It does vary depending on where you live though, I don't know of many charging $400/hr (or equivalent) in Sweden. Same rings true for the limited experience I have in The Netherlands.

Edit: Edited for clarity.

Edit2: Looking at your HN profile: why not consulting in Big data or such? Big data is all the rage at the moment and it is a new niche that everyone wants in on.
Absolutely agreed. Often I go to my local library just to pick up a random book in the IT section that sounds interesting to me.

I feel sorry for the trees when I see thousands upon thousands of pages of empty burbling. There is so much garbage I have not found anything worthwhile yet.
UPDATE:
https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/answ...

>"Due to ongoing challenges making payments to Argentine developers, we will no longer be able to pay Google Play developers based in Argentina."

...

>"We realize this change will be painful, and will continue exploring ways to resume funding Argentine developers."

While they don't specify which challenges they are facing, I read somewhere that the problem seems to be that banks in Argentina charge international transfers with a fee of around 1/1000 of the money being transferred, with a minimum fee of around (usd) $75, making the payments too expensive for Google on small accounts.
Xorg-free Wayland Live CD that starts directly to Wayland
All Sky's Android apps were hacked and replaced
You keep updating your post, so it's hard to reply to it all :-)

Yes, many South Eastern Europeans have left for the US, UK, Germany, Italy, and Spain (not so many for Scandinavia, though). So far, few have returned. I am not sure it's fair to say that Western countries export their unemployment to Eastern Europe, thougn. There is also a lot of Western jobs being outsourced to Eastern Europe.
Can you think of a better single, instant indicator that someone is educated?
SICP distilled (2009)
They may make you go through a preferred agency for payroll/invoicing, but any fees they add should be passed back to the employer, not met by you. Typical enterprise/gov BS, needlessly adding 10-20% to the cost.

By agents I mean 'recruitment consultants', that's what they are called in London (along with pimps). Most people hate dealing with them, but they are a necessary evil.
What is worse are idea people whose pitch to technical people is "I have this great idea that will revolutionize industry X" and/or "I will take on megacorps X, Y and Z with this idea", and then continue immediately with: "But I cannot tell you anything until you commit and sign an NDA." That's very poor salesmanship, which is the exact opposite of what I need from a non-technical co-founder.

It also tells me straight away that the idea has never left the idea person's head. He hasn't talked with technical people to understand if it's feasible, he hasn't talked with potential customers to understand if his idea is attractive to them and if they're willing to pay for it, and he hasn't pitched to anyone for funding. In fact, he is probably guarding his idea so tightly because he knows that idea alone is all he has to contribute. I have drawers full of those kinds of ideas I could build, I don't need an idea person for that.

If all the idea person brings to the table are things I could do myself with a trivial effort, then they have no value at all. The real value comes from things that are difficult to achieve and take hard work. Like relationships with customers, deep understanding of what is the simplest possible technical solution that will satisfy those customer's needs, and the ability to bring in highly skilled employees, partners and funding.
Programming CAN be a system of Engineering (and often is wrt medical and weapon systems). Most programming is done as a craft in businesses, with business needs that reward turn around time and coming in under budget more than ruggedness, or real maintainability.

In a more corporate environment, it tends to favor the use of "Architecture" roles, and the use of many different design patterns even when they are not necessary and only add complexity in the name of "consistency" with other "enterprise" implementations.

Just the same, most software development is a model of crafting, not engineering. The exceptions to this tend to be with designing software that works with physical devices for a given role, not generic computing devices that are virtual representations of business logic.
I have no idea where you got the idea about binding all (any) of those listening ports on the client, but that is incorrect.

anecdotally:

% lsof -i4 -T s
COMMAND PID USER FD TYPE DEVICE
imagent 158 mh 6u IPv4 0x2969ca78b2e9b6bb 0t0 TCP mac:52812->pb-in-f125.1e100.net:5223 (ESTABLISHED)

authoritatively:

http://wiki.xmpp.org/web/SRV_Records#Ports
I believe in having unique keys for each client device, then putting them in a hashed authorized_hosts that you can treat as a unit.

