skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: What are your tips for freelancers?
Last week I finished a basic web app for a small company working as a contractor. Today, they asked me if I can expand the app and continue to work with them. This isn't my full-time job and is the first time doing freelance professionally. Can any freelancers out there share advice, tips or even software they use to help manage their business?
Yes, that's what I mean. Which is why I wrote it:

... This is an upgrade price from the low end cards, which have been estimated at a combined value of ~ $1000 themselves[1], so the total would actually be $1000 per card, or what you said you can get that sort of card for...
To a certain extent this behavior is nothing new. The 12 CD's for a penny scams I fell pray to as a child come to mind. The people who think like that have just moved online.

One thing I don't see getting much attention here is the section on regulation and the lack of interest by tech companies who provide the platforms for people like this to exploit on.

Quoting part of the article, "... the tech companies that carry those ads tend to throw up their hands an declaim that the web is so huge that no one could hope to monitor it all."

This section of the article, where Edelman is quoted several times, stood out to me. It made me a little more sympathetic to regulation. In that, if there is no incentive inside the large tech companies to identify and punish or eliminate the Jesse Williams of the world from their platforms, why shouldn't they be held accountable for the consequences of the behavior enabled by the platform they developed?

One more quotes that stood out to me and made sense:

- "If Jesse Williams is responsible for the bad things his contractors did, why is Google not responsible for the bad things its advertisers did?"

To extend on that and not just limit this to Google - Uber recently got some bad publicity in LA. One incident where someone was charged several hundred dollars for what amounted to a cab ride home to from a bar and another where an uber rider left their cell phone in the car. Then the driver held the phone ransom for several hundred dollars and still never returned it. In the one case Uber suspended the drivers account and was trying to help the phone owner.

The point I am trying to make by bringing up Uber, who is not an advertising company, is as follows. Technology extends and scales human ability. But the onus is still on people to use technology morally, ethically & responsibly. The double edge on technology's sword is that not all people make choices with morals or ethics in mind. So, is a technology provider responsible for self policing their platform? Idk but reading the Atlantic article sway my opinion in the direction of, If the technology provider won't or "can't" be responsible then they open the doors for regulation without any sympathy from me.
Extra credit to anyone who can implement this in HTML/CSS without using the canvas element. Since CSS transformations are hardware accelerated, I bet it can be made to look as smooth as the reference GIF.
One of the more interesting ones was the renewing a drivers license at a kiosk. Right now you either renew it online from home or wait in a ridiculously long line to talk to a human. This shows that some tasks are not practical to completely automate, at least until we invent very smart machines or better wireless / video chat type scenarios. I don't really see why DMV employees can't be remotely located and have a TV monitor and less employees at the location.

The other inventions were spot on for the most part. Probably because the ideas are fairly easy, it's the execution and bringing to market that are difficult. The components and infrastructure just wasn't there to make a lot of those things happen without the internet, which was not as common as it is now (20 years later). The internet will continue to change the way we live, there are still lots of potential to better automate processes and make the world more efficient. It's getting kind of hard to imagine the next 20 years though. We've come so far in the past 20 that the things that are left are the really hard problems (space travel, re-arranging molecules and atoms at will, advanced medicine).

One problem with a more efficient and automated world is the loss of jobs. Hopefully all of this innovation will also create as many jobs as it removes. Then we can also start moving towards a post-scarcity society, like socialism but more of a Utopian society that will actually work. We just need molecular re-arrangers to be as common as a printer and BAM, then the only things we will have to worry about are running out of land and accidentally creating a virus, parasite, or robot that kills everyone.
You may want to hang out online where some I-bankers hang out. HN tend to hate anything not related to code. Bankers on a site I'm posting are as pious as us Comp Sci students though - so take them with a grain of salt. A question similar to yours has been asked a few times there - may check it out. Could transfer to a algo trader or quant possibly. "Data science" is also growing in the field. (I'm in no way affiliated to the site). http://www.wallstreetoasis.com/tag/computer-science
I side with Marco on this but I think he should update the original post on new developments: iA decided to drop the patent application yesterday [1]. Regardless, their original attitude towards this issue was enough for me to decide not to support future iA products.

[1]: https://twitter.com/iA/status/416393539182796800
No intentions to spread FUD but Spotify fails to even remember that I like my playlists to be sorted by recency of addition. I always have to manual click their tab to sort it on mobile app.
We all get it that you think very highly of yourself, and belittling Glenn without actually having listened to his talk reinforces your feeling of superiority, but we don't care, so why don't you keep it to yourself?
So, you're saying:

> Is whitespace sometimes insignificant and other times significant?

(Yes, there are languages where whitespace is ALWAYS insiginificant. Well, that is unless you tell the parser to treat it as significant. Or a construct in the parser temporarily enables significance of whitespace.)
Yes, I think this is correct. They're still prioritizing performance first right now. But when the time is right, they'll probably upgrade that capability as well. Either pushing the full resolution file up, or syncing the full resolution later when you're on wifi.

