skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I did it accidentally without really knowing there was such a thing as contracting. I was 19 years old, self taught PHP Dev and the highest salary where i lived (Edinburgh, UK) was £22k. I had always wanted to go to London and so i started looking for a job there. I got invited for an interview at a place in London, went down, had already done a technical test remotely and got told i had scored the highest overall in the test of all applicants (it wasnt a hard test so i'm amazed they said that).

I got offered the job at the end of the interview and asked what salary i expected. I hadnt a god damned clue and just pulled £30k out my ass thinking that was a big ask even for London. In hindsight they probably would've given me £45k at least because they bit my arm off saying that they'd happily give me £30k with a raise of £5k in 1 year. I accepted and the HR person brought me the contract, i started reading and got to a section i didnt like. It basically said all code i produced both at the company and in my spare time would be owned by them, i asked them to remove it, they refused and i walked. BEST THING I EVER DID!

Coincidentally i had seen another job advert for a temporary gig elsewhere in London the day before on a job board. After refusing the offer at the first place at probably 11am, i walked to an internet cafe, phoned the advert, said i could be there that afternoon, traveled across London, interviewed at probably 1pm, got the offer at 3pm by phone, and started the next morning at £250 a day, which was stupid money at the time.

I've been a contractor since and that was 8 years ago, i now charge £400 a day and still do PHP work. PHP isnt cool, but i like it, it pays the bills and its in high demand and ive got a pretty nice portfolio.
Please get off your moral high horse. I used to be like you all smug-faced and judgmental sitting behind a computer, until I was on the field with brac (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BRAC_(NGO)) and see for myself how the real world works.

They are NOT underpaid for the most part (If you actually bothered to read what I wrote). They are under-paid to "western living standard" but not according to the local living standard (for the most part). There are some exceptions and exploitations, but its very small percentage, but those are the examples that the media and people like you try to bring up when discussion these issues.

Lets be oblivious and ignore the world of good garments industry has done for literally millions people in the poorest parts of the world.

Change takes time, its not pretty, its not shiny, and its not fairy tale and sometimes people die in the process.
Try ports, perhaps? http://www.macports.org/
Imagine that. A site dependent on a database.
As a US based manufacturer, I find your comment ignorant. There is a great deal of manufacturing in the US, and it is getting easier to do - not harder.

I have been manufacturing since 2004. It's not that hard. You start with an idea, build a minimally viable prototype, improve it, make a final design, sort out the supply chain and then start building. Design once, sell thousands of times.

Use automation, its cheaper than even Chinese labor. Work on just-in-time manufacturing techniques and you can get your inventory down to a small fraction of annual sales. The multi-axis controls in a 3D printer can be repurposed to do all sorts of motion control in a factory. See https://www.synthetos.com/project/tinyg/
When I see stories like this, I'm always impressed at the wide availability of gas masks. Are we even allowed to own those in the States?*

*Yes, I know how sad of a question that is.
It's about 1/4th the downtime my company's little project server has had in the past month, and that's with SVN, not git, which means workflow was even more seriously disrupted.
First of all, he was commenting about this page not displaying ANY content at all. At the very least there should be a noscript tag to tell the user to enable JS.

Second, I whitelist sites for javascript. There's nothing absurd about that. Honestly, I can't believe people run any and all JS on every random page they land on.
I translated informally into Chinese: http://geek.csdn.net/news/detail/1290
Turkish Protests of May 2013 for the Uninitiated
Multiplying two large Fixnum, gives a float value.
I find myself falling into this sometimes. I came from a relatively poor area and family (at least by US standards), and sometimes foolishly get the attitude briefly when confronted with poverty of "I got out of that, they should be able too. They're just lazy and/or are happy living that way. Which may be true, but I doubt it. I certainly never was.
Move. Seriously. You're harming your future.

I made very nearly that as a fresh graduate with an unremarkable degree and no relevant experience. Out in the sticks with more reasonable living expenses. Thirteen years ago, and I'd come close on several better paying positions. (Tip BTW, £400/mo after rent won't be enough for independent living.)

You're letting loyalty cloud your judgement; you can do better for yourself. Counting pennies isn't fun and you don't need to.
Structural typing is facially similar to duck typing when anonymous types (interfaces and structures) are allowed, as in OCaml. I don't believe either exists in Go.
Did you use Chrome to access the URL?
This is why the internet is bad for your self-image. In the whole world there are only a handful of people who could write something like jslinux. But, because of the internet, we have all seen it and consider this the reference to live up to. Well, most people cannot ever live up to fabrice bellard. I'm sure my work will never live up to his work. Does that mean all my work is automatically rubbish?

