skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: How to deal with this freelance client?
I'm new(er) to freelancing.

I just had a personal contact (known him about 1.5 years now - met at network event) he reached out to me about a really cool software project he needed done for this recruiting business.

So what I did is :
1) Spend 30-45 mins (2 times) talking on phone to him about it. (1-1.5 hrs total)

2) About 3-4 hours mocking up his proposed solution in a flow chart.

3) Another hour or two over the course of a few weeks about minor details.

4) It seemed like all was set.

I sent him this and then he tells me some silly response like "I need to have a new employee look this over and I'll get back to you"

Its been 10 days now and this guy just posted on quora : "How to do <x> subfunctionality of this project? (he is non-technical)

How should I take this? That the guy isn't interested in my work and is likely using the diagrams I made of the process with someone else?

Thoughts?

Additionally, any good reads on (software) freelancing books you may have could be helpful too.

Thanks
LOL What a parody! With this article she effectively destroyed her business... Unbelievable! Nobody with a brain would like to work for her after a simple search for references and her customers must be already scratching their heads if they can trust that a business with her as a head would stay afloat... Unless she is linked to EU funds that can keep her business funded regardless of performance due to political connections, I don't think many people would be willing to bet on her. This is not about making tough calls when they are necessary, it's about exhibiting inability to comprehend basic business and operational issues and inability to at least conceal that fact by issuing meaningless statements.
The biggest gripe I have with using Python for rich command-line tool is the startup time. One of the first reason I like to write a nice command-line tool when I start a project, say foo, is to be able to do `foo --help` to quickly see and remember what the project can do (I have a very bad memory and doing this makes it possible for me to jump back faster to a project, even well documented. I can forget what I was doing in just a few days and so I add a lot of small commands).

In short running `foo --help` should be instant and if it loads all its modules to list the different sub-commands and their respective description it is really too slow.

A possibility is to cache some information (e.g. generate a text file or a small Python script).
Ahh.. I really like pocoo's products. But I've found manage.py (https://github.com/Birdback/manage.py) to be far leaner and simple. What do you guys think?
Paid App in App Store's Free Top Charts
Another vote for Czech Republic (well, Prague) - great for living and running a small/private business, though kind of bad for getting funding, going public or getting the best employees.
I think this was recently touched on by the big four supermarkets coming under criticism.

No real full time customer service assistants. Staff are placed on 16 hour contracts with single, double or quad hours randomly placed throughout the week.

If you don't come in, you get fired.

http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/apr/19/zero-hours-co...
When people watch is highly time-sensitive and congestion is the problem. If a non-streaming approach meant downloading 3x as much data but doing it at night rather than in the evening that would be a win.
Various core system bits that are tightly integrated using undocumented APIs and assumptions about what the other parts are doing internally which are subject to change at any time. I think you can replace some, though not all, of the non-PID-1 bits with a little development work, but replacing the core parts is unsupported.
'I'm just being honest' is not an excuse for being an asshole, yet the vast majority of the time that is exactly what it's about. It's the most popular justification given by sociopaths.
it sounds like a lot of the complaints were of the "this makes things easier and smells like it's not the lovechild borne of any arcane hacker and I refuse to read documentation" variety.
It was possible to have < 5 second boot times in 2008 https://lwn.net/Articles/299483/

I'd be interested to know if the systemd boot process (which can be 2 seconds or quicker) has enough advantages to make the other changes worth it.
Has anyone seen this before? The app doesn't seem to have any reviews. I wonder if it could be a bug due to the App Store's recent update to include the "In-App Purchases" tag.
How to Analyze a Patent
For me it always feels like people who are bashing on systemd never actually used it. I was very concerned about systemd for long time. And nowadays I use it on all my machines/servers. And it just makes my life so much easier. I'm happy. I like it. I can agree with lot of points on this website. But still systemd makes my happy. So sorry, but no.
Yep, it's best us case is basically acting as pythons anonymous function (since lambdas suck for everything but the most trivial things).