That way, if someone steals my (FDE, managed) laptop or phone, I can revoke just the credentials on that client device, not losing access to all my servers.

Using tamper-resistant storage for the keys is a great idea; I wonder if anyone has done TPM for ssh on windows, or just trousers on linux. Sadly for Macs the only option is some kind of external USB token :( I kind of wish someone made a bluetooth 4.0 le device which could hold keys and be used as a smartcard/key device, maybe with trusted user I/O too. Maybe in a watch form factor.
Shit, that's depressing, I have one main client, and a couple of fill-ins each year, averaging about $30K total, $50K on the high end.

I charge a lump sum per project, never hourly.

So, $30K / (50 weeks per year * 40 hours per week) = $15/hour, wow, that's absurd.

10+ year web developer, front end, back end, I do absolutely everything short of whatever banner/color scheme an artist puts together.

What's worse is that I've been on the JVM for 3 years, developing in Scala, loving it, and making nothing extra in return.

Clients are hosted on my purchased 2X Dell R610 (not cheap) ESXi virtualization servers living in colo, getting crazy performance for $30/month.

Pretty clear I'm horrible at selling myself and/or looking for work. Every client I've had has been via word of mouth (probably something like, hey, this guy is a GREAT deal).

Kudos to those raking it in, impressive to make $150+/hour. Working remotely doing web development I would assume is on the low end of the spectrum re: what one can charge given Wordpress and/or outsourcing options (e.g. India $5/hour).
It's like anything else; you have limited time, and you need to choose your focus. I personally feel there is a lot of 'low hanging fruit' in marketing for many technical people; I think it is pretty important to have at least basic sales/marketing skills, and that going from zero to just a little bit can give you pretty big (financial) returns without a huge amount of effort. A lot of this is to just get used to asking for more, rather than just taking what you are offered.

But it's also important to remember where your focus really is, and to not go too far down the marketing rabbit hole; at least in my experience, the ROI on effort in that direction drops pretty fast once you get past that initial low-hanging fruit, just due to my lack of innate ability, and at least for me, it quickly starts looking like deception. Really, much of sales looks like fraud to me, so I go out of my way to avoid those parts of sales. No sense in playing close to the line when I can't see the line. But, one can aggressive while still being transparent and honest, and while it does bother me that being aggressive gets me more money, it's something I can live with for more money.
Not a lack of perspective at all, more of an attempt at deflection because Google are being dicks. Skype's protocols predate Microsofts takeover, so attempting to 'blame' them is churlish, and there already has been a furore over Apple and FaceTime. The browser thing has absolutely sweet FA to do with this.
We not here for the sole reason of providing value to you. Although we may, incidentally, hope to do so.

Some of us need our thoughts clarified by the community.

In any case, I find that learning happens in an atmosphere of uncertainty, humility and exploration. Doubt, thus, is a valuable commodity in any community which encourages learning, and I'd like to believe HN is one of them.
Google updating SSL keys to 2048 bit - describes validation techniques
First steps with JSR-352 - Batch Applications for the Java platform
> Nowadays developers seem to code without reading.

As someone who started programming 4 year back (which from the conversation seems to be pretty much "nowadays" :-)), I think it is a bit of a generalization. I am not saying it's not true. There are certainly places such as StackOverflow, mailing lists etc that attract newbies early on because they provide quick answers or even code, but at some point every developer who is serious about computer programming as a long term profession does need to start reading the docs. There is no other alternative and one eventually comes to realize that it's much faster than arbitrarily hunting for code and asking questions on mailing lists and IRC.

