skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have been doing consulting for years now, and this is my policy.

Invoices unpaid for more than 30 days, get a 10% late fee. Late for more than 60 days, no more work of any kind untill all invoices are paid.i work to make a living and expecting prompt payment is reasonable, not a favor

After last invoice paid, 30 days of free bug fixes. After that, the client had enoug time to report any problems, so anything else is goes into maintenaince fee.

If a potential client does not agree with this terms, then it will be a client that is more expensive than what i can afford, so i reject the work and move on. Specially the manipulative ones that try to guilt trip into fixing for free whatever they want, i don't need those.

So te question is, are you into freelancing to make money or to do favors?
a single inconsistency in a formal logical system means you can prove anything. if both A and !A are true, then you can prove anything you wish via contradiction.

assume !B.

A & !A - which is a contradiction.

therefore, our assumption was wrong, and thus B is true.

this means a single contradiction in a legal system renders the whole thing meaningless. everything becomes both legal and illegal at the same time.

a single semicolon can break an entire program because the program _must_ be consistent. that doesn't happen in the law because you have a judge who, at some point, will get pissed off at you. it doesn't matter if two conflicting rules - one dealing with the importing of flowers, and the other dealing with navigating riverways - are in conflict with each other. the judge isn't going to accept that as an argument for why you should be allowed to jaywalk - even if a technically correct interpretation of the law would say you should.

all of this is to say that the claim 'we have a nation of laws, not a nation of men' is entirely fatuous. it's just not true. we have a nation of men interpreting rules that are in a very convoluted language, designed to be 'unambiguous' - and yet still vague enough for an education person to find and exploit this ambiguity.

anyone reasonable would agree with me. if you disagree, you probably think 'reasonable cause' is reasonably clear.
PacketZoom

packetzoom.com

Burlingame, CA

(I forgot one role, and couldn't edit so reposting with the additional role)

PacketZoom provides mobile speed as a service to app developers and we want your talents, passion and personality on the team to help build our pre-IPO, SaaS model company. Our headquarters is located in Burlingame, California, a couple of blocks from Caltrain.

We’re a technology company first, solving hard problems that others think are impossible.

We’re looking for INTERNS, as well as FULL TIME people who want to shape the company technology and culture.
H1B Transfer ok for the right candidate. TN ok.
Roles

- Sales Engineer - looking for someone who has been an app developer and wants to make the transition to the BD side

- Developer Evangelist - know how to code, and get smart developers to try us out

- P/T Office Manager - Help us stay organized as we grow and scale the team

- Business Development / Marketing Specialist - build our customer pipeline and help define our go to market tactics

- Sales Engineer (Intern)- work with app developers to get our SDK integrated

- Business Development (Intern) - Generate leads and close deals with strategically important customers

contact john at packetzoom.com
Leanpub Github integration instructions are @ http://blog.leanpub.com/2014/04/github-integration.html

They are very awkward instructions. I have yet to use it, so I can't comment on the quality of it. Arturo pushes a build and a diff for each PR(attaches to the link on the orange/red/green dots). This is a start of Arturo and I would love it to be Open Source and Developer friendly, focusing more on the Books + Code aspect.
Not so. Renaissance people (there are a few, even today) tend to end up underemployed. If you want to be a "business multimillionaire", you go the opposite way. You focus, you narrow yourself, but you have to focus on something that can actually make you money (i.e. not medieval history).

Why are most of the true Renaissance people underemployed, obscure, and financially mediocre? It's because the only thing that can tell a polymath from a dabbler is time.
It never will be. Tennis tournaments take place on private property and you agree to certain terms that ban you from "transmitting match data" by purchasing a ticket and attending. The tournament can throw anyone out that they please at their discretion.
Iotum Inc., Los Angeles, CA - Full Time and Toronto, ON - Full Time http://iotum.com

We are seeking Junior and Senior Developers for full time employment who are available to commence work within the next month in our Toronto or Los Angeles office. Capability is more important than formal school training; we are willing to expand the skill set of the right candidate.

Our distributed development team is self managed and uses components of agile, scrum, and XP practices to build products in a fast paced, yet casual work environment.

You will be working closely with team leads designing and implementing features for our web and mobile based WebRTC communications suite, focusing on dynamic and responsive interfaces.