In my opinion, we should compare other people's work to our own work. If we compare against the work of the very best then 99.9% of things will fall short of what they should have been.
I'm also in the exact same position and would be very interested to know how to get into remote/telecommuting contracting.
I have worked with a variety of developers over my career. The best were the ones that accepted and even sought out criticism, and knew how to apply it. Developers that can't handle criticism should be let go.

I would hesitate to generalize across generations. I have worked with some excellent younger developers who can take direct criticism and some terrible older developers whose ego couldn't fit through a door.

I tend to be more direct with my criticism when someone "should know better" and gentler when it's a more advanced concept for them. I've found that works well for most people.
Yeah. A lot of smart folks on HN, but also a lot of naive sheltered upper-class youngsters who have never even seen genuine adversity or human suffering.

This elite naivete blew me away when I spent years in the rough orbit of the Ivy League. They're not bad people... they just really genuinely have no idea. They have no frame of reference for the difficulty of growing up poor in the American interior, let alone for the difficulties faced by people in the third world or in dictatorships-of-GDP like China.
This is great advice. One thing you also need to develop is a sense of who is a good client. Choosing who you work with is going to be have a huge effect on your happiness and career direction as an independent developer.
JavaScript – Array Direct Assignment
If prices go up sufficiently then there is no advantage to building a factory in Bangladesh. Bangladeshi workers then become unemployed.

Right now, Bangladesh needs wealth more than anything else. Once they have wealth, they can spend it on things like OSHA.
Seriously, when I first moved here it bothered me a lot. I am used to cooking for myself and wouldn't mind learning how to drive. But I was absolutely prohibited from going to the kitchen even by accident and not go anywhere without having someone with me all the time.

Now as I have learned my way around I do go out by myself but kitchen it still off limit.
Orange Roulette
CodeIgniter and MVC EBook Free Download 
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These problems are discussed in considerable detail in [1], specifically:

While reactor grade plutonium would probably be of no
interest to a nation with access to better grade
material, it could be effectively used by a nation
capable of good weapon design, but without access to
better fissile material. Even a low technology nation
could fashion powerful weapons from it, after all even
a 1 kt device greatly exceeds the destruction of any
conventional weapon.

So yes, recognized nuclear states are using very pure Pu239, but this is done for engineering convenience and not an absolute necessity. And the calculation probably changes for a state with a clandestine nuclear program, since it is much easier to hide the additional computing capacity to make a working reactor grade plutonium design, than it is to hide a breeder reactor.

[1] http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Nwfaq/Nfaq6.html
(In section 6.2.2.10 Reactor Grade Plutonium)
The revolutionism part is kindof odd, don't you think? A tradition that calls for the rejection of traditions.
I did some more research after leaving my last comment, and the part i was talking about was "New employment must be the 'same or similar' occupational classification," [1] which according to my coworkers means you can't switch amongst QA engineer, dev/software engineer, and manager.

The dev <-> QA switch probably isn't very common, but dev/qa -> management is apparently an issue, since green-cards for Indians with a masters take roughly a decade of waiting on an h1b to get (again, this is according to my coworkers, not something i have direct experience with).

[1]: http://immigrationroad.com/green-card/ac21-portability-chang...
I am planning these days to leave my full-time job and switch over to contracting. Since I don't have any real experience, so my thoughts might be irrelevant, nevertheless, I would like to share a few things I learned from other successful contractors in my area.

1. Don't do everything. Find a niche, something that you are good at and stay focused on it.

2. Before signing up for a project, make a guess how successful it will be. Having successful projects in your portfolio will help you grab new projects more easily.

3. Try to get initial projects through your personal network. This might help both parties develop some initial trust.

4. Favor longer projects over shorter ones.

5. Don't charge for the all of the project at once. Divide requirements into milestones, and invoice the client on completion of each milestone.

You may agree or disagree with points above, I would like to learn what you think about them.
No problem with people protesting so long as they do so where you never have to bother with them, eh?

You seem to labor under the false belief that simply because something is voted upon, it is infallibly a correct decision.

Not every law, resolution and ordinance passed is actually good for all the persons it effects. Laws can be extremely adverse for sections of the public, but pass anyways due to disregard or active dislike by larger groups. Expecting people to knuckle under without further resistance simply because they've been outvoted is ridiculous.

Protesting via passive resistance is an excellent way to peacefully make known that something is extremely adverse to your section of the public, without damage to property or persons.