It also depends upon the style of programming language (imperative/functional) and the previous experience of the developer IMO. For eg. I find my self reading the docs significantly more in Erlang/Scala than in Python than in PHP/JS. It is also the reverse order in which I learnt these languages. Of course that is my personal experience.
Cheers. I will use that URL next time. The comments about package managers ring true; I have a bug open on that right now for Gentoo: https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=453620
Selfless-js
That happens enough in the U.S. as well. More often as many positions are being actively driven/searched by consulting companies (temp/placement agencies for IT/Software).
>They may make you go through a preferred agency for payroll/invoicing, but any fees they add should be passed back to the employer, not met by you. Typical enterprise/gov BS, needlessly adding 10-20% to the cost.

The employer pays the agency, usually around 30% more than the agency pays me. You could say that the employer is paying that fee, sure, but that's like saying the employer is paying the 7.5% payroll tax that the employer has to pay if you are an employee and not a contractor. That's coming out of the pool of money the employer is willing to spend to get my labor, even though it's not going to me.

>By agents I mean 'recruitment consultants', that's what they are called in London (along with pimps). Most people hate dealing with them, but they are a necessary evil.

Someone who works for the consultant? I don't know of anything like that in America. As far as I can tell, in this industry and location, all of the middlemen are paid by the clients.
The entire first few chapters of CLR/The White book are dedicated to explaining this in great, patient detail.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Introduction_to_Algorithms

Just pick it up.
So long as you can be socially awkward together, you're probably golden.
Being from The Netherlands myself, this is simply not true. Euthanasia is something that both the patient (and if the patient is no longer capable of deciding for himself, his family) and the doctor have to agree on.

Stopping treatment or prescribing drugs that will shorten the patient's life is also being done in the US, so if you want to inflate the suicide numbers, you have to do it for all.
Order of growth. A shape of a function. Execution time (or memory usage) of a procedure as a function of the size of its input.
When someone says “I don’t see your Startup on Kickstarter”
My reaction to people when they ask whey our startup is not on Kickstarter.
I know of lawyers who charge $20,000 for a 15 minute court appearance. They represent billionaires.
I think I've saw that diagram, that's only half the picture I remembered.

Here is the other half: http://www.voxeu.org/article/are-germans-really-poorer-spani...

TL;DR The gist is that first they looked at median, while mean housholds are of much greater values. Also figures seem to indicate that a lot of wealth of Germany is located in their state and not in their household ownership. Basically most German households don't have money for bailouts but Germany does.
Karger's (randomized min-cut) algorithm
I think it depends on what PhD program you are looking at... the people you have to deal with in say a Psychology program are a bit different than what you would see in a CS program. The culture can be very different, and the expectations of conformity can be even more so.
you have a point here, thanks :)
I asked and they said "try in 1.5 years" so... maybe then :)
I agree with that, except for the lost income, this recent study [1] showed that your lifetime earnings will quite likely be more if get a PhD (not accounting for tuition, not sure about it then). I think that the differences are so marginal in the end, that it should not be money that decides whether you want to go for a PhD or not ...

[1] http://www9.georgetown.edu/grad/gppi/hpi/cew/pdfs/collegepay...
Ask HN: What do you think about this startup idea?
We are looking to launch a website for families/singles with kids so for example 2 families could go both in a vacation, kids will have fun together and they will share responsabilities, at the same time, they could just go out in the city , will be a bit like couchsurfing but will be limited to families/single with kids .

If you are interested in helping us , will be great if you can complete this survey : https://docs.google.com/forms/d/14jgxdW-7UtGFnoIzKNI8HPVBXZ-SsJzuaRAxmysRrMQ/
Simple Made Easy [Talk by Rich Hickey]
I hope not! Just that I already did and failed :(
"I have drawers full of those kinds of ideas I could build, I don't need an idea person for that."

"I could do myself with a trivial effort"

This is ridiculous, you know that?I'm a programmer too but I can't say I have a drawer full of super-mega-awesome ideas.If that were true you would be a billionaire by now.

