skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
it's a nice sentiment, but it's unsustainable and it's setting bad expectations with the client. You should not be guaranteeing bug-free software, because that is impossible. The client should understand that the software will have bugs, and that your ability to continue fixing those bugs is contingent on you having a continuing source of revenue. I'm sure they'd rather pay than have you close up shop and have nobody to fix the bugs.

Also, i've noticed in my own work that people are always eager to blame problems on whatever component is the cheapest/easiest to solve. If you charge $50/hr for application support and the guy they contract to do virus scans and run disk defragger costs $40/hr, their first call will always be to him, not you, no matter where the actual problem lies. Somebody at their office has figured out that whenever a user has a problem, it's cheaper to pawn the problem off to you and let you do the triage than it is to triage it themselves before calling you. Even if you don't start charging for bug fixes, you need to start charging for wasted time.
I've heard stories about one year at WWDC's Stump the Experts, they discussed the longest method name in ObjC land. I wish I had been there. I also wish I was going to be there tomorrow, but alas, the marketers and bosses have taken over.
Coder Factory On Why You Need To Learn To Code
I'm curious, what's the significance of the use of --optname instead of -optname in a lot of *nix CLI apps?
Creating Cellular Automata: Life-like Cellular Automata
All of your requirements for a good PM mean that the PM needs to have the skills to be a developer as well. It's probably why some companies aren't hiring for PMs anymore because only an engineer will have the technical foresight required to perform adequately.
> stable government policies

You're a funny one.
Reminds me of Nomic[1], a thought experiment which appears in an appendix to Peter Suber's excellent book, "The Paradox of Self-Amendment" [2]. Choice quote from the introduction to Nomic:

If law-making is a game, then it is a game in which changing the rules is a move.

[1] http://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/10288408/Peter%20...

[2] http://dash.harvard.edu/handle/1/10243418
It disambiguates multiple short flags from a long flag. Ie. if the program happened to have short flags l, o, n, g, and l could also be the whole word long, which would

-long

mean?
INFOGRAPHIC: Online Dating Market Statistics
iOS designer switches to Android: 'It’s Death By A Thousand Cuts'
Don't feel bad, they owe you. They can always try to negotiate. In fact I would say they always try to negotiate on charges like this, but stick to your guns. If they won't pay for a few hours of work then it's going to be a red flag for all other work anyway. Just my experience.
Did you mean (July 2014) ?
You don't even need the high-speed backbone. You could backup the files to a local drive. The latency might be bad, but trucks still have higher bandwidth then the internet.

http://what-if.xkcd.com/31/
>The problem is that a lot of companies are structured so that this
>is impossible for their PMs to accomplish.

Would love to hear more about this since I'm going to be structuring the engineering, and possibly product, teams for the startup I joined...

>get buy-in from both sales and development

Totally. People often rant about Sales or Marketing or Engineering, but none exists without the other. I think the combination of deep technical skills and a two year tour of duty in Sales (as a Field Applications Engineer) provided me with the ability to pre-understand each sides' concerns and to communicate with each more effectively.

>If leadership feels the need to put product management under sales
>or under development, chances are they need to hire new PMs.

Yeah, I've seen this first hand two separate times and the constant refrain from the rest of the company was "why isn't engineering building what our customer's need?" I do wonder if it's possible. Or advisable. Might be something that goes bad no matter how well it starts.
Fundamentalist Christians are still seen in the U.S. as the "oppressing majority" that want to impose their belief system on others or want at least to make others feel bad for not adhering to their beliefs or not conforming to their moral code. This view is outdated.

The Evangelical+Fundamentalist Christians had their latest political and cultural heyday in the 1980's with the "Moral Majority" movement. They've been in steady decline since, with the book "The Great Evangelical Recession" (http://www.amazon.com/Great-Evangelical-Recession-The-Americ...) arguing that the U.S. population can count only between 7% and 9% as part of the "true believer" Evangelical or Fundamental Christian set. The other 30% to 50% that loosely associate themselves with Christian churches have only limited knowledge of what Christianity teaches.

Politicians, advertisers, tastemakers all are slowly realizing this declining influence and focus of Christian groups. Many "free thinking" folks though still see Fundamentalist Christianity as the big bogey-man. Those dabbling in the occult or most other religions are generally seen as interesting and as having no agenda to impose moral beliefs, and so are much less threatening and downright fun and interesting. The California occult even had raucous sex parties, yay!
Add the ability to filter to show utopian/sydtopian/all and then include a trend graph showing how many utopian predictions have come to pass vs. how many dystopian ones.
There are a variety of better deal structures available to you.

One is to cap your hours/cost. Just build in 40 hours (or whatever) of bug fixing for the first month into the price. Line item it, so the customer knows what he's getting and what it costs. Often customers will complain about this cost, and say they'd rather pay a la carte. Bingo. But if they don't, you have now set clear expectations about what is being provided.

