skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Yeah we do: Coca-cola <-- The product offers no value other than "brand". (Brand is advertising).

It tastes good. How is it different than any other form of pleasure that is sold, such as (non-artistic) video games, alcohol, any luxury good, fashion, etc.

EDIT: ... or World Cup soccer, on my TV now.
You should probably see a psychiatrist and/or psychologist instead of asking hackernews how to solve this problem.
Landau's Theoretical Minimum (2002)
"Raise your rates" is excellent advice and, OP, you may or may not understand that it's actually more about psychology.

Higher rates help filter out demanding clients and also make it "worth it" when you do get a demanding one. Higher rates helps focus you, with 20 cheap clients you'll feel like going bonkers. With one or two high-paying clients you'll feel focused.

With higher rates and therefore more focus you also provide better customer service during the day. That will help reduce the amount of off-hour communications (this is also a boundary thing that Patrick already mentioned, be firm). Clients that understand that they get what they pay for and are comfortable paying a higher rate usually let you do what they are paying you to do and only communicate on the set meetings over minutiae.
crypto101 says that because of how fast GPUs are at computing hashes, even using long per-user salt is now broken and you must use pbkdf2 or better yet, scrypt.
5 Common Server Setups For Your Web Application
What you say about IR35 is a bit misleading. The point of IR35 was to close a massive tax loophole where people who were in effect employees working for a single employee avoided national insurance payments by being working for their own company, and paying themselves most of their income via dividends, this avoiding NI.

This is no way affected only IT.

Some contracts ends up getting taxed higher if you run them via an intermediary company (because the company gets charged employers national insurance contributions), but this reflects the fact that the contracting company gets away without paying NI, and so a contractor can generally get away with demanding a higher hourly/daily fee even for long term contracts.

There may certainly be some people that get unfairly affected, but the situation prior to IR35 was also quite negative, in that some people could drastically cut their taxes just by spending a couple of hundred pounds setting up a company, and bill their employer and pay themselves dividends, instead of being a paid employee of the same company.
Reminds me of the sci-fi novel "Manna". It's worth a read: http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm.

From Wikipedia:

"Manna is meant to be a thought-provoking read or conceptual prototype rather than an entertaining novel (see exploratory engineering for more on such writing). The novel shows two possible outcomes of the 'robotic revolution' in the near future: one outcome is a dystopia based around US capitalism and the other is a utopia based upon a communal and technological society in Australia. Essentially, the two differ in that lower-class humans in the dystopic society have been left unmodified and are controlled by AI "managers" to the point of slavery, while humans in the utopian society more directly and efficiently participate in the management of the society as a whole and most or all willingly accept implanted AI aids."
Ask HN: Can you provide a Roadmap+Tools for a Beginner?
How would you learn programming if you were to start now?There are so many tutorials these days, that i find myself overwhelmed by it.I started with HTML and CSS but each tutorial/website/course is offering a different view/different style of coding/different tools. How do I know which is the best way?

Can Professional Developers offer some advice on this eternal topic?Like, if you were to start now, how would you do it and what would you use?An example would be:

Learn : A B C first. Then go X Y Z.

Use: Tutorials/Websites X Y Z + Books 1 2 3.

Tools To use/Using: X Y Z.

My goal is to get enough knowledge in the next months to build demo/basic websites.

Also if anyone has 10 min to talk to me about this on gmail I would really appreciate it. Thank you.

Josh
You will be surprised how no one will care when you quit. Not that they don't care about you, but in a week it will be like you were never there.

Just imagine someone else in the team leaving and see what are the steps you will take to replace them. It will be easy to move on
I see cpan in 4th postion, but I'm not sure I see the problem?

Net::LDAP is a perl module too, one of the things it does is search, so 3/4 of the words are not just matched literally, but are the right kind of net (not fishing or stockings), the right kind of ldap , the right kind of search.

You claim there is nothing related to ruby on that page, yet how many times must people have linked to both those languages from a webpage, perhaps alongside other related terms like python?

Its not perfect, and it's not magic, but is that really the level we expect from Google, so much so that we're in a huff if we have to scroll past one easily discounted search result?
Someone always mentions Marshall Brain's short story "Manna" on such threads but everyday it seems ever more prescient and relevant. I wonder how he saw it all coming.
Then don't leave. If something is broken, fix it. Don't throw it away.
One place where marketers have gotten around this quite adeptly is Windows PCs and laptops.

Try searching for reviews on a laptop you find at Best Buy. There are none. The model number is 10+ random characters and completely meaningless. Comparison shopping between laptops on the basis of reviews is impossible. Consequently, they have you buying on 1) brand and 2) specs, which is right where they want you, and completely ignoring things like build quality and MTBF of parts which might be revealed by long-term reviews.