So how about we stop bragging about it?Because in reality most of us don't have those revolutionary ideas.You know why?Because we overthink it too much.Sometimes an outside mind can see things clearer even if it's not technical.

Arrogance kills innovation all the time.
Exposure for Startup in Beta
Hi all,

I'm part of a team who are launching a startup in August.. Right now we're finalising the site design/layouts and doing the final bits of code.

We have a landing page at the moment which was featured on Beta List just the other day.

Wondering if anyone would care to share some other avenues to gain good exposure on an idea we think might do well.

We're looking for early adopters and people who are interested in beta testing our product too.

It is fully bootstrapped and we're running on empty, but we're almost there :)
What a finding! People knows for ages that open space is beneficial for a manual, drone work, while for tasks in which so-called intellect must be involved, quietness or even solitude is absolutely necessary. This is why a workshop or a Mc. Donald's kitchen is a tightly packed open space, while academics work productively in an isolated pairs or alone.
Hit submit before finishing, but the site is http://www.howsto.com

It is a user driven content site where members can earn revenue from tutuorials they produce and submit.

Love to hear from you all.

Best,
Rob
nah, no worries, in a sense it was good. I noticed areas I need to improve and I'm happy to get to the on-site interview. If I got to that step I probably will be more confident with other interview processes.
Could this allow for developing a toy kernel in Rust as long as you define those few libc functions (maybe even with e.g. musl[1])?

[1]: http://www.musl-libc.org/
They usually do, if "school" is a computer science (or surely even just mathematics) program.
I think it would have been better to make my question more general and ask about automated testing rather than unit testing specifically. I can still change it if you're happy to modify your answer?

Thanks for your answer :)
I may need to check those offers in more detail, I just wonder what kind of life-work balance there will be :)
It just take me little longer - Scott's story
For that matter, I'm not sure how much this feature actually helps... I know there is a cost to a lot of dns lookups.. but having the dns-prefetch in the header along with the actual link to the css likely won't help much... it might help a bit with script includes at the bottom of the page though...

Also, a lot of the other bits aren't supported on IE 8/9 which is optimistically 1/3-1/2 the users on a lot of websites... it's worth doing, but doesn't mean you can/should forgo server-side checks/code. I find a lot of the client/server frameworks that are client-centric people are coming up with that do no input validation server-side to be more dangerous than a lot of older frameworks. It's like SQL injection issues all over again.
It's tempting to just say "yes". Tool support is not yet good enough. Inline assembly is available. Language constructs allow for deterministic memory allocation patters.

https://github.com/mozilla/rust/pull/5317
I'm 31 so this is kind of my concern too. I can see amazing startups I'd love to work at, but probably the work schedule and the pay wouldn't match the needs of a family in London.
What I look for in a founder
Presence subscriptions don't have to be symmetrical in XMPP, and indeed you can even have contacts on your roster that don't share presence in either direction. As for exchanging messages, as far as I know Google's implementation is the only one that doesn't allow that without presence subscription. All others do.

In fact, this caused presence subscription requests to be the only attack vector in terms of spam in Google talk, which some argue makes it harder to combat. Mostly because there is less data available to detect malicious behaviour.
An open letter to Bill Gates from an overwhelmed teacher
I will, thanks for the comment :)
Calling Google a single absolute dictator seems like a huge stretch. I'd put Google somewhere between there and a mess of committees myself.
I may try, thanks for the info!
Have you written a blog post or something more about this setup? I'd certainly like to know more about it.
I would always like to see breakdown by country too. I have a theory that rates here int he UK are lower, not just because we have a supposedly lower standard of living but because we don't pay private health insurance.

Be interesting to group by country to get the median for that country, not a silicon valley inflated amount.
I'll check them, thanks!
And that still highlights the problem with open plan: acres and distraction, but no way to collaborrate without disturbing others. Might as well take phones away if you can't use them.