skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've been an oDesk freelancer for the last few months so I'll explain what appeals to me about a client / job. My hourly rate makes me an outlier on the site however, so this is less applicable if you're after cheap and good.

The easiest way to find good developers is have them come to you, and the best to way do that is to have a good job ad.

* Tag the ad with the appropriate tech

* Add a high level description of what the job is. Not just technically, but what is being made too. Also, whether it's as part of a team or completely autonomous.

* Include links, to a company website if you are one, or to your own website / twitter / github / etc if you have them.

* Post hourly jobs only. Fixed price jobs may be appropriate sometimes, but only if they're fully specced out to avoid scope creep.

* oDesk allows you to specify the experience level you want (Entry Level - $, Intermediate - $$, Expert - $$$), treat this more as how much you're willing to pay rather than the real experience level. Ideally, they should correlate, but they often don't.

Tagging the ad with the tech is important, I have a filtered view on the job feed to remove all that isn't relevant to me. I see only ~10-15 new jobs per week and may apply for one or two of them. If your ad is tagged and it's something that I'm interested in then I'll see it.

Next, filtering out the less good / less interested freelancers by making the job application process a little more difficult. Many freelancers spam out applications without even reading the ad contents, you want to exclude them.

* I've seen some ads that ask freelancers to include a certain word in their application so the client can filter based on that.

* Even better (IMO), and the best way to find good hires, is to include a couple of your own questions in the application. oDesk allows you to set these in addition or instead of the standard cover letter approach. It will filter out a lot of freelancers that are solely spamming out applications and don't have time for anything that doesn't fit the standard template. Those that get through, you can filter them on their answers.

Once you have a few freelancers that you're considering hiring, send them a bit of extra information on the job, maybe discuss it a little, set up a Skype meeting. Don't go overboard here, it should be a short-ish process, not a free consultation.

Then, hire someone. If it doesn't work out, we're easy to fire.

--

An additional note on the job ad (from experience), be honest in it about rates etc. Don't tick the "expert" box if you're looking for someone at $cheap/hr. If you're a startup that's looking to pay in equity that state that up front instead of after going through all of the above.
Sure, but libertarian socialists (mostly European) have the same annoyance with US libertarians over the term "libertarian". Also, like Baptists, ten US libertarians and free-market anarchists in a room can easily produce a dozen heartfelt and mutually exclusive opinions on a single topic.
> I find it a bit odd they crashed one because the pilot didn't realize it was upside down, I would expect there would be some intelligence to the avionics, like - NO DAVE I WILL NOT DO THAT.

There's an attitude indicator, I'm sure, just like there is in any aircraft. It seems like that ought to be enough.
Arduino Rubik's Cube Solver – my first repository
> ./servo -co output.png ../src/test/html/about-mozilla.html
Oh that's awesome. May I ask what method you used to figure out the algorithm?

> I asked the author, he apparently made the entire unrolled table by hand.

what the hell...
Apparently, USAF pilots aren't trained to watch out for mountains descending from above them.
You're creating a false dichotomy. One can be good at negotiating salary and still choose a job that comes with high demands.

It's obviously not a myth that each job can help you get the next. Else why does anyone prepare a resume? Or do an internship?
I'm not talking of a situation where entire society consist of these people. I'm taking about wealth. Consider two separate cities.
You don't have to do it with the original devs' consent. It would be nice to get it folded back into the original but if that doesn't happen you can just have it as a fork (of some degree).

Your idea does sound hard to bolt onto an existing client. Minimalist ones probably don't like the weight a plugin system will add, even if none are used. And clients that are open to having a plugin system added, or an existing one extended, probably aren't that minimalist to start with.

Trying to get deluge to work with new python sounds like a good aim to encourage others to help you with it. Many people seem to lament the slow progress being made in adopting python 3. Try to contact past contributors and the current "maintainers". See which ones are open to the idea of using python 3.