Where in js flask might read app.route('/', function(){//do something}); python uses a decorator right above a regular function definition. The alternative is to manually add it after it's defined (in flask that's add_url_rule), but that kind of hides the intent of the function and is more cumbersome as you need to manually pass in the fn name.
For uncomplicated systems (such as virtual machines, servers and whatnot) there's mdev in busybox.
1) The notice given was required by law, not some kind of sweetheart deal for the employee.

2) It appears that after-hours on-call work wasn't ever actually a part of the employee's contract - they shouldn't have been doing them anyway. When you know you're no-longer part of the team, why exactly would you go above and beyond? Show up, do good work in the hours you're contracted for and don't pick up the phone after hours.

The employee is treating it as a time:money transaction and since there is no ongoing deal why give away your time for free?
I am a 2 year old.My brain thinks everyone in the world wants what I want.When I grab some other childs toy I dont understand why the child cries instead of being motivated and jumping with joy at having done what I want.

Apparently this startup ceo has not outgrown the terrible twos
I'd recommend Berlin or Israel. The latter I'm very surprised would make my list but only under these special circumstances.

ISRAEL:
It is by far the most disgustingly capitalistic country I've ever lived in but the VK crew may find this to their benefit. They will also find a nice and strong Russian community in Israel and a large pool of talent to pull from. What they will not find there is any sort of non-commercial activity (non-edu research, hacker spaces, fringe technical movement of any type) nor will they find a government interested in free speech. And they will have to turn a blind eye to all the shit their tax dollars will be put toward.

BERLIN:
If you want free speech then definitely go to Berlin. Germanys conservative government comes off more liberal than the US's most liberal government. You'll find strong party factions with ties to post-NSA thinkers and movers. The place is beaming with intellectual discourse. It is also a hacker mecca so there are plenty of fringe technological movements. What you will not find is a large tech community (though it is growing fast) nor a very money driven culture.

Go to Berlin if you want to make impact on the world. Go to Israel if you want to make money.
Warhol began archiving material well before his death. There is a lot of it, and until there's a reason...such as a grant...to look in a box, nobody is likely to.

http://www.warhol.org/collection/archives/http://www.warhol....
> (...) serious, modern PHP developer (...)

A "serious PHP developer" is an oxymoron.
YouTube unfairly removes Language Channel with last Thao native speaker
Polyglot channel Glossika Language Training has been banned unfairly from Youtube. I can't imagine what I'd do if my years of hard work and language learning videos were removed because someone simply abused the flagging option!
Help give him a hand to get it back!
One of the videos includes the last native speaker of the Thao language!
I was amazed as well, same age as me. Now I feel challenged to execute even more of my ideas, well done Sir!
“Artery chokes after 70 copies of Visual Studio”
I love docopt. My big draw is that I write the documentation only once - in the doc string where it should be. Click looks great, but there is no documentation in the code itself. You need to run the code to print the documentation.
Multitasking absolutely sucks on Mobiles, I agree with you that the matter is pressing as smartphones and even more tablets now have enough Ram, CPU and screen for good multitasking.

On Windows tablets it is perfectly ok although I highly dislike metro's lack of windowing management:

Customize your screen with 3 metro apps (e.g. twitter, browser, Xbox music), switch to another full screen metro app (flipbook), Switch back to twitter and there you go, metro forgot you customized the screen and shows twitter full screen. What king of crap is that 18 months after windows 8 launch.

Apart from that though I am extremely impressed with the Surface 2 and multitasking with outlook, word, browser & apps is a given.

Re r00fus to me the back button, also on Windows phones, is a major ui design failure. On touch buttons it could change depending on context but it's impossible for hardware buttons.
We just install daemontools on all of our servers for our own stuff and let the system packages use whatevers the default in the distro, they seem to live happily together.