This is one of the (many) refreshing things about Apple. Macbook Pro is Macbook Pro until the next refresh.
How is basic problem solving a test for rationality? Artists and serial killers and the mentally ill can learn to count.
Yeah. What I said works for corporations. Start-ups tend to be as creative with ranks as with everything else.
Early in my career I worked in an environment where we were micromanaged and closely monitored for everything (arrival time, breaks, time on non-intranet sites, conversation with customers length, etc). It was hell on earth and I still have occasional Vietnam-style flashbacks from it. It only made me more productive in finding a new job.
Isn't it a way to prevent eBay's competition to show ads on 'eBay' keyword?
For most of the iPod's lifespan it was not the best product on the market, it was just the best marketed.

I wouldn't say it was just better marketed, although that is true. It was also better designed, both in its hardware and software. An iPod in your hands felt and looked great and the scroll wheel made it intuitive to use. Anyone could easily pick it up and check out what you had in your library.

Before I had one, I had an iRiver iHP-120[0], which had a plethora of features an iPod didn't have. But it was ridiculously hard to use if you didn't know what you were doing.

[0] http://edmundstarbanks.files.wordpress.com/2013/04/iriverihp...
This sounds like you have several bugs in your processes. That's likely normal as you grow, and luckily you have a built-in alarm to beep that now it is time to fix them, it is no more premature optimization. Congratulations for hitting that point, don't kill yourself or quit yet, fix the problem.

You get a text every 5 seconds? Where is it coming from? Clients? Introduce an issue tracking system, or some kind of a queue, so that you can handle those problems asynchronously.

Are those messages immediate bug fix requests? Fixing bugs should eliminate them over time. If they are not, you are not doing it right. Introduce test driven development, rewrite code. Often, most of the bugs are contained in few modules of a program. Localize and rewrite (not fix) them. (Idea source: Code Complete)

Are your colleagues pinging you for approval all the time? Introduce decision making guidelines. Possibly with some examples how they were applied in the past.

Clients asking the same questions repeatedly? Create a FAQ or some Help. I made a policy for myself once to always just answer client requests with links to the Help. If I could find answers in the Help, I linked them, otherwise I added them to the Help first. This teaches clients to first check the Help.
One client was asking the same questions all them time. I made that client a custom private help page with a link collection - it helped. Another I printed a paper he could glue over his monitor on the wall because he couldn't find anything on his computer.

For all your other issues: identify what bothers you; keep asking why it is happening and how you could fix it. Fix one problem at a time so it won't recur. You will have loads of free time really soon.

That said, you might as well consider raising your prices as others noted if your current margins can't justify the effort needed to deliver. Otherwise, you just created some new jobs that pay worse than the alternatives. In that case, everyone is loosing and closing your company would make everyone better off. But most likely you could add processes to handle things better. Or cut back on 20% of the features that require most of your time, but deliver least of the value.

Also, you should talk about the problems with your colleagues. You are better off solving them together because it starts to build a culture of solving these problems.

Good luck.
They are a means to an end, absolutely. I wasn't try to imply that the constitution recognized Intellectual Property as a kind of property that people have some kind of inherent right to. In fact, I believe the opposite, but realize I may have implied that's what I believe, and that's what these responses are reacting to.

However, it's that end that's being examined here, not the means. My point was that by granting a limited-time monopoly on an invention, Congress can advance the state of "Science and useful Arts". It can be argued what is meant by "promote". As I noted, the historical context makes it pretty clear that it's meant as an incentive to invent, not necessarily public documentation of inventions, which really came later. This is exactly what is said in the article: "The idea behind patents is to create a financial incentive to promote innovation: patents ensure that the inventor of a new idea can get compensated for it, rather than seeing her idea immediately ripped off by copycats".

Regardless, what absolutely is missing from that clause in the constitution is any requirement at all that there be a public disclosure of the invention. That's what I was saying the constitution was clear on. Any assertion of public disclosure being the purpose is an interpolation, because the constitution has absolutely no requirement that that take place. All patents could be secretly filed away, for all it cares.
That's a fair point, but I meant advertising as one of the tools of marketing (like datastructures are one of the tools of computer science). Sorry I was not clear.

Thus in my last sentence I was generalizing to say that marketing, even formal marketing analysis with statistics and A/B models, is still a mixture of heuristics, data, and superstition. And its practitioners

Since it's a kind of social science, I say that in contrast to fields like economics and psychology which also have plenty of charlatans but whose major practitioners are well aware of, and discuss, the epistemological flaws that still remain in the foundations of the fields. By comparison most marketing "theoreticians" remind me, at best, of alchemists.

There's no question that marketing is crucial to any successful business. But we have to realize that it's typically simply just gut judgement.
reddit is home to many of the worst examples of what I'm talking about. As is HN at times.
I have been in the industry for around 11 years now. Seems that I have already reached the top of the payscale where I am (Spain).