(This all sounds like far more work than I like to attempt.)
Cratejoy (YC S13) is hiring engineers, platform, devops and UI/UX
Only somewhat related to the article, the broad use of the word "drone" to include both military drones (usually gutted aircraft, to my understanding) and civilian drones (usually smaller-scale robotics, like quadcopters) is a little confusing. I kinda wish there was some better term to differentiate them, because while I can see a military drone falling from the sky being a great hazard, a smaller quadcopter falling from the sky isn't going to be that bad. (Bad enough, I guess, but not to this degree.)

Like, for instance, some town in Colorado recently passed (or attempted to pass) an anti-drone ordinance giving citizens the right to shoot down drones. In my mind, this means military drones -- not quadcopters -- but to the average person in this town, it probably means any automated and/or remote-controlled aircraft, including quadcopter-drones.

Amazon was recently talking about using drones to deliver stuff. Delivery quadcopter-drones are way, way, way different from military RC-planes-with-missiles drones. Due to the common label "drone," however, I'm not sure the average American really knows the difference.

Anyway, just thinking out loud.
I see the potential legal problem, but I don't see the... moral(?) problem.

This goes both ways, though. If I fell into one of these groups you describe, and interviewed at this hypothetical company, assuming I got a good taste of this culture during the interview process, I wouldn't want to work there anyway. So what, should the company give me an offer, and I accept it, only to be miserable because I don't fit in with my colleagues?

Real discrimination is a problem. Not hiring women, or people of a particular color or religious group, etc. because you "don't like them" is horrible. But that's not what we're talking about. We're talking about people being deemed a poor culture fit on an individual, case-by-case basis. It's not saying, "we're not going to consider Muslim candidates because they won't drink", it's saying, "we brought this guy in, and after talking with him, we decided not to give him an offer because he doesn't fit socially/culturally". And while his religion might -- coincidentally -- be the root of that, I don't see that as discriminatory in the legal sense. (Of course it's "discriminatory" in the dictionary-definition sense, but so is "discriminating" against someone without the required qualifications.) I see this as people who want to work with people who they really gel with, and while that might be unfortunate (different points of view informed by different backgrounds is almost universally an advantage), I believe it's a valid choice for people in a company (especially a new, small one) to make.
> if we need to pay tribute in the form of specs

RFC 2468 - "I remember IANA". Vint Cerf did it for Jon Postel. http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2468.txt

(And the number is a nice touch too)
Leaving aside the context of the name, how is this different from adding another name of any other color to the CSS specification?
Honestly, if semicolons are the one feature somebody mentions when comparing modern languages, I don't want to work with them.

I like Python. I think Python's whitespace-based blocking is interesting. But it is not the most interesting part of the language, and anybody who obsesses over that kind of stuff is just bikeshedding.
Remember when the US government kept talking about the dangers of another country writing something like Stuxnet before it came out that they were behind it?
Exactly the same way that you enforce all property rights when they've been violated: You sue them.
Assuming you know the frequency a drone is flying on, it is trivial to jam.

Hence they make it hard to know the frequency: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_hopping
>It seems the naysayers are doing nothing to try and change the situation

You can thank the naysayers for serious research, otherwise people would just come up with stupid abstract ideas since no one would be skeptical or pessimistic.

I agree with your second point, but I also think we shouldn't rush for a temporary solution that would give people a feeling of "we have at least done something about this, now let's stop worrying about it". Startup culture shouldn't apply to public- or crowd-funded solutions.
Pasta Mia
Swift and JSON Reborn: Let there be light
Affiliate networks (eg Commission Junction or LinkShare) solve pretty much all of the problems you mentioned.

It's a large business now, and can cover broad and narrow topics. Major affiliate networks can't compete with the scale of AdSense, but then no other ad network can either.
I took UberX yesterday. The driver told me he used to be a cab driver and he loved Uber. He made more money and spent less time doing it. For reference, when he drove a cab he had to spend $600 per month to rent the car!
Previous submission https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7814466
The rule of thumb whenever you hear about a big hairy audacious government project like this in Russia is: assume that someone had figured out how to fleece a bunch of taxpayer's money off that. 99% the project won't go anywhere, but all key people will get paid.
The difference between unmanned airplanes and quadcopters is especially important, IMO.
That's it. Google now finally owns the web. The decide what people should find on the web, and they define the web standards, so why not use their html templates.
One performance issue C has is 0 terminated strings. String processing code is constantly hampered by having to do strlen or the equivalent to find the end of the string. 0 terminated strings also means that 'slices' of strings cannot be strings themselves, a copy must be made.