I suspect that one issue with systemd is that it aims to solve very real problem, but they are problems that not many noticed. Most of the stuff that's highlighted as benefits of systemd are things I never experienced, either I don't thing advanced enough or the issue has already been addressed by the distro.

Most of us are just going have some daemon/process that we want to start at boot and for that purpose systemd is going to look like massive overkill and overly complicated. That might be mostly a documentation issue, systemd could benefit for a "So you want to start at process" guide.
> people were beginning to develop Berkshire-tracking funds

At the very least, that's proof that the market wants shares that trade at less than 6 digits. It's not the same as "rational", but we do our best.
Building a Website To Scale (youporn.com)
Interesting. Always wondered how studying Shakespeare feels for native speakers. I had a hard time with Shakespeare, but enjoyed equivalent German poets a lot (though Goethe etc. worked more than a hundred years later ... no plain text translation is needed). Their language is plain beautiful, and getting their wit is like solving a riddle.
Well what does the Ada initiative know about the case? GitHub claims they did an investigation, and they let people go. So on what basis does Ada initiative assume misconduct, apart from their ideology?
Longyearbyen, Norway.

They even have high-speed optic fiber on the island. And here is a nice property for sale, should be great for a small team of 2-4: http://www.finn.no/finn/realestate/homes/object?finnkode=448... Plane tickets to the mainland are dirt cheap.

Anyway, that is my dream – to get a comfortable, cozy place far away from the continent. Whatever happens out in the world, will likely not distract me from work.

Edit: >They have a team of 12

Well then, one could always buy land and build on it. Also on Svalbard, taxes are pretty low.
I'm increasingly stunned at the lack of empathy for what it's like to be an employer here on HN where, ostensibly, people are trying to learn about what it takes to become a successful startup and employer.

As an employer, I've dealt with helping people transition out of a job that has disappeared or turned out not to be right for them. I tried to do what this woman did - give the employee some extra time on my dime to find new work. If during that time that I'm paying them to hunt for a job (which costs me thousands of dollars a week, typically), if I need them to lift a finger to do something, I should feel guilty to even ask?

If I took the flip side of the attitude of a lot of people in this thread, I'd just fire an employee with minimal severance the moment he isn't making me money. That would suck.
Tech titans join forces to stop the next Heartbleed
I'd also suggest Berlin, but aren't they in berlin already? If so, I'd be interested to know why are they looking for yet another country? Sure, you need to know some German to get around, but otherwise berlin has a pretty good climate for startups (and the cost of living is not as high as in Switzerland or Iceland).
I'm an employee, it should also be my right to work more without the governement always taxing me extra. I want to work more, but i see no financial benefit from it for working a day in a weekend (eg. when i have a deadline), nor does my employer.

I'm not sure I understand here. Surely if you're making more money, then you should expect to pay a portion of that in tax? And you'll see a financial benefit as a result?
I agree with what most people here are saying - there is certainly a lot of WTF's in what she wrote that doesn't quite add up.

BUT!

When someone is leaving a job (ie is working during the notice period and is still being paid), I would still expect that they fully do their job until they've actually left - doesn't matter if they quit or "were let go". Doing otherwise is, IMHO, very unprofessional.

Having said that, in this story, he was expected to work after hours, so he had absolutely no obligation to respond. So, given the circumstances, what I said above doesn't seem to apply in this case, unless it was in his original contract to be on call like this.
You got the last part right. It's pretty unreasonable to expect anyone to have passion for a project that is no longer their's.

Hard to get people to go above and beyond the call of duty after you tell them they aren't needed.
Google, Microsoft and Facebook launch project to stop the next Heartbleed
Ah, absolutely. Even if that's making coffee, ordering food, or doing the mindless repetitive tasks.
Duplicate https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7629485
What people actually mean when they say "buy something" is "invest in something".

When an investor chooses whether to invest in something, the question they ask themselves is "will this make more money than the best alternative investment on offer to me?"