I think there are companies out there that will pay more than what I am on, but trying to differentiate myself is becoming a problem. I don't have experience in NoSQL / big data / whatever buzzword, because I choose the right tool for the job, not the latest fad. Hell I even got an email from a company looking for "big data" developers. I asked what size there data was, as usually I see a relation database being better suited to most problems. No reply after that.
When citing the Monroe doctrine, people tend to forget the Spanish-American war, which was its most significant outcome.

It's also interesting to wonder how the Chinese would respond if Taiwan started manufacturing land further south. I can't imagine it'd go over well.
I'm curious to know what you think makes Wolfram Language (which is the language used in the desktop program Mathematica) hopeless for large scale structured programming.
> "If we go out to Westminster to go to Costco to buy sodas for employees in the office in Denver, we're on the hook to pay the difference between the sales tax in Westminster and the sales tax in Denver," said Stefan Ramsbott, 303 Software's co-founder.

Is this supposed to be a joke?! Seriously, what kind of bullsh.t is this?

I accept having to pay VAT and customs when importing stuff from another country, but from another city in the same country?

Sorry, but the way I see this is as a perfect thing to (ab)use as a government if you want to crack down on someone... don't enforce it, only when doing a "random tax compliance audit"...
>I can't ditch my clients, my business partners, my friends, my employees. I don't know how to get out. I so furiously pitched my friends to start this company, I brought them ALL into this. I hired everyone, I convinced them to jump ship from their jobs and work with me. If I bail now, every word I said, anything I did, will mean nothing.

I'm in a similar position myself. I don't think this should be a factor in your decision making. They're adults and they made a choice.

You may feel like you let them down, but as I said they're adults, they made a choice. It even sounds like they wont lose their jobs if you quit, and if they're no longer interested in working there without you, they should have time to find other positions. Even if that wasn't the case, it shouldn't be a factor for you.

They may hate you, but they'll get over it.

So, if you need to quit for your mental well being, do it. If you feel it's worth trying other things first, go for it, but there's nothing to be ashamed for here.
I am a firm believer of the idea that everyone's got a choice. It's the living with the consequences bit that's problematic.

Usually what people mean when they say "I don't have a choice" is actually "The probability and cost of catastrophic failure are too high to be worth it".
No one assumed that, but it is a good distillation of what our legal system bases its notion of patents on. Common law is often used as the basis for precedent in the US, but usually not in cases when the constitution gives explicit goals and the means to achieve those goals, as it did with patents and copyright.
It is not ignored, because eBay has some bad adverts. It did attract significant attention more than a year ago (the study was conducted in 2012, and media reported on it in early 2013).

"eBay has no idea if online ads work" would be a better title. Or "eBay can't get their online ads to work".

If you looked at eBay's search advertisements in the last years you probably have seen very ridiculous ones, like:

Love.

Buy it cheap on eBay
Low Prices. New and used.

This is a significant waste of money, and seems endemic at eBay, not a rare occasion. Though it is too easy to point at this and discard the entire study, it is a relevant prior.

As a control they take MSDN/Yahoo vs. Google. The control should be a different advertiser, not a different advertisement network.

In the paper they mention removing the term "eBay Shoes" from their keywords, because they rank organically for that. They should have never added it, because it is a bad keyword for them. They should advertise on the brand name shoes they are selling. This ties back to the bad adverts by eBay: Fixing your mistakes and seeing change, is different from performing a controlled experiments on a healthy advertiser.

They muse about "the types of consumer that may already be informed about the advertiser’s product". This adds a few problems: those customers may have been informed through the very advertisements they now claim don't work. Suddenly shutting down advertisements does not negate the effects of running advertisements years before that. The paper does not investigate the effect that ads have on brand recognition and brand trust. Usability tests show people clicking on advertisements first, because then they expect quality and a simple commercially interesting proposition.

I do think the problem they are describing "some customers may be so aware of a brand, that advertising to them becomes worthless" is valid. Maybe ad networks could help here and implement a form of "demarketing" next to their "remarketing" options: Once a user has enough knowledge of the brand, stop advertising. But a better (and currently available) method could be to apply remarketing and give these power users tailored advertisements. An example could be a buyer's program, promoting a new product from a well-purchased brand, or a referral bonus. To continue offering them advertisements like "eBay shoes" does not make much sense.
It seems like the problems expressed by you and the parent comments really come down to the unsuitability of open plan offices for development work that seem to have become popular in many startup environments. Giving people access to offices with doors that close would elimanate an entire class of issues (and admittedly introduce some more, but I couldn't see anything being more destructive than continuous streams of interruptions)
What are the advantages of using Torch7 over Julia?
Fun hacks by tinkernutYouTube
The Case for the Stylus
Physics, Topology, Logic and Computation: A Rosetta Stone (2009)
Securing the Sinatra Micro-Framework
"Progress" is also new inventions. There is no requirement for public disclosure anywhere in that clause. As I said, that came later.
MacroMode Android Photo Sharing App Updated
Chromecast competitor from Firefox
>the nature of JS means libraries move slower than other languages.

