skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My best advice is to get involved in your (platform here) local user groups. Not only are they a great source for networking, it's a target-rich environment and projects expect to pay a reasonable rate for freelancers.

You don't have to wait for a meeting - most groups have a mailing list / discussion group. You can introduce yourself and tell them openly that you're looking for work. You can also sign up for (your platform here) groups on LinkedIn. I signed-up for a few and received several "cold calls" for work within a week.
Because the monkeys weren't being underfed and it's a straw man to suggest they were. Tibetan monks get by on much less food than we do and they will still kick our asses anytime.
Babylon Search
Shows how easy it is to manipulate the press. That was true in the 1990s and its true now. Lots of stories in Wired, NYT, WSJ etc. are prompted by vendors PR agencies, and do not ask enough critical questions about revenue, business models, product claims, and more.
One interesting difference i see between Facebook & Twitter is that i've never seen someone being peer pressured into signing up to Twitter whereas i see it constantly occur for facebook. I too share the 15 year olds position, i signed up to twitter but hardly anyone i know in real life uses it and i'm not interested in celebrities.
that's actually a problem. The site is blank if you don't have javascript enabled.

There should be some basic alternative version for those people
Surely that doesn't have any effect on the intra-implementation results. So, for instance, it still seems he's shown that case has O(1) performance on CLISP but some sort of (apparently quite severe) number-of-cases dependence on SBCL and ACL, whereas ncase and switch are pretty much O(1) on all three implementations.
In most cultures throughout most of human history, people thought illness was caused by evil spirits and worshiped a harvest god. Our understanding of human psychology and biology in general has expanded far more since then. I will not pretend to be qualified to judge this topic (unlike most of Hacker News, it seems) and will instead defer psychological judgment to a trained professional who has interacted with the subject directly.
Wait, what's wrong with Wordpress's update mechanism? I've only used it for a short while but I've been nothing short of amazed how simple and easy it is (two button presses), compared to years of downloading packages, diffing files, uploading files, running database upload scripts, fixing errors, and so on under phpBB/IPB/MediaWiki.
I think you mean divide by 1000.
I had to look up what you were talking about, so apparently there are still some wonders to be done.
New Online Community Creates Opportunity For Small Businesses In A Bad Economy
As the economy continues to sputter, local small businesses continue to search for new and better ways to bring in new customers and clients. But, in a world where every consumer is looking for a bargain - a great deal, a nice discount. But, for many, reaching those bargain-hunters directly through paid advertising is financially impossible. The results for many small businesses have been ugly.

According to small business lending analyst Robert Coleman, in 2008, small business defaults on Small Business Administration (SBA) loans reached 12 percent, up from just 2.4 percent in 2004.

Even with thousands of websites catering to all sorts of people, there hasn't been a "one stop shop" where a small, independent businesses owner can offer these deals for consumers in their area to find them.

Where others might see gloom and doom, Jan Stuart saw hope and opportunity. An entrepreneur who saw his own successful business go under due to the stock market crash in 1987, Stuart has launched a new project, JansDeals.com, which specifically caters to the new deal-seekers who increasingly use the internet, and allows small businesses to cheaply target them, by listing deals that they can edit and change as they see fit.

"I really sympathized with the small business owners, because I've been there," said Stuart, who is offering small businesses three months free listings on the website to help launch the site. "You've got the big stores like Macy's which can afford to buy a full-page ad, offering 30 percent off all handbags. But what about the handbag shop down the street, or the woman who sells hand-made bags from a small home-based business? How can they say, 'Hey, I got a good deal here too!'? There was nothing for them - not even on the internet. That's why I created Jan's Deals."

Indeed, online marketing has been very much untapped by small businesses. 220 million+ people have internet access, according to Nielsen. But, more than half of all small business owners aren't using the internet to market or advertise their business, according to American Express.

Those who hadn't used the internet for advertising, and took part in a limited test phase of Jan's Deals in Boca Raton, Fla.,. seemed pleased with the results. Stuart's site includes testimonials from local businesses praising the concept.

"I do a lot of advertising in news print and on the Web, but since signing up with Jan's Deals I have never had such a consistent flow of new patient's from one source," writes the owner of Siegel Chiropractic Center.

Reaction like that is what Stuart believes will be replicated nationwide, as more businesses find his site and sign up.

"Americans are desperate for deals, because they have to stretch every dollar. But, at the same time, they want to help their locally owned small businesses, because everyone knows the horrible effect small businesses failing has on the local economy. Marrying those two things together at a website like this will absolutely take off," said Stuart. "Someone just had to create it."
I'm having trouble parsing this.