When the value of currency is falling, it becomes relatively more appealing to invest in things that are not currency. For example, new machines for the local factory - those machines make widgets, and with 2% inflation those widgets are worth 2% more every year.

When the value of currency is rising, it becomes relatively more appealing to invest in things that are currency, like keeping my money in the bank. Glad I'm not one of those suckers who invested in the widget factory, because of the 2% deflation those widgets are worth 2% less every year.

Me, I think our economy would be better off with more invested in manufacturing and less in financial services.
In most of the EU you seldom can fire an employee without weeks of notice

This is true. What you can do, though, is let an employee go immediately and pay his salary for the notice period.

Banks do this quite often on employees, who could create huge damage for the bank. For example traders.
Apparently that happened with Dilbert. The author made stuff up and people kept writing to him saying "That story-line is just like $COMPANY, that's where you got the idea, right?"
Dense Bitpacking for Fun and (tiny) Profit
This reminds me of my college days. At Statistical Computing Facility at UC Berkeley, a grad student and I (I just finished 1st year at the time) built a web-based spreadsheet for tracking students' homework and exam scores. We called it StatGrades. One feature that it had was that you could write javascript for each column for calculation/validation. I looked at the excel help docs and implemented most of the relevant/useful functions, so people could do something like:

AVERAGE(homework1, homework2) * 0.2 + AVERAGE(exam1, exam2) * 0.8

for the final grade. We used rhino for javascript and the service was built on jsp/servlet. It also had access controls so different readers/GSIs had access to different students and columns, and students could see their own grades. Everyone hated Blackboard and loved what we built, but unfortunately they couldn't find anyone to maintain it after I graduated (I was the only person working on it shortly after I joined). The service was shutdown a couple years after I left.
Her. The article was written by a lady.
'It never crossed my mind that he had been FIRED.'

Yes, by the end of most modern firings, which are conducted with an astonishing degree of cowardice, the goal is to make the employee somehow leave feeling like they've voluntarily quit. This is how we avoid recognizing the uncomfortable fact that a firing is actually a confrontation, and that it is super uncomfortable. And we don't want to experience that, right?

Apparently the CEO has somehow convinced themselves that firings are mutual and that they aren't super uncomfortable.

Stop couching something in euphemisms and recognize things for what they actually are. If you are letting someone go chances are 1) it's a one-sided decision 2) they won't appreciate it very much. Only in the flavor-less world of detached corporate speak are firings mutual.
I read your answer like this:

No newbie sysadmin should touch init scripts because they can't handle it.

Isn't it about damn time we go from overly complex to what makes sense?

“The only way to control chaos and complexity is to give up some of that control”
Bank of England to hire "hackers"
Crazy. I knew PHP was bad, but this is just terrible.
That's incorrect. The actual tl;dr would be "don't give people notice if you need them".

He's technically still employed until the end of the notice period. How does "firing" work in the USA? Do you literally pack up your desk and walk out the moment you're "fired"? That sounds, well... illegal?
It's quite nitpicky, but she.
What do you think of the course so far? I added it to my watch list but haven't started it yet.
The problem is that it's a suite of tools that are all developed under the same umbrella, by the same people, with the same ideas, and the same gatekeepers. It's rather difficult to fully replace parts of it, especially as the formal API to it is defined by systemd, and we're seeing more and more tools integrate with all that.

Why can't we have an independent organisation that defines a spec for all the relevant APIs and tools for managing a system, and systemd just be one implementation of that spec? Actually, it could be a suite of specs, so people could pick and choose which ones solve their problems, and build alternatives for others.
If I see another hipster start-up name that just adds "-(i)fy", "-er" or "-ly" on the end of a noun/verb, I think I'll scream.

Looks good though.
You beat me to it, by a minute >_<
What exactly has she "done" that's so wrong? I mean, sure, her expectations are perhaps a bit [insert whatever you want here], but her actions?