For a while, the Java upload tool was knocking down resolution before upload on desktop, too. That was a few years ago, I think. 2008-09?
What kind of bug did you find?
I am glad to read this. I have been following the Free Sherlock website for some time. It can be found here:

http://free-sherlock.com/
I find it unreal to read about a professional conman having his scam advertised on Google shortly after the Rap Genius incident. Clearly Google has interesting priorities.
This. Whenever people talk about Mickey Mouse entering the public domain like it's the end of the world, I point to the Fleischer Studio Superman Cartoons that were made in the 1940s. Those cartoons are in the public domain and people may copy or sell them as much as they want.

However, since DC Comics still holds a trademark on Superman, you can't use Superman for anything else. In fact, when I bought a VHS tape of the Superman cartoons back in the 90s, the manufacturer was careful to use an actual Public Domain image of Superman on the box. If they created a new image, the Superman trademark would have applied.
NSLinguisticTagger that is, for anyone wondering.

https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/cocoa/...
It's hackers all the way down.
So I should try to come up with the best sounding, longest to implement, but in reality most unprofitable idea and hope you burn 9 months on it?
Sorry, but I don't think you're right. The data shows that in east Texas, patent holders win injunctions or damages nearly 2x of the time. That's why they go to trial there.

Since you didn't provide data to back up your assertion, I will provide a link to mine: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/09/19...
I save albums as playlists all the time, mainly if I want to download them. But the problem for me is that they are all just playlists, and Spotify is really dumb when it comes to playlists, i.e. I can't organize them in a sane manner or filter them (someone please tell me if I'm wrong about this), so then I just have a huge pile of playlists to scroll through. I don't think that treating albums as "just a playlist by the artist" is a powerful concept when you treat playlists so primitively to begin with.
I'm not telling you mine :) Use Glassdoor for averages.
Did you know that Disney is asserting their trademark on Snow White? They believe that they're the only studio allowed to make a film of the Snow White story, even though the Snow White fairy tale is in the public domain?
And yet making threats using the bully pulpit that comes with having a popular internet personality is just fine.
It's worth considering how poorly handled the communications were here. No blog posts, no responses to the forum thread that mostly started all of this [1], nor the story that hit HN's front page [2].

Just Twitter. Which is something, but not enough when you have a PR issue this big...

[1]: http://www.theverge.com/2013/12/21/5234580/patent-pending-ia...
[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6966528
Thanks for the link, very interesting. Have you read Massalin's thesis on Synthesis OS (Partially Evaluated/JIT kernel objects) ? It's from the late 80s and very 'demo-scene' like (The author mentions efficient audio playing through his object based system).

http://valerieaurora.org/synthesis/SynthesisOS/

http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?SynthesisOs

http://lwn.net/Articles/270081/
Ask HN: What do you find most beneficial about blogging?
@semisync(callback=output) does indicate that the call is asynchronous and will be called immediately. If a dependency was specified

@semisync(dependencies=[function_name])

the function will only be called once 'function_name' has been executed. In this sense, it's not entirely synchronous, and not entirely asynchronous.

With regards to the flask question, you'd see an output after 5 seconds when the function finishes and returns. "Revenue" would only be printed after the function terminates. If you'd like, you could log something at the beginning of the function to let you know when execution begins.
Any idea how easy it is to transfer positions within a i-bank?

It seems that the path for an analyst is pretty set, from summer internship to analyst to b-school to associate and onwards. Call me naive, but have I missed out by not studying humanities/finance-related majors?
You could build my source and deploy to your system yourself and it would work, but this doesn't seem like a very "for the masses" solution. Plenty of people out there who want the security of using open source code that others have reviewed, but don't know anything about development to be able to build that code themselves.
This is the best breakdown of the Writer Pro brouhaha that I've read yet. Thanks.
I'll speak using my experience as a musician and a writer. "Songs about life" have a huge audience. "Hillbilly flamenco" has a relatively smaller audience. Yet it's much, much harder to be successful as "the person who sings songs about life", because there's so much competition, and many established figures who do it better than you. Even if you can do it better than them, the average listener isn't interested in you, isn't invested in you.

Sit down and try to write the Great American Novel and you're pretty much screwed. Try to write the truest thing you know, though, and there's a chance that people will pick it up and share it.

The problem when trying to solve a pain for many many people, whether you're a writer or an entrepreneur, is that it's hard to start big and good. You can start small and good, and grow big, or start big and not-so-good, and try to get good. There are many instances of the former, almost no examples of the latter.