Your "decent society" is a society of insects, bowing to authority unconditionally rather than with individual consideration, without the will to resist evils where they encounter them.

Your equation of the "passive violence" of standing in front of a bulldozer with the active violence of spreading nuclear waste in an area seems purposely made to incite an outraged response. The lack of consideration for the difference in proportion between delaying construction and permanently poisoning an area with nuclear waste shows a damning extremism of thought. It is such equivocations that allows the justification of atrocity when other methods would better do.

Your choice to end your comment with a snide remark on zalew's lack of capitalization makes me wonder whether you believe a word of it, or are simply crafting your response to be purposefully invective for your amusement.
What is currently going on in Turkey is the Islamist ruling party pushing hard to make the country much more conservative instead of secular, all the while pushing their way back into the Arab world to regain their clout and power.

The youths are protesting because what was once a fairly liberal set of standards is rapidly being removed.

Ironically, it was the military that protected this set of freedoms.
I don't disagree with anything you wrote. But wage issue often does come up on western media, with or without reference to safety standard (I am talking about Bangladesh, this might not be true about other countries).
Developer in Stockholm, Sweden here. I usually check who's hiring in Stockholm, even though I am not actively looking for a job at the moment. You never now when you need to find something else, and having seen a company posting to "Who's Hiring" is always a good indicator of an interesting company.
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_1/175-7511757-7036919...

Knock yourself out.
As bad as this is, it gets even worse: a lot of the stuff produced in China and exported overseas is made in forced labor camps (like the infamous Masanjia labor camp) and prisons by people who're simply imprisoned for being dissidents. Those people are not only unpaid, but tortured physically and mentally outside of their grueling work hours.
The law of jante is slightly esoteric and so everyone feels the need to bring it up when the Scandinavian tech scene is discussed, just to show they are in the know. Nobody in a position to do a startup gives a shit about the law of jante. Neither is an investor going to turn away from a pile of money while muttering under his breath 'who does he think he is?'

Of all the people I know that could have done a startup, the main reason they did not is because the alternative is so good. Everyone in my class (5 years of computer engineering) who bothered with early interviews, had a job lined up 9 months prior to graduation. Even my mediocre classmates were being courted by multiple companies. Starting salary in Oslo is $80k, about 60k more than what a typical student lives off in Norway.
Pretty much.

I find it amusing that people who've visited these countries and lived in a select few, politically manipulated bubbles, can discern what's really happening.

I.E. The fellow who worked for BRAC. We know all about their work in Sri Lanka and how well they funneled cash to special interests after the 2004 tsunami who (in the interest of humanitarian relief, of course) managed to lose a lot of it in "administrative fees". Amazingly, in some places, some of the first structures to go up again were new garment factories; not public housing.
Assuming you're based in London, feel free to get in touch and I can give you a run-down about how it works here in London. (details in my profile)

I've been in and out of consulting for myself, for large companies (SAP for example), sub-contracting, and developing. Both in London and the US. Happy to help guide a fellow HN'r.
Don't worry, I don't have the power to change ASCII :D
I think the problem raised about login is due to the limited options, either Facebook or Github.

People don't trust websites that quickly ask for their Facebook account. It looks spammy.

I'm all for third-party authentication, I hate creating yet another account. I think the balance is to offer more choices than just Facebook or Github. And I don't like linking my Github to things that are not directly involving my code.

The way StackExchange does is the right way, I believe. Offering more neutral, flexible OAuth providers than only Facebook (and in that case a smaller player like Github).

This is meant as a constructive comment, if anybody ends up at this line thinking I'm just whining.
it depends on the promotion. the ac21 stipulates "New employment must be the 'same or similar' occupational classification". According to my coworkers, that means they can't get promoted to management from dev/qa.

http://immigrationroad.com/green-card/ac21-portability-chang...
Yes, and I pay about that much petrol month just in petrol to get to work. London's a swings and roundabouts thing, I can see the attraction TBH.
How does China "not need America"? The U.S. is China's largest trading partner.
> my agency is likely billing out at $80/hour or more, yet I only get $55/hour

Wait, what? Where are you? Please tell me you're a regular employee of the agency on paper, getting benefits and not paying self-employment tax?
On average gmail takes me 10-15 seconds to load. My inbox is almost always empty.
Curated videos for web designers
I just did this 3 months ago and I agree with aneth4, it's always best to start with a client if you can -- just be careful that you aren't violating any employment agreements you have with your current employer as you go after that first client.

One of the biggest fears I hear from people looking to make the jump is "I can’t take the risk to get started."