Another is to make bug reports consumable. For reference, Apple has a bug fix consumable called a DTS Incident where you pay in advance to have N bugs investigated. Something you may want to consider if the bugs are all invalid is requiring somebody to pay to file a report, and if it turns out valid you refund their money. This may lead to more disputes though it's unclear if disputes are a problem in your situation. In that case you may want 2 hours of your time no refundable for every report.

The third thing is technical, and it works even if you don't have a good contract in place. Become omniscient. Log really detailed, invasive things and phone them home. Every user action, all the user's data, etc. Then when the bug comes in you cross-check against the logs and can verify quickly. "No you pressed the delete button, that's why you don't have any data. Not because a bug in the app destroyed it." Make it clear that you are doing this and make it clear that you will disable it, but disabling it voids the warranty.
Playable???? Not even close :/ It barely worked from what I can remember (I was very young at the time). It certainly made me even more excited for HL2's release though.
The problem is that this guy was young, relatively speaking, maybe about 20. The headline calls him a "boy", so he was certainly under 21.

By the time I was 21, I certainly wouldn't have done something like what he did. But, just a few years earlier, say at 18, yes, I did stupid things. In his position I probably could have done what he did. At that age many "boys" brains just aren't developed enough to truly understand right and wrong.

I'm not saying they shouldn't be punished. But I am saying they definitely shouldn't be punished harshly. In this case he was lucky to receive two years of probation as punishment. Something like that, or perhaps what we call "community service", is certainly more appropriate than throwing him in adult jail with hardened criminals.
i charge for phone calls, travel, bugs that are my fault, bugs that are not and everything else. Basically, if i can't bill another client for the time then i am occupied and must bill. i do not have contracts or recurring revenue to lean on and it sounds like you don't either. look at it this way, its unethical to your boss to not bill for time. Your boss may be you in this instance but you need to act like it isn't and the answers to these questions will be a lot easier to answer.
^^Solid advice. The only thing I might add is to record these hours somewhere and then in your future quotes include a portion of time called maintenance, bug fixes, testing or something similar that accounts for these unforeseeable problems. Some clients will use more than the allotted time, some less. Over time it will average out.

You may have to explain to them why code \might\ need bug fixes etc but that generally leads to the client having a better overall understanding of the work required which never hurts :)
In what way? How could that make sense?
I meant can the NSA force you to keep publishing "we have not worked with the NSA" when you have worked with them.
Personally, I wouldn't offer free fixes on anything I didn't write entirely by myself. And I would only do it if there were sufficient scope and flexibility for me to include all my quality-oriented practices (unit testing, pair programming, good logging, incremental deployment, etc). So in the future, I think my answer is, "Don't do that."

But that's the future. For now, you made an offer. I'd honor it for the current list, and then send them a note saying, in fancier language, "Hey, I've spent 8 hours running down issues that turned out to not be my bugs. I am happy to stand behind my work, but I can't afford to do that for other people's code. If you folks would like a support contract for your system, I'm glad to do that at $XXX per hour with a monthly retainer of $YYYY. I'm still glad to fix any bugs in my code for free, but in the future, time spent on issues that aren't caused by a bug in my code will be billed at my normal rate, $ZZZ per hour with a 1-hour minimum per incident."

Most clients are great, but few think through the economics of freelance software development. And some people are just greedy. The best thing I even learned about client pricing was to structure deals so that no matter what happened, I was ok with the outcome.
> If they were talented coders, they could've found less destructive ways to make money. But he decided to go the greedy route.

Let me guess: you are a US citizen, or anyway live in a country where developer positions abound. Well, not everyone is. Some people live in small towns where the cool programming positions are adapting invoice management software for small businesses.

Also this was before Freelancer.com, before code.org. And he was a boy, he couldn't just relocate. Also, before the App Store.

This is exactly the curiosity that people who enter the InfoSec world feel, coupled with real skills. Often too much skills and too little to do to start.

Then you stumble upon a IRC channel and a world of challenges opens in front of you.

By the way, he asked Valve to hire him. Maybe he just didn't find "less destructive ways to make money" yet.

Don't judge if people are oppressed (or better, repressed) if you have never been, please, either because at that age YOU had the occasions or guidance, or because you hadn't that curiosity or talent.
The constant eroding of the State's sovereignty and the consolidation of power into the Federal Government's hands make this somewhat more troubling in the future however. Especially as we move towards more pure democratic systems and away from representative republicism. See for instance the National Popular Vote Compact: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Interstat...

A similar compact for approving amendments could be an issue for instance.
Leanpub does offer GitHub integration, including private Github account access. I am using it right now.

And you can setup a commit hook to trigger the preview build automatically.