I suppose "thinking big" really means "always be open to the idea of scaling up", or "pick markets/conditions that allow for scaling up". But you almost always have to start small to do something really, really well.
Also, to clarify, the callback function must take the same position arguments that the function returns. field --> "Revenue", value --> shared.revenue in the example.
of all the technical things I have learned over the years, higher mathematics (say calc 1-3 and diff. eqns.) is the topic I most regret brain dumping. I am not so much interested in the history, but can anyone recommend a streamlined primer?
I don't think it's that simple, and a civil war will only result in more death and suffering, even if it is successful. The people are very brainwashed and terrified. The regime would certainly consider it an act of war and possibly retaliate against South Korea.
I think OpenBSD and Arch has really good documentation too.
Still canvas, but is that any smoother?: http://jsfiddle.net/rYa5d/8/
As an American and a Yogi I have to say America has to be the only country where "entrepreneurial" teachers of Yoga feel the right to patent Yoga.

Exactly when Yoga started is a matter of debate but most will grant it a couple of thousand years at least and most much farther back.

As an example is [Forrest Yoga](http://www.forrestyoga.com/) where prior art is technically in illustratiosn and text in ancient books. (There are diligent engineers in India working to scan every single page of these books as so people can claim it as prior art.

In Forrest yoga though they have made slight different in some of the poses to justify it.

More importantly its the morality of feeling like as a teacher with maybe 40 years or less experience that you have mastered Yoga enough to own it.

So, now in the US there is a lot of money in Yoga, and Americans at every level are trying to create patents to
protect their "business" Be it in Yoga itself, in the teaching of Yoga, in the franchises, and apparently the filming of Yoga.

I feel we need a rule that will punish an organization or person filing or a patent that is objectively illegitimate.
I suppose the punishment would have to be based on a percentage of the gross earnings of the company.
Actually it's a little better when more spaced out: http://jsfiddle.net/rYa5d/8/
I really enjoyed the book on Fermat's last theorem by Simon Singh -

http://www.amazon.com/dp/0802713319

A long time ago, a friend's mother was complaining to me that (high school) Math is a dry subject and she doesn't blame her otherwise intelligent son for not being able get interested and do well in it. I wish I knew of this book then - I know it cranked up my interest in Math ever since.
Not sure if the same but college math classes threw me into intense drowsiness, almost narcolepsia, I couldn't hold my head just by looking at the board. Coffee intake did nothing. Just moving away from these classes brought me back.
> * The current website was absolutely clueless of states when first released (i.e. showing signup buttons for logged in users)

I think the website keeps urging me to upgrade to premium when I'm logged in, even though I've had premium for years...
"The Journal will be a bi-monthly publication and will be available on the web or as an Android/iPhone/Kindle app."

Why make it an app? Making "app" magazines seems really dumb to me, when you could simply make it available in an open format like PDF or ePub or text.
I read "The Mathematical Experience" when I was in high school. Unfortunately, I do not remember many details of the book (for me, "when I was in high school" is approaching 20 years ago) except I recall that I read it over and over again and thought it was excellent.
Haha that's funny. He was all over it. He responded to my tweet saying he'd stop if I wanted him to. I just told him to be mindful of annoying people.
Charge by the day or the week, not by the hour. Very explicitly define your scope of work, and beware of scope creep.

When providing estimates, plan for 30-32 hours/week of reasonable full-time effort. If you estimate assuming you will be able to dedicate 40 hours/week to one thing, you may find yourself working a shitload of overtime.

Be firm with the client. If you believe a feature request is out of scope, say something and create a change order.

Finally, knock their socks off and they might have a referral for you!
"But when a small company or independent developer files for a small number of patents, there’s no defensive value — they can only be used for offense."

This is obviously not correct.

1) With the changes in patent law, it's now critical to be the first to file. It's not enough to just have proof that you did something / invented something before someone else.

2) A patent can be filed for the purpose of preventing a competitor or aggressor from acquiring said patent and using it offensively. This makes a lot of sense for small companies particularly if their business hinges on a specific technology that is even kinda-sorta original to said company, or if the company's prosperity depends on not getting hit by a patent lawsuit on some cornerstone aspect to their business.
HN does NOT do humour.

Well, unless its embedded in code, then its like fecking hilarious.
I think it's all about branding and preventing copycats from riding off of someone else's coattails. It's the creator who did the hard work of making a particular character well-known, and it wouldn't be fair to let an unknown third party use this popularity for his/herself.
That's a pretty amazing hyperbole from kaepora (twitter description of incident vs actual e-mail response from Apple). And later, Apple accepted the fix: https://github.com/cryptocat/cryptocat/issues/542#issuecomme...