Of course, a C program doesn't have to use C strings, but so many libraries and APIs do (including the C standard library) that they are unavoidable for most practical purposes.

D eliminates this problem by using dynamic arrays to represent strings. A dynamic array is a pointer/length pair.
Hi there,

I've been freelancing for about 2 years now on oDesk and owe so much to that platform. It's allowed me to find great paying jobs with smart people.

Here's what I look for when applying for jobs. My oDesk rate is usually from $30 to $45 /hr - so this may not apply to the lower end of 'cheap cheap cheap fast fast' developers.

* Well written job titles. Descriptive and concise.

* Clear information on where the project stands at the moment. Is this a greenfield project? Is this in the design phase? Do you have mockups? Specs?

* Client history. If I see a client has an average hourly rate of hiring at $10/hr I don't bother applying as I don't think we'll be a good fit. Likewise if the client is new with no feedback or previous contracts completed, I may be hesitant to apply.

---

These are the key things I look for to find good jobs on oDesk. If you want to attract great developers, keep them in mind, they're a must!
Interesting, however I believe other formulation of the thinking theory might be also used. If you think of all beliefs that a person has as pieces of the puzzle. Those pieces have to be interconnected in order to create a perception of the object/world. If new knowledge is introduced to the system, one piece of the puzzle is taken away and new piece substitutes it. This kind of thinking is stable and can react fast to changes.
Hmmm. I think ESR's talk of cost is a bad framing to use when thinking about businesses; I think in terms of value creation and sustainability.

If we imagine two sites, one with manual curating and editing and one without, the former's clearly more valuable. The question for me is whether the value created is enough that we can extract enough cash in return to make it sustainable. If you eliminate the editors, it could be that the lowered value makes the business less sustainable, not more so.

Either way, I think ESR's view is an interesting hypothesis, but it's one I'd definitely test. But I'd also test the hypothesis that the Freshmeat model just doesn't make sense any more, in that people who previously used it now solve their problems in other, better ways.
Violence and starvation are not a 'long tail' of human happiness. The market that can afford Teslas is much further down the tail than people subject to these problems.
As far as the low-income side of things, the safety nets you mention definitely help many people, but in the US at least there are still many other people who do not qualify for existing programs, but are still very much in need:

- Long-term unemployment - unemployment pay, even with the recent extensions, is limited in duration. A portion of such people might qualify just fine for disability (SSDI, SSI), but many long-term unemployed do not. To qualify a person can't just prove they haven't been able to find any available jobs they're capable of doing, but prove that there isn't any possible job at all they could do, regardless of openings or likelihood of being hired.

There is disability fraud that goes on (cases that don't meet the legal definition, but are misrepresented and approved), especially for areas with very high unemployment, but this is illegal and not supposed to happen, and efforts are constantly underway to crack down, often to the detriment of many unequivocally legitimate (by legal definition) disability recipients.

- For food assistance, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), provides usually $100-$300 per person in monthly supplemental assistance for purchasing groceries. But for those people without additional income to put towards food, it is often not enough and seeking out additional non-governmental help is necessary to not go hungry. In many states long-term unemployed people, regardless of need, do not even qualify (assistance is time-limited).

- Except in the case of low-income parents, cash assistance is very rare or nonexistent most places in the US.

- Health care - the Affordable Care Act (ACA) improved the situation for a large portion of uninsured Americans, mostly by providing variable subsidies for a wide range of incomes, and disallowing insurance companies from denying or cancelling coverage for medical reasons.

Even now though, in some states many low income-people still cannot obtain insurance; some State governments (like Texas, Florida and others) chose not to expand their Medicaid programs to cover all adults below the poverty level, as was expected. In those states non-disabled adults below the poverty level do not qualify for Medicaid, or even for the same subsidies provided to those in higher income brackets.