Given that common base, I am curious what the specific other difference are. Especially to justify paying for a private repo account.
I would argue that it's a political and economic problem that certain devices exist without the capability to support the latest HTML5/CSS3/JS standards. I worry that your idealism will serve to only upset users, who will undoubtedly blame you, not their ISPs. It would be wonderful if every device conformed to the RFC, but much like certain browsers don't behave to spec, certain implementations of many other internet technologies suffer the same problem.

Of course, I am a proponent of IPv6 deployment (I doubt you'll find many people who are not), but I can't agree with your assertion that IPv4 has no place on the internet, it's practically impossible to force a transition merely by ignoring the world around you and trudging on.
Sure, the number 80 may be rooted in a very old design decision, but that doesn't mean it's necessarily bad or suboptimal because of that.

More isn't better in this case. When text gets too wide, it becomes harder to move your gaze from end of one line to beginning of another.

Also, the best number is probably not a hard limit, but a guideline/average to aim for.
>>> Your second argument is a bit like saying, well we have to get nicotine from somewhere

No it does not. Human organism has ways of producing substances that work with the same receptors that respond to nicotine. Thus, there is no biological need to introduce nicotine to the organism. More correct analogy would be vitamines, proteins, minerals and other substances that we commonly call "food". If you want to give up food, it would be reasonable to ask, how you replace energetic and nutritional needs of the organism? Modern economy has energetic needs which need to be satisfied if you want to have modern economy. Either you go back to pre-industrial economy and subsistence on the constant brink of starvation, or you produce a lot of energy. There's no other way. The question is how you are going to produce it.

>>> natural gas is a more efficient and cleaner burning alternative that you didn't mention.

As carbon emissions are the problem being discussed, and burning gas produces carbon emissions, naturally I did not consider it as a true alternative with respect to producing energy while reducing carbon emissions.
Lumosity - http://www.lumosity.com/ - San Francisco, CA

We are looking for software engineers on the rails team and operations team (the team I'm on)!

Lumosity provides brain training games to improve the minds and lives of our 60 million users worldwide. Lumosity.com is one of the largest consumer rails apps and has a team of really smart engineers and product people building it.

If you're interested, please read the job descriptions and apply here:

Sr. Software Engineer (Rails): https://jobs.lever.co/lumosity/56dba397-a23d-43e6-b8cb-817be...

Sr. Ops Engineer (DevOps): https://jobs.lever.co/lumosity/a9f51eeb-d3fd-479c-9ecf-e9023...

Performance Engineer: https://jobs.lever.co/lumosity/771d2086-f508-42e8-8f8e-3938b...

We also have a bunch of positions open at https://jobs.lever.co/lumosity for engineers (iOS, Android, Flash) and others (UX, marketing, internationalization, PM). If you have any questions at all please email slieberman@lumoslabs.com and put "Hacker News" in the subject!
What if Ansible used XML for configuration management?
I suppose if the original post had been about chaos magic alone I wouldn't have chimed in to refer to it as religious speech. I would even suggest that there are more and more scientific authors showing up who are helping to bridge the gap between "chaos magic" concepts and hard science (see Rupert Sheldrake, Bruce Lipton, Michael Talbot, and others)

"I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness." – Max Planck. 1931.
Will serious companies actually post the money to an escrow? I dont have any experience with this directly, but cant imagine any company with say >100 employees would respond favorably to this request
Due to the overhead of configurability, FPGAs are something like 10x less area-efficient and power-efficient than ASICs.
That's insanity. Everyone expects bugs. Saying you'll fix bugs for free is saying your time isn't valuable.
You could clarify "bug fixes are free" by saying:

1. You offer support (problem analysis) for $X per hour.

2. If analysis reveals a bug in your software, you will fully refund the support cost and offer the fix for free.
The bracket they give is, as Retuters reports, is "as low as $175 billion or as high as $523 billion" but there is much more costs than specifically lung impact. Unfortunately, direct link from Greenpeace site to the actual study does not work, but I'll try to find it and see what they say about specific health impact.
I was the same. I saw the full title in the morning and thought it looked interesting enought to read later. When I came back the title had changed and I wouldn't have clicked through had I not seen the explanation in the original title.

Glad I did, too, because it's such a clever "gadget"!
True absolutely. But there's something more appealing to me about handing a drive across a counter, knowing it will be backed up in a few hours (assuming that is practical), and ready for me to be confirmed back home via my higher-download-speed broadband; rather than have the drive rattle across the country in a truck, sit in a mail room, and finally get processed X days/weeks later...
Sorry.

I did read your admonition a few days ago, and I should have apologized then.

I will be much more careful with the tone of my postings going forward.
>All of your requirements for a good PM mean that the
>PM needs to have the skills to be a developer as well.