prior to node and npm maybe. The JS npm ecosystem is actually growing faster than any other language's module/library system, it's on the cusp of becoming #1 in the world. http://modulecounts.com/
This is technically true for MOST taxes in the USA. Generally municipalities have reciprocal agreements with each other, but when tax is fixed at a state or municipality level, you generally are supposed to file proof of tax payment in the location of purchase, and that is then generally applied as a credit against any tax burden imposed on the place of use. A perfect example is income tax in the US if you work in one state, but reside in another.

It's inefficient, but how else would a local tax scheme be at all enforceable?
Julia doesn't yet have strong support for running stuff on GPUs.
The traffic killed the server - I'm rebuilding it now with decent RAM, back in 20 minutes..
> Servers, knowing they were being monitored, pushed customers to have that dessert or a second beer

Great example of something good for the restaurant owner being bad for the visitors and potentially unsafer for other drivers.

Now I want to write software that offloads some aspect of quality-of-life into making restaurant managers' lives unhealthier and riskier.

Also a great example of feature creep: Adveritsed as "Restaurant Guard," reducing theft, it made people have to perform better b/c they were being watched. Good thing we have choices in life still. Honey, where are my gardening gloves!
About once a year, sometimes less. The constant shifting of tech stacks, architecture, domain, and also that he didn't have to maintain anything long term meant he was constantly at junior level.
The additional stuff pretty much falls into categories of:

Already covered by my policies.

Don't believe it.

All big companies have some insanities; if that bothered me I'd be living off the grid.

Don't think it's a problem.

And RMS and I have very different political views ... and a lot of his are remarkably uninformed (disclaimer: I knew him rather well in the early '80s, e.g. we were roommates when he started the GNU Project).

This covers the whole Political Harm section, I'm "right wing" myself, so it's not axiomatic I'd mind ALEC's lobbying, the Left's campaign against "voter suppression" is a existentially dangerous campaign for more voter fraud, and Stand You Ground laws have nothing to do with any sort of "Shoot First" policy. Heck, I'm not sure I've even seen that insane phrase before, but the gun-grabbers are ever inventive in their total dishonesty. (RMS is also one of the last people in the world you should be paying attention to when it comes to the self-defense area, it's a miracle he's still alive.)

Note, there's a relevant point in going into details below; this is an area of personal expertise going back to the early '70s:

Stand Your Ground is shorthand/American value invoking propaganda wording simply for having no duty to retreat, nothing more or less, although I suppose if you're a rabbit it's antithetical. It's extremely valuable against abusive prosecutors who insist in the calmness of a courtroom there was some plausible way for you to retreat:

In two Massachusetts cases I'm familiar with, convicting when retreat wasn't really possible, or would have required abandoning a child to the tender mercies of a home intruder. As of late, it's been noted that more blacks have benefited from Florida's Stand Your Ground law than whites....

The major point I'm trying to make is that RMS's sophistication about things outside the domains where he's good, the ones relevant to me limited to computer stuff, is very poor, sometimes to the point of implicitly suicidal, and I have nothing to gain from reading them, as I have just reconfirmed.

But e.g. when he coins a new relevant meme, like Digital Restrictions Management, I do pay attention.
USA is a big country, and sales tax is not federally administered.

This isn't an import tax, this is an anti-evasion provision so some city elsewhere can't unilaterally undermine this city's tax policy.

The USA recognizes state law as a defends against Federal tyranny.
Please Relax.

Don't leave. Write down your problems, and logically develop solutions to work on solving each of them. It sounds like you're in charge of your company. If so, change things up so where y'all can work together to deliver a successful product without killing each-other. If there is too much work, take on less, and plan better.

If anxiety is an issue, there are many anti-anxiety drugs that you can use to help control it (see /r/nootropics and/or a psychiatrist). Anxiety issues can affect your perception in many ways, and they're often invisible, which is what makes things seem so difficult.

Also, you may need to sit down and figure out exactly what you want out of life, then align the rest of your goals and plans with that. Getting a good life balance can be tremendously helpful in these situations.
rebeccapurple - #663399
> I get that all these things resonate deeply with hackers. But Rush Limbaugh's broadcasts resonate deeply with his audience, too.

I don't see how you should be casting stones considering the rhetorical device you're employing right here.

He's super libertarian, for sure, and he writes about technology policy, so what did you expect? There is still legitimate content here, these are not techcrunch articles, and dismissing it like this is just weak.
What isn't difficult to execute on a large team or in a long-running base with developer turn over?