Hard Skills:

- Proficient in at least one scripting language such as Ruby, Python, or Javascript
- Knowledge and experience with object oriented design (OOP)
- Knowledge of best practices and principles for web applications
- Experience with HTML, CSS, jQuery, AngularJS
- Experience developing in Linux environments
- Mobile application development (e.g. Android, iPhone, Blackberry) an asset
- Knowledge of IP networking, and socket level programming an asset
- WebRTC, SIP, and telephony knowledge an asset

Soft Skills:

- Must be able to work within a team and independently
- Excellent communication skills (written and oral)
- Comfortable with new, difficult, and challenging work
- Trustworthy
- Creative

We offer competitive wages and great benefit packages. You must be entitled to work in Canada or the United States. Only candidates that meet the above qualifications will be contacted for interview.

About the Company:

iotum is an international company with roots in VoIP, telecom switch development, and innovative voice and mobile services. Today, we provide several teleconferencing platforms and collaboration services to millions of users worldwide, and we are working on the next generation of virtual services to make it easier to collaborate and converse around the world.

Apply at: jobs@iotum.com, and include 'Hacker News' in the subject.
Very little of our evolutionary history occurred with easy access to antibiotics, so it seems extremely far-fetched (bordering on ridiculous) that it would somehow be "healthier" from a biological perspective.

Oh wait.

That doesn't sound right at all does it?
Private Group Makes Contact with 36-Year-Old NASA Spacecraft
"Working within US hours" is what matters to us. (Being in US timezones is probably the easiest way to achieve that, but if you want to work US hours within your local timezone we could probably make do.)
I am not an expert on the topic, but nobody seems to have mentioned RAID-Z. https://blogs.oracle.com/bonwick/entry/raid_z
Can anyone comment on this?
See edits/corrections. The breakdown starts on page 91. The effects of air pollution on lungs is discussed on page 85. The breakdown pegs the 'best' estimate for health costs from air pollution at $187 billion per year.

Interestingly, the impact on Appalachia, $75 billion per year, is substantially more than the GDP of West Virginia ($57 billion per year). The economic return of coal mining in Appalachia is very probably net negative.
Reactty – (Node.js) a reactive templating solution for TTY environments
I honestly think you should look at the database just like any other piece of your code, you cannot just replace GTK with WX Widgets and except there to be no migration work. And most of these differences between databases have nothing to do with SQL, but rather databases not implementing it correctly for legacy reasons.

I would not expect a new database query language or NoSQL databases to do this better.
You may be able to use sips instead of imagemagick.
You're right. Maybe something wrong in Wordpress then, it's supposed to redirect you. We killed that page. I'll open a ticket.
It's not so much that it "has to be like that", in that your merging two different roles, without finishing your thought. Your arguing for good project management, and practicing good project management, while telling yourself + others that it's "no project management."

There is no such thing as "no PM". Such a concept can't exist (for the same reason that "no developers" can't exist). There's actual work there, that someone has to do, or nothing gets built.

Now, it's totally fine if you say "I think it's best if all of our team members spend 75% of their time as developers, and 25% of their time as project managers". That's what you've just described above, and (in my opinion) there's nothing inherently wrong with that.

But your misleading yourself if you claim "PM's aren't needed because Agile", or "PM's aren't needed because the one's I've met 'silo' us off". All you've done is shift the PM burden from a specific person, to some/all of your developers. Your developers are now actually "part-time developers, part-time PM's"

There's also some weird assumptions that your making around PM's. PM's do not have to silo developers away from the client (and good ones don't). PM's do not have to estimate for devs (good ones always use team estimates).

I've seen developers write buggy code, or brittle tests. But I would never say "developers aren't needed". You've clearly encountered bad PM's, and that's very unfortunate. But that doesn't mean "PM isn't needed", and as you yourself just described, you already have to pick up that work on your own since you lack one on your team.
Haha! I'm sure he does.
Because society as a whole benefits more from the best being their best than from the average being average.
The HL2 team rewrote major portions of the Source Engine in response to the hack.
I have a question: if bug fixes shouldn't be free, then why are clients able to take freelancers to court under lost revenue due to "errors and omissions"? I used to think that bugs could/should be billed until I had to deal with a horrible client that threatened litigation under E&O and breach of contract. Going to court would put me into debt, so I really felt screwed into working for free.

Super bitter about it and thinking about giving up on self-employment altogether because of that guy.
The IT Meta-Skill
As the PhD candidate in question, I would have to agree that it is rambling - but I hope you wait to read my actual dissertation before judging my scholarly output as a whole!

I should also add that I have no connection to the O.T.O. or any similar group (and speaking frankly, I find all such contemporary occult groups to be faintly silly). But I do think their intellectual genealogy is super interesting.
Mate, you are too caught-up in the big picture. The devil is in the details. You seem to be consumed about the big picture yet may be unwilling to do the necessary daily work to make it happen.
Making something happen is always a case of rolling up your sleeves and getting your hands dirty. That's how dreams are made. The daily grind is 90% of the time boring dull work that just needs to be done and you have to be willing to slog-it-out.