Or are you saying it's morally wrong to terminate an employment contract when the business no-longer needs the employee?
There's one thing that the boycott post gets right, that Mr Poettering doesn't address, which is:

> 2. systemd's journal files (handled by journald) are stored in a complicated binary format.

Mr Poettering tackles the myth that configuration files are binary (they are very obviously not).

That said, I am not sure how to get the journaling data in an Upstart system, nor in a sysvinit one.
I'm dumbfounded as to why this is on the front page with 0 comments and only 4 points. I couldn't figure out from the link why this is the simplest way to sell digital downloads or how it works :(
European Working Time Directive forbids more than a 48 hour working week. The UK has an opt out to that maximum. Sounds like this employer wants someone who can work 24x7, which y'know is illegal.
From the same corner of the Internet, http://lesswrong.com/lw/y4/three_worlds_collide_08/

One of the craziest (in a good sense) scifi stories I ever read.
And when called on it: "oh it's not just you, I'm an asshole to everyone!"
Costa Rica? My brothers company has had a software development subsidiary there for more than a decade. Upside: Educated, motivated workforce, reasonable business climate, short plane ride to US and rest of S. America. Great weather and outdoors. Downside: it's not yet quite up to EU or US infrastructure standards, which could cause issues (all of which can be mitigated). Cost of living is not a cheap as it once was. Traffic in San Juan sucks. There will definitely be some cultural issues to be aware of between Slavs and S. Americans. If he's really rabidly anti-socialist, they have universal health care.
One night only: Come to a free lecture with Dr. Richard Stallman
Agree, but SysV-init isn't notably unixy. In general, SysV distros raced to embrace and extend away from the mainstream. That created lots of un-unixy subsystems that live on in linux. Quick wave in the direction of three - NFS, wacky IPC systems, SysVinit.

SysVinit is complicated - it wants to be a DSL but is still a shell hack-together. It's inflexible - it's a dependency tracking system, but you can't easily adapt it for userspace launch control, or as a build tool. It doesn't do one thing well. (e.g. doesn't reliably contain a process tree, there are still situations where you want to use pid files or complicated ps greps).

Init is a hard problem. From what I can see all the unix derivatives have made a mess of it. I've had fleeting attempts at writing my own, and I definitely made mess.

In the absence of the good, I reckon the simple becomes the standard. In modern BSDs there's a script called init, it gets called at startup and does nothing for you. I reckon we should judge challengers to init against that.
That "deal" to give him reasonable time to find a new job was forced by law, not given by kindness of her heart.

If she wanted to do the minimum declared by law, she would have just fired him. The severance clock doesn't start ticking until you fire someone.

By just coming to an agreement with him that he would look for a job, she was giving him extra time. If she decided after a month that he wasn't getting a new job and wanted to let him go, then at that point, she'd still owe him the minimal amount of severance.

[edit: You can tell that this issue is all about emotion when a simple fact like what I stated above has to be downvoted]
I know hating on PHP is en vogue but you could probably write the same ugly code with another language too.
"Logic and results" is orthogonal to "people skills". I've worked with so many other programmers who act like this. Being smart does not excuse being rude.
In most develeped countries (except the USA), you can't just fire someone on the spot (unless they are stealing from you / beating up co-workers etc.). So the employee always has a notice period to work.
5 Good App Development Tips, and 5 Bad ones
> What is that killer feature that Arch offers, apart from being rolling release?
Apart from that its pacman, just sick of the apt-get madness.
And generally having far less default crap on you system.
As a German expat who moved to the UK to start a business, I second this. Incorporating (a GmbH) in Germany would've been a major nightmare compared to the UK. Not that I'd recommend the UK as a good location at this point.
> (governement taxes that A LOT if you do overtime).

Let's say the tax rate on overtime is 60%. And that you would be motivated/consider the overtime pay fair if you got € X an hour.

Well then the employer needs to offer € X * 1/(1-0.6) gross pay to get the employee the right amount of net pay. It's not difficult, merely expensive, but since overtime like this is rare, I doubt it's impossible.