Kaepora is so full of himself, I'm not sure how anyone takes what he says or the apps he writes seriously. Glad that people are putting stock in more consistent developers these days (http://tobtu.com/decryptocat.php).
Here's the problem with patents: if you file for a patent, you are basically manufacturing intellectual land mines. Both the ethics and mechanics involved are chillingly analogous. Yes, they can be used defensively against a specific enemy. The vast majority will never explode at all, although they will still cost money to deploy. The few that do eventually go off are likely to injure uninvolved parties who didn't see what they were stepping on -- people and companies who may not even have been born when you tightened the last screw. Your creation will remain dangerous for decades, long past the point when it could conceivably benefit your country's economy as a whole.

The people who are paying you to build the land mine have interests that are different from yours -- perhaps that's not true at the moment, but it almost certainly will be in the future. They are very likely to sell your handiwork to someone else, perhaps under financial or legal duress. This may happen several times before the explosives in your creation decay into harmlessness. Chances are, any influence you may have when you manufacture your mine will only diminish with time. It is not only possible but likely that what you are building will fall into the hands of people whose interests and values are far removed from your own.

Of course, it's unlikely that you will be the one who eventually steps on your own mine. Whether that makes a difference to you depends on -- and speaks volumes about -- your character as an engineer.
Results of Pingdom's "Website Speed Test" on the URL:

http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/2YiTc/http://www.theatlantic.co...

1.1 MB of that is JavaScript! And while it reports 3.69s load time, the waterfall shows that it actually took much longer than that. For example, a 497 byte resource on realtime.services.disqus.com (heh, "realtime") took just over 10 seconds!

I'm glad I use Ghostery.
I plan on porting code samples/frameworks from Objective-C to RubyMotion.

Also I want to release some standalone novelty apps with in-app purchases and guerrilla market the shit out of them.
I would recommend the book, 'Double Your Freelancing Rate'. It provided really great info about why companies hire freelancers, and how that is different than why you think you were hired.
Sounds more like you were both sleep deprived and not up to speed on the material.
I'll second that with caveats. "The Elements" requires quite a bit of commentary to make sense and most editions seem to aspire more to translational accuracy than mathematical understanding. But if you can get past that it is the singular "must read" book in mathematics.
And consider how even Tesla started with the Roadster, and then the Model S- targeted at small demographics. Consider how SpaceX is working on reusability of rockets.

They might be "thinking big", but they're also "working small". They have to.
"Big companies like Google and Apple have defensible reasons to accumulate lots of patents: they need them for defense."

About that...

The Rockstar consortium is an organization backed by Apple, Microsoft, BlackBerry, Ericsson and Sony. It purchased patents off of the defunct telecommunications company Nortel in 2011, in a bidding war with Google.

Now, the consortium has filed suit against Google, ASUSTek, HTC, Huawei, LG, Pantech and ZTE over those patents.

http://techcrunch.com/2013/10/31/apple-microsoft-backed-rock...
One more suggestion, make sure to test against lower case:

reply = str(raw_input(question+' (y/n): ')).lower()

You could even add .strip() on there if you want to make sure it doesn't have leading spaces.
In my opinion, the 3 years of CS has more to do with age of the student than actual learning. With a requisite level of maturity, this should not be a problem.
I just watched the Cory Doctorow talk. He has a really interesting hypothesis. It is a bit scary if true, so I am not too sure I want to believe it, or would rather sit here with my fingers in my ears shouting "LA LA LA LA I CAN'T HEAR YOU". Yup, I think I'll do that for a while.
I disagree pretty fundamentally with your first line. "Having a backbone" is in no way equivalent to being reasonable when someone (or an organization) makes a mistake.

> If you're fine with someone going into your account and pulling money at will, all the power to you

If you've got a Google AdMob, you've already done this, right? You've given them the ability to push/pull from your account, and signed whatever agreement about "we're not responsible for xyz."

I don't have an account, but presumably there was some line in there about not being liable for mischarges, or something along those lines.
Sure. I don't agree with software patents. This story doesn't really answer my question.
Regardless of specs, it's an absolute terrible looking device, a real monstrosity I would say.

I was just looking into getting a MacPro after years of self building my boxes and started to warm up towards the "previous" Mac Pro boxes/towers.

However, getting a MacPro is now longer a option with this "design" and self build suddenly seems quite appealing again.
> I suspect it would be possible to build up a wrapper that emulates the entire NodeJS javascript API in PyV8

http://pyv8.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/demos/node.py

But I think node itself can be used with pyv8 since they are both v8. There may be some issues with the event loops but that's not an extremely hard problem. IIRC, node-webkit (or appjs?) hacked up the node event loop with the event loop from chromium.

Another neat pyv8 trick is this (incomplete..) commonjs implementation:

https://github.com/flier/pyv8/blob/master/demos/commonjs/com...

.. so you can import node (or other commonjs) modules into python.

Although this isn't pyv8, it's possible to get python/javascript bindings for the webkit js environment (shared variables/functions/objects):

https://gist.github.com/kanzure/6581415

I am eager to figure out how to do a similar trick with blink or servo.
Koding.com lets you pair-program for free : here is a great review