I am coding a new web-service and excited about the prospects yet I know to make it happen I have to spend the months debugging, tweaking the UI, writing documentation, load testing, etc. In other words, all the shit work.

Until you understand that 99% of any dream is doing the shit work, you will never reach that dream.
Am I the only one who notices that for web framework, website is horrendous. The problem with these experiments, in my humble view is that they are disconnected from medium in which it is suppose to work.
The Denver chapter of the Colorado Mountain Club used to (and may still) have "practice climbs": all climbers were belayed from the top of the pitch. A fellow I met at one of these said that he considered that he hadn't learned anything if he didn't fall three times in the course of the day. I would probably never have been a good rock climber in any case; but had I understood and embraced that approach, I might have been a better bad one.
Personally I think having one person who's responsible for product is essential. Someone needs to find out what features really matter, how to prioritize them, and make important decisions like when to kill features.

I work for a very early stage startup. One of the reasons why we are having such a hard time finding product market fit is that there is no one person in charge of product. We all just do what we feel is important and 50% of the time it's useless, gets scrapped, or wasn't thought out well enough.

We need someone who eats and shits the product 24/7 and is responsible for making good or bad decisions.
Alabama, Remote-friendly (obviously), Part-time/contract (not looking specifically for full-time but willing to entertain competitive offers)

Comfortable Stack:

- Backend: Node.js (JavaScript/CoffeeScript), Go, Ruby (on/off Rails), Clojure

- Databases: PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB, Redis, Riak

- DevOps: Ansible

- Front-End: Flight, React.js, Ractive.js, SCSS, LESS, Foundation, Bootstrap

Website: http://duncanmsmith.com

Contact: hello@duncanmsmith.com
I've only read the abstract. I feel no need to read the entire 37 page paper. This topic might be interesting to a philosopher, but I don't think it has any practical significance.

We had a flurry of amendments to the US constitution back in the 1960s. Since then, in 1971 we gave 18 year olds the right to vote. There was only one other amendment since then, in 1992, and it was "housekeeping". It delayed salary changes for legislators until after the next election.

I'm old enough to remember the contentious proposed Equal Rights Amendment. [1] It kicked around for years in the 1970s but was never ratified.

Since then, nothing. And, given the political climate in the USA (the "red state" vs "blue state" dichotomy) it's unlikely that any new amendment would pass anytime soon, unless it was necessary to solve a very very critical problem. It's hard to believe that an amendment to change Article V would ever pass both houses of Congress then get ratified by 38 states.

Not. Gonna. Happen.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal_Rights_Amendment
Product Management is its own thing. It doesn't really belong under either of those. Keeping in mind that org charts influence thinking - rightly or wrongly - you'd be putting Product Management in a no-win situation when they're meant to act as intermediaries between engineering and sales.

I'm just joined a startup where Product is its own arm. We sync with Sales and Engineering, but we push products based on smart decisions. It wasn't always that way, from what I hear, and it was a slog to get there, but so far from what I've experienced, it's been well worth it. There's still some work to do, but it's vastly different from orgs I've been in before, where Product fell under something else and had little clout to do what needed to be done.
Sift Science - San Francisco, CA. Full-time.
Sift Science (http://siftscience.com) uses large-scale machine learning to fight online fraud. It's a problem that cost U.S. merchants > $10B last year, and 70% of it is organized crime. Attacks have rapidly evolved in breadth and depth, but current rule-based systems don't scale. We're looking for engineers of all flavors -- distributed systems, web development, data visualization, and of course, machine learning. We're a tight-knit team that likes board games, yummy food, and solving challenging technical problems. Check out https://siftscience.com/jobs We're also looking for account managers, integration engineers, and sales folks. Ping us at jobs+hn@siftscience.com or feel free to e-mail me directly at evie@siftscience.com :)
> My guess is being around 30% smarter than average is the sweet spot.

As phrased, this is completely meaningless. What are you thinking of here? You think people are best off at the 80th percentile?
ISEE-3 Reboot Project Update: BULLSEYE and More
I agree that promising any bug fix for free is silly and not necessary. If you want to demonstrate good will, you can at your own discretion not charge them for your moronic bugs, the ones where you go "oh fuck this is embarrassing" when you figure it out. So their expectation will be set at paying for your work hourly, but once in a while you will waive the fee. I think people will appreciate it more.
I think this is the case in a FB, What's App, or Tinder startup. But if you are in an advanced field like Medical, Law, etc. Then you need Product people with specializations to discuss with development and refine requirements.
Levitation just part of the power of pushy light
Answers.com - Mountain View, CA - Hiring Android Developers

We are looking for Android devs to help work on our native Android app (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.answers.an...)