You mean that you tried to implement something on top of Tahoe, and it didn't work? Or Tahoe didn't work, so you went and wrote your own based on the Tahoe design? Or something else? :)
I think the bigger news is that he managed to get someone listen to the painful truth about online advertising: that it's ignored or grudgingly endured with little actual chance of conversion. Moreover, people are actually learning to avoid looking at areas with ads (Banner Blindness: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/fancy-formatting.html).

This is not new to web app creators, who long ago discovered that simply adding Adwords to a non-monetize-able service was not the key to vast internet riches.

But as soon as the marketing departments who buy online ads come to grips with this, it's going to be a(n even greater) shock to older content creators (e.g. newspapers) that have placed their hopes on online advertising as the easiest transition to a web-based business.

Of course, I don't have any better ideas, and solving that is indeed the million dollar question.
Oh, so it is humor! Most everybody here just thinks it is terrible advice. I'll remove the flag.
Unaffected by the kid's proclamations.
"The Miracle Factory"

Great name for a movie honoring Tesla.

Well, "Tesla" has more punch, I guess.
I've never been too socially anxious, so I wouldn't have felt this article — while inspiring — was very pertinent to me. It has a more general message though: if you feel anxious, the only route to recovery is by passing through it.

I'm currently living in a foreign country making due with limited language skills and my experiences learning to use the language in a real situation mirror this Social Skydiving experiment. You have to find the fun in failure.
"This means that all of the related posts from Twitter,....."

How does this work with all the url shortening services?
For those hesitant to click, from the link:

"Together with Marc Mézard, [Andrea Montanari is] writing a book. It should be an introduction to a rich and rapidly evolving research field at the interface between statistical physics, theretical [spelling mistake in original - I assume he doesn't mean theatrical...but that too might be an interesting read] computer science/discrete mathematics, and coding/information theory. It should be accessible to graduate students an researchers without specific training in any of these three fields."

Contains PDFs.
don't worry about what they're doing and stay focused on whatever it was that motivated you to start in the first place.

nothing has really changed other than your perception.

fleaflicker launched in august 2005. i was 23 and living with my parents. that same year, fox sports, protrade ($10M in funding plus celebrity board members), and a slew of other startups also launched their fantasy games.

i fretted over this for a few days and then just go back to work.

fox's debut was widely regarded as a disaster, protrade fizzled (but has since reinvented itself nicely), and the one startup i worried about the most folded before they launched.

as far as timing your launch, i'll just reiterate the same advice that has been dispensed here often: launch as soon as practical.
There are a ton of variables here. The only data point I can add is that in SF web/interactive work $125 is a pretty fair average rate.

Some of the variables to consider.
1. Location - NY and SF are going to be more expensive.
2. Type of work. HTML is going to be lower generally the C for embedded devices.
3. Length of contract. My rate could go down if you hired me for more than 3-4 months work. (the more time you have to spend looking for work the higher the premium)
4. The Client. Large corporations are going to spend more money generally then a local restaurant. Note you're not going to get a lot of large clients working only part time.
The big question is: does funding help? With funding you can hire more developers, but that may or may not help depending on what you're doing. Is your project capital heavy (ie. do you have to pay lots of money for servers and such)?

If you aren't going to be hiring more developers and your service doesn't require a lot of capital, then the funding advantage shouldn't be so daunting. For example, it's hard to go up against Flickr without funding because you'd have to buy a ton of storage (even if you're just paying for cloud storage, it'll be expensive when people use it). However, going up against Twitter wouldn't require such funding because the capital costs are low comparatively.

Now, clearly there are other barriers than funding, but if your business doesn't need a lot of capital to compete, don't worry about a competitor's funding advantage too much. If you're smarter/better/more awesome, you're funding your project with something even more valuable: your time.
I think knowing your own hourly rate is necessary to benchmark your own tasks and priorities. But yeah, in my experience clients generally want an estimate up front so my rate is more of an internal tool. The art of it all comes from being able to accurately predict the amount of time for the project that will used for the estimate based on my rate, which comes from experience.
I think he means that that argument sounds similar to the ones actually given by slavery's supporters. I've heard an old economic argument that chattel slavery is better than wage slavery (what we have now), because you treat something you own better than what you merely rent.

(So an anarchonistic example is that a car you own will remain in better shape than one you rent. That's actually not such a terrible argument, though of course we'd reject it nowadays.)

That said, I don't personally know either way, and Wikipedia does mention that _Uncle Tom's Cabin_ is popularly seen as propaganda. (I personally haven't read the book, but it wouldn't surprise me if it were 'propaganda' in the sense that it was biased and promoted a political point of view. Apparently, before the Nazis, propaganda didn't have such bad connotations.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncle_Tom%27s_Cabin#Literary_si...
Open source in Genomics: Sequencing a Genome a Week
This quote: "we have the same goals. We’re trying to get information out there "

I don't think book companies are all about getting out information at all. Some even press limited amounts of a book.
A conspiracy theorist on HN!