This one stops a lot of people from making the jump from full-time employee to freelancer but you can do things to minimize your risk.

Depending on your current employment agreement, you may be able to do some moonlighting in order to build up a client list before you make the jump.

Get a part-time job to help pay the bills.

Or, just do what I did, take the leap with confidence that you will quickly sign a few clients and get things started.

For me, the most important part of freelancing has been my network. Make sure you are continually making connections. Ask for clients for referrals or recommendations. Word of mouth of your network is going to be the best marketing you can buy.
They do. They have a fund.
Realize that the move to contractor will depend on your ability to sell your services. Before anything, I would start marketing and then focus on making the jump. Don't quit without doing so, because your marketing could take months to start working (relative to your skills at doing so). If anything, read my profile.
Could you please write ‟Wikipedia” instead of ‟wiki”? There are thousands of wikis on the Web, Wikipedia is only one of them.
Some call it wisdom. Some call it broken record. You decide.
What would you consider a 'real' technology? (Does my node example qualify?)

---

What's the difference between 'programming language' and 'dialect'? 'Supports macros' or 'uses parens in surface syntax' doesn't feel like enough reason to label Clojure a dialect. Supersets of specs are closer to 'dialects', like ISO C and gcc C, or Kawa scheme and guile. Racket seems to add enough extra feature that programmers are quite likely to leave base scheme in any program, so it doesn't feel like a dialect either.

---

(Parenthetically, since I'd rather discuss the original argument: I mildly agree with my sibling comment by thedanfilter: arguing about definitions doesn't feel like the most interesting conversation to have here. It feels nitpicky; you didn't actually ever comment on my original argument itself: that large-scale habits reveal developers aren't hard to impress. Do you disagree with it, or just with the examples I chose?

However, gravitating toward words like 'condescending' just adds more heat than light. Avoiding introducing incendiary distractions is hard; I'm not sure I'm succeeding in this comment. But comments here would be improved if we all tried harder not to take the bait. Maybe we should all try to skip past the first three comments we feel the urge to respond to every morning, or something.)
Saving 4-6 mths might seem like a dreamland only visited by flying pigs for many. I would say that you spend at least two months in control of your money.

- have a spreadsheet of income and outgoings and update it weekly ( really just download stmts from the bank works here). But go through it each time and see if you can cut something

- pay back your debt - know where it is, which is highest interest etx

- sell stuff - declutger a lot

After two months you will feel in control and it will be a habit
Trying to remember the name of a website
Hi,

I don't know if it's the right place for my question (sorry if not: an admin can delete it) but most of the people here are aware about startups and new services so maybe you could help me.
I'm trying to remember the name of a startup/website.

It allows to create automatic "tasks" to make things happen between several services you have (Dropbox, sendgrid, etc.)
For example, a use case was: send automatically an email using sendgrid when a new file is put in my dropbox.

And you can define several combinations like that.

Any idea of what this startup is?

Thanks.
I remember a comment from PG about this matter. He too was not impressed with all the negativity lurking HN.

It's not about admitting genius. It's about recognizing effort and proactivity.

It's about stimulating good behavior. It's not about who's more badass.
This is not completely true, most of the garments workers are working with low wage like 40$/month(official but unofficially they are paid even less!). They live in the worst part of city and so on. And recent building collapse opened the nasty part of there work environment, when I lived in Bangladesh I have seen how misrable the work condition in garments. And most people work there due to job crisis and for other factors. And you can see the latest accidents photos http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2013/04/304_dead_in_buildin....
So how can we do the improvement, it needs steps from every stakeholders, laws should be strict, there should be labour union(millions of worker working but there is no labour right union!) and of course the West should be more concern to provide better facility for the workers.
A Generation Ago, A Thoroughly Modern Sampling
Matt Drudge Speech to the National Press Club on Media and the Internet
This is a quintessential "middlebrow dismissal", taking an uninteresting point, dismissing it with trivial technicalities, and pretending it added anything to the conversation. The conversation then gets sidetracked to debate semantics or pedantic details.

I've started down-voting these types of posts.
ASU launches free summer program for aspiring innovators
Oh that part seems plausible. The bit that seems like over-reaching is that we can easily and quickly gain some insight into the situation by hitting google maps. Mohamed Bouazizi's suicide sparked popular protests in Tunisia and subsequently, across the middle east. Is there a lot we can learn about the Arab Spring by googling 'street vendors, Ben Arous'? Probably not.
Why, no. There are lots of offspring of world's elites in top-tier US colleges.
Ignorance, whether real or pretend, is often a great way of spreading FUD.