You:

-Good problem solving skills

-Strong CS fundamentals

-1+ year(s) experience in Java

-Interested in consumer facing apps

-Passionate about Android

-Ideally you have published at least one app to the Play Store

Us:

-Top 10 U.S. site

-Chance to work on an app that is in early growth stage

-Young and fast growing company

Full description can be found here: http://wiki.answers.com/page/careers

Interested? email android { at } answers.com
> I reject the argument that Valve had it coming since they didn't take the time to secure their network beforehand.

I think the suggestion was that the time taken to secure their networks shouldn't be counted as "damages", just something that needed to be done regardless.
My first ever client did that to me, many years ago. Fun aspects of that engagement included:

- I ignored a great big warning sign up-front ("our previous developer abandoned the project, refusing to work with us again")

- I offered fixed-price (a horrible mistake for a variety of reasons, including that it was explicitly a 'learning project' for all of us)

- I didn't mitigate scope creep ("I know we said we'd hire a designer, but can you style the UI as well?")

- when we ran into obvious deadline and quality issues, I should have fixed it by re-evaluating things with the client; instead, I tried to "work harder"

- finally, when everything went south and the client refused to pay (and in fact demanded their deposit back!) I didn't take them to court for the money they owed me

All in all it was a horrible engagement for everyone involved, but a great learning experience for me at least. I hope the clients (quite reasonable people I think, just as domain-clueless as I was at the time) learned from it too.

Don't give up though. I continued contracting, and used those experiences to build a simple set of practices that made future engagements a lot more pleasant and productive for everyone involved. One of these is to be super-explicit up-front about how bugs are tracked, resolved and billed.

Something to consider: as a software professional, part of your job is to help your clients learn how to engage software professionals. Many clients are either new to the field, try to bring odd expectations from other fields into it, or have been burned by bad engagements in the past and are 100% in CYA mode. Help them get past that :)
I would personally rather see a carbon tax; it'd be simpler. But I see three big differences with cap and trade that make it more practical.

One is that a cap-and-trade program acknowledges the status quo. There are a lot of businesses that are currently emitting CO2, and saying, "Surprise! Big tax for you!" will generate enormous political resistance. If I understand cap-and-trade programs rightly, we'd start out by giving those businesses the right to keep emitting, but let them sell the right if they aren't using it. Suddenly they have choices, turning the response from, "Rawr! Tax bad!" to "Hm, can I get a competitive advantage from this?"

The second is that in cap-and-trade, the right price for carbon flows not from government fiat, but from market outcomes. What's the right level for a carbon tax to drive the right amount of reduction 15 years out? Hard to say. Cap and trade lets us fix what we care about, the reductions, and then lets market mechanisms work out how to do that most economically.

The third comes from the combination of the first two. The US right is fervently anti-tax, and has been for decades. They are, however, pro-market, at least nominally. Plus, Wall Street loves anything market-like, as it gives them an opportunity to make a buck. A carbon tax will be fought hard by the people facing it before, during, and after. But markets mean winners and losers, and the opportunity for a lot of capitalist reindeer games.
Been there. At one point we made a pretty spiffy network appliance that included free support. (On the theory that it was also rock solid, so there wouldn't be any.) Cisco would charge you out the nose for support. We got a lot of experience helping a multibillion dollar customer out with their Cisco routers once they figured out that if part of their network was so broken even our devices wouldn't perform well, we would come in and support them.
> 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.

No, they're more often seen as an oppressing, politically-powerful minority that wants to do that. Which, while somewhat imprecise (Evangelicals/Fundamentalists and those seeking to impose conservative policies either based on religious motivation or by leveraging others' religious identity aren't identical groups, though there's significant overlap), isn't outdated in any sense.

> twith 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.

That's kind of silly, for one thing because it presumes that every Christian who isn't a "true believer" in one of two closely-related subsets of Protestantism is only "loosely associated" with a Christian Church.
Tell that to Newton. There is a fine line separating the various realms of the unknown and inventors are merely the most successful of the insane as they have made flesh of their delusions.
ZFS has been around a bit longer than Btrfs, which the ZFS proponents claim has allowed for it to become more stable. Watching the commit logs of Illumos (the open-source derivative of Solaris) most commits seem to be related to adding features or reducing IO latency variance. Problems with lost data are few and far between.

As an appeal to authority, a number of companies currently trust[1] their data to ZFS, Joyent probably being the most well know of them. I store my personal data[2] on ZFS, though my needs are modest.

[1]: http://open-zfs.org/wiki/Companies
[2]: http://www.awise.us/2013/03/10/smartos-home-server.html