Wasn't there a news story a few weeks ago that intelligence and rationality weren't that correlated? :-)

Edit: This and parent seems to be quite fun/strange examples of jumping up/down in votes over the minutes.
Ick. Since you don't see what all the fuss is about, you're going to put another doodad between your user and conversion. Ask an online business that does any sort of volume at all: this is bad.

Web forms are where the usability rubber hits the road online. When adding an item to your form you should always be of the mind set that this extra step (optional or not) will lose you conversions, but you have to have it because of X. This forces you to justify placing item X, which in this case is the unmask password option. Is having an option to unmask the password field going to gain you more conversions than not? I have no data, just anecdotes and experience, but those all tell me no.

Putting a check box next to the entry field is putting GUI decisions on your user because you can't figure it out, and it will lose you conversions.

EDIT: Re-reading this it sounds like personal attack on the OC. It's not. I'm using the universal you.
It is true, I tried it at a bar once as an explicit tip of the hat to those funny commercials, and then found out I actually liked it. If not for those commercials I never would have tried it.
I'm not sure where your perceived disconnect between mental stamina and running out of steam is. (Additionally, could you say how mental stamina is a bad thing, ceteris paribus?)

Could you elaborate on your definitions for "early bird" and "night owl"? My everyday semantics align with the article.
The OP makes an excellent point about the quality of the reporting that comes via Twitter. There was an article in the NYT this week about a handful of celebrities (Jeff Goldblum, Lindsay Lohan, etc.) that "died" via Twitter during the mania surrounding Michael Jackson's death.

All it takes is: "RIP Jeff Goldblum...plz retweet...kthxbye!!!" Soon enough, a couple thousand have retweeted it, and that makes it news, so CNN reports it immediately with no fact checking.
The comment needs to die. Think about it - why should what you have to say become property of the publisher, to be abused/twisted/moderated?
Enterprise Virtual Worlds
Unlimited Web to PDF Converter for Free
I'm in this very same position. I'm taking another approach. I plan to propose that I go from employee to contractor. I was disappointed this option wasn't discussed, but not surprised. It's risky, yes. But it's a lot better than being an asshole.
It's easier to observe and control for the sleep schedule and then measure alertness, rather than the other way around.
Honestly, I wish I was working on something outside of the office. The reality is I wish I was working on something worthwhile while I'm in the office. Lately the job has become a job again, and although it pays the bills, its still meaningless work. Building the same applications ten different ways for ten different purposes. Its futile.

That said, I'm glad I work where I work otherwise I might be struggling. Being the go-to guy has its ups and downs, but for now it'll do.

Things I have been neglecting, however:

* HackMyJob.com - Job automation script sharing. Working this with a coworker outside the office. We're just trying to learn Django, honestly.

* FragTweet.com - Just a simple service to tell friends when and what you're playing. Unfortunately, a competitor has beaten me to market on the advanced features.

* MeetTheDress.com - A outfit sharing/comparing site. Still not even out of the spec on this one. I'm just not motivated at the moment.

* All my personal sites. Just last night I jumped two Wordpress point released on AbyssKnight.com. Maybe those sites need some TLC...
"Why Forth?"

Just a "mind expanding" language chosen to be as different from lisp as possible (I am comfortable with static type systems and OCaml/Haskell for example). Also, I'd like (at some later date) to grok Factor.
Some do, some don't. Most people go back to their natural patterns during the holidays, though. The classification is based on forms asking questions in a context of freedom from external constraints.

I'm not very familiar with sleep research, but I'd guess that both types will underperform if their natural penchant is disturbed (by work hours, for example).

Edit: Here is the actual screening form (in French) used for the studies: http://www2.ulg.ac.be/crc/in/CIRCADIEN_ONLYweb.html ... Adapted from: Horne, J. A. and O. Ostberg (1976). "A self-assessment questionnaire to determine morningness-eveningness in human circadian rhythms." Int J Chronobiol 4(2): 97-110.

Extreme early and late subject are further "diagnosed" with more exhaustive tests.
The keys to billing per project are clearly defined specifications, signed contracts, and down payments. Give your hourly rate in addition for work that goes beyond the spec.

Both you and your client benefit from knowing exactly what they're getting and for exactly how much. Plus, a concrete spec and price will help them get the expenditure approved, when applicable.
Though I can't recall where I read it, I recall reading another source that claimed that teenagers and tweens did not use twitter but instead were more enamored with direct texting.