I somewhat agree. The best PMs I've seen have had technical backgrounds, so a technical background seems necessary, but it is not sufficient. The best PMs have had a deep understanding of customer need, company/product direction, development feasibility. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7830892 said "president of the product" and I think that's nice. Given the invisibility of corporate "presidents", I'd suggest "CEO of the product" since you've got to have the ability to review the smallest issue while considering the long term effects.

Years ago, I was friends with the CEO of an hot CPU startup and I asked him what had most surprised him about his job. He was formerly the VP of a division of a public semiconductor company, so had serious experience. And still he said that he was astounded at the range of questions he got asked: VP of Finance raising some technical accounting issue; VP of Hardware knocking on his door to discuss process nodes and vendors; VP of Software looking for advice on ways to solve a complex problem; HR Director raising sexual harassment policies. Barring the sexual harassment policy, yeah, that sounds about like Product Management [and, yes, you will bump into "revenue recognition" while a PM].

EDIT:

... derp ... I missed this:

>only an engineer will have the technical foresight
>required to perform adequately

I think this was covered above, but I did want to address this particularly engineering-centric perspective. There are supremely bad engineers-turned-PMs because they think PM is Eng+[some vague management-y ring they should try to catch]. (There are also supremely bad marketers-turned-PMs... but we all know that...) Don't get lulled into thinking that you can be a good PM merely because you're an engineer. [You'll suck and be frustrated. And companies have huge problems with people doing jobs they shouldn't be doing, so be an awesome engineer/developer and you will be richly rewarded.]

The worst part of being a PM is that you won't be as skilled as your audience. You'll propose features, but you won't be as good at development as the developers who'll develop them, the salespeople who'll sell them, the marketers who'll market them. But you need to be good enough in any domain to call bullshit on any of them because everyone will be a passive-aggressive sand-bagger when they don't like your requests. [Once, as a PM, I proposed a feature and then, since I also had SVN access, built it in 3 hours. Was approached as I was building the feature. The Dir Eng was telling another PM the feature would take 3 days to build. Sand-baggers suck and developers sand-bag, too...]
This should be built into your hourly rate. An hourly rate needs to not just cover billable hours (aka time programming), but also bug fixes, customer support, etc.

This is the reason (among others, such as lack of benefits) that hourly rates as a consultant/freelancer are so much higher than that of an employee.

That being said, if you do fixes like this for free, they'll bug you (hey, it's free -- why not?) rather than spending half a second figuring it out themselves.
Something to consider: if you're billing by the hour, your clients aren't paying for a product, they're paying for you. Would you expect a company that hired you for a salary to dock your wages for time spent bug-fixing?

Make it entirely clear and transparent what you're working on, including time spent bugfixing, and if they're unhappy they can take their business elsewhere.

This of course puts great incentive on you to write high-quality code, because your failings in that area will be visible as bugs to the client.
I don't doubt there are bad places and bad factories that pollute. But the parent post made it sound as if literally everybody is affected by it, including people not living in SLC or near any coal plants. Which exactly what got me interested to see the data about how I could be affected (curiously, though not unexpectedly, it was received by some as if I was somehow defending coal burning by just asking to see the data that explain how harmful it is).
Because I doubt they had 5 million engaged, active users.
Thanks for the clarification, I was wondering about this!
50th percentile outcome is mediocrity, depression, booze.

This isn't gloating at their expense, because I was one. This is a fucked-up society and the "tallest nail" phenomenon ensures that most people like them eventually reach a stage of life where they don't do well, and it's harder to recover once that "golden child" image (untarnished success, monotonic progress) is lost and the world would rather invest in someone else.
Your analysis of EU Cap is off base. The price collapsed in the first phase for two reasons:

1. They set the cap far too high; and
2. They did not allow banking between phases.

They correct the first error in the second phase of the system. For the second, they still allocated too many permits but the economic collapse in Europe led to far lower output than had been expected, and for a time declining confidence in the future existence of the EU led to a collapse in confidence in the long-term existence of the policy, making "banking" the credits for future abatement less attractive.

Finally, the cap is a "backstop" mechanism, which exists to ensure that the marginal abatement takes place, with inframarginal abatement taking place through, e.g., the Renewables Directive and the Large Combustion Directive as well as very high fuel taxes among many other mechanisms the EU uses to drive renewable energy and consumption efficiency.

The cap worked perfectly from a qualitative perspective - there is a highly visible price on carbon with complete capital market instruments available (forwards, futures, options, etc.) to give long-term investors what they need to make investment decisions. It has been the quantitative parameters that have not been ratcheted high enough. You'd have the same issues with a tax.

Both forms of pricing carbon can work, but both need good design.
I agree that gas is more clean then the coal, but speaking in context of carbon emissions, does it really change that much? It's still burning hydrocarbons.
2π-ssed to do it now.
Hi Greg. Can you clarify—“remotely within US timezones” is located in US or working within US hours? Or literally: located within US timezones?