It would be worth someone actually doing a study of this.
One has to wonder - given the individual and group mindset that promulgated and then rationalized those feminist book(s), ideas, and arguments laden with falsehoods and fabrications - what the reaction to this article would have been had its author been a man.
Cell phones didn't let people outside Iran convince themselves they were "a part of things" by changing their timezones or using green icons.
Gibbler: Git-like Hashes and History for Ruby Objects
Does anybody know anything about ibs-safeworlds ?
I ran into this:
http://www.ibs-safeworlds.com/

It looks kind of fishy to me.
Has anybody ever used it ? Or heard about it ?
I have wii, xbox, mac mini hooked up in the living room.

wii: family games (Agreed, the browser is crappy, no keyboard, etc), but games are best for kids/family.

xbox: guitar hero, good if someone wants to shoot random stuff or do real racing games.

mac mini: browser, youtube, photos, play backed up dvds, movie trailers, itunes, etc etc.

IMHO The UI in the xbox isn't good, and their insistance on reimplementing the web in 'apps' isn't one that I agree with - facebook, twitter integration? Just use a browser. I just simply can't stand to use the xBox more than is really necessary. It's painful :/ Whilst everyone else is moving towards the web as a platform, Microsoft still seems to think the web is irrelevant.
This is a very nice story around on very important point: being nice and friendly creates tremendous positive externalities, and if people don't react well, that's their own problem, not yours
Eh, the Peace Prize has had a lot of dubious winners, too. (Doesn't mean suggestions like this guy's shouldn't be mocked, but still.)
A hands-on look at Microsoft Office 2010.
It must feel really horrible to have your content spidered, indexed and found by users who will come to your site and see your ads.

As far as I have understood the issue, the newspapers want to control how users interact with the site, coming in from the front-page where they can tempt/lure the users to more on-site content and more ads, or just have two page-views and double ads for that one same story.

What I don't get, is how in this time and age where everyone should know more or less how the World wide web works, anyone can think they can control how users interact with your content.
I think the "with no fact checking" part is CNN's fault. They wouldn't walk into the street and take credit for some random hobo's ravings without fact checking them first, would they? I realize there's a difference between one voice on the street and a buzzing conversation, but the journalists are still supposed to be journalists.
Study Measures the Chatter of the News Cycle
I wonder how this affects Schneier Facts: http://www.schneierfacts.com
Ask HN: Can anyone recommend a good CDN?
Can anyone recommend a cost effective reliable CDN for media hosting? We'll be serving static files that are part of an online game. Please share any experiences. Thanks.
Good point. I remember that during the first gulf war, a lot of ground-level info was available on IRC chatrooms. The ability to share text remotely from anyplace in the world has been around for a long time, way before Twitter.
Cool idea. Downside: one more routine maintenance task that can no longer reasonably be performed by your average car owner.
When programmers build websites
So would you say that the US State Department should have supported the efforts of the Iranian government in quelling dissent amongst the election protesters? Perhaps that they should have requested that Twitter block access from Iranian IP addresses and take down posts?

Look man, there's a difference between fomenting a violent revolution by providing weapons and terrorist training and trying to encourage a grass roots movement for regime change in the face of fishy election results.

I don't intrinsically believe that everyone should stay out of everyone else's domestic politics. I believe that as long as support is nonviolent, there's not a problem with expressing it.
Django internals: authentication
I use OS X for desktops and Ubuntu for servers. For me, Windows 7 is engineered well as a desktop OS:

* More granular user access control

* Win left and right for easy split screen, a feature Mac and Ubuntu could both do with.

* Proper DPI scaling, for nearly all apps, with full crispness. My eyes aren't great and this is really helpful.

* Updated Powershell UI with method browsing etc. built in.
I'm the same way (and I used to hate morning).

I'm not sure if it's a product of it being quieter in the early morning when I first wake up (as opposed to at noon), the fact that recently I've been alone in the "office" for most of the day, or what, but I definitely find it easier to get into "the zone" in the morning and get a lot of work done.

I'm writing code 8-12 hours a day now, which is pretty outstanding considering it isn't a new project or something. The fact that I'm exhausted by about 8pm doesn't really bother me.
It seems they haven't heard of robots.txt.
Is that a problem? Besides, it looks like that's just one application of the new functionality.
a lot of the information you just shared is not in the article that was linked.

if had been then I would not have called it to be superficial. I mistakenly assumed with the tone of the article, that it would make as strong of a point that it could, and this article, presented very little information about all these additional constraints and steps you mentioned.

Now knowing about all these additional steps, I'm still left pondering - what if high energy people shifted their sleep patterns? I'm a night owl, and I'm generally a high energy kind of person, but if I was to shift my sleep so that I went to bed earlier and woke up earlier (although tough to pull off for me), maybe my energy would go with me, shifting to earlier in the day.

I think that would make a good follow up study: take those night owls and perhaps the early rises as well, and shift their sleep up and then do all these measurements again to see how it affected them. Did they drop in energy, or did their energy go with them through the transition (giving them time to adjust as well).