-----

A basic income would ease a lot of pains for low-income individuals who do not qualify for current aid programs, or qualify but do not receive benefits for various other reasons: like not knowing it's available, daunting paperwork and proof of identity/need requirements, stigma, etc. The bureaucratic overhead of processing applications and managing current cases for a range of programs would be greatly reduced too.
Anyone Can Speak in Tongues
Typelevel.scala – powerful libraries for Scala
Datomic solves the O/R impedance mismatch
The real problem with online advertising
At 20 Amazon is bulking up. It is not yet slowing down
> Post smallish fixed price jobs and say more is at stake if they do well.

This is a giant red flag for me as a freelancer. It immediately puts me off as a sign of this guy is being defensive for some reason.

"I know we're paying you lower than your usual rate, but if you do this right, there's another project down the line."

No thank you.
It seems to me that this would only be of interest if it can be shown that an immoral person is not someone that cooperates with other immoral people but not with moral people.
I loved Nassim Nicholas Taleb's discussion of why being a taxi drive can be better than being a banker (Antifragile).

This Uber stuff is throwing a twist into his conclusions.
I think Apple is in this battle as well. With the new iOS 8 / Yosemite releases, they are targeting the home automation & health monitoring markets. Google & Microsoft had better have something to offer because Apple is getting ready to eat their lunch.
Good luck, Russia, with sending yourself to dinosaurs.
Time Warner Cable ads start showing up in Comcast’s turf
Pattern matching is a very popular feature in most modern FPs I'm familiar with.

Elixir (http://elixir-lang.org/) has lovely built-in pattern matching syntax. Ditto for Scala.
Completely disagree. I've been freelancing on oDesk exclusively for 2 years now and I make a great living. Don't be stupid and set your rates to $10/hr, you're obviously going to compete with the bottom of the barrel and work with shady clients.

Up your rates and suddenly shady guys don't contact you, and good clients recognise talent and you get a good paying job.
The arguments about chaos without regulations is bullshit. There are proofs around the world.

It's going to be very interesting to see how the industry will change.

1. Almost all will switch to Uber, Lyft etc.
2. Driveless cars take over.
3. Distributed network of driveless cars backed by bitcoin like transactions. No need for central logistics like Uber.

What will happen first: 2 or 3
I think you can export the video snippets and save them to local storage. This would allow you to keep as much video as you want, basically for free. It would be nice to have it linked in to Google Drive so that you can store selected video snippets there.
I'm happy to find other people that share my vision.

Drop me a line: username @ gmail
Do you mean that "moral" should mean "someone who cooperates with others" and "immoral" should mean "someone who does not cooperate with others"? Then "moral" and "immoral" would just mean "cooperative" and "uncooperative," which we already have words for. Plus, morality shouldn't require you to cooperate with immoral people (although whether you should actively punish them or not is the eigenJesus-eigenMoses question).
Stream Audio and Control color bulbs from an OpenWRT Router
We are working on getting music-responsive, hackable LED lights to the masses. The router has a web interface where you can write scripts, there are smart phone apps, and the router makes your speakers into Wifi speakers, optionally listening to the music going through and making the lights respond in turn.

We've designed an interface to compose a light show for a given track and share it, even to people that don't have our system installed, and we're making it possible to set combined light/sound alerts and alarms.

www.kck.st/1pCusil

Please support us if you can!
There's a difference between having pattern matching capabilities and the entire language being built on pattern matching. I have no idea if pattern matching is as fundamental in Egison as it is in e.g. Erlang, but I know for myself and some other people I respect, first-class, built-in pattern matching is a huge draw to a language.
Oh, I absolutely agree with that. Re-reading my posts, I realize I wasn't clear: I definitely don't think much of this is valid or useful when talking about a company that's grown beyond 75 or so. The SV notion of company culture absolutely does not scale.

But when you're 5 people, or, I'd even argue, 15, 30, or 50, working your asses off to get your first product to market, "getting along" in all those ways can be extremely important.

Ironically, the only company where I've worked where there were somewhat-forced social activities was a large (>300 people) one, with the "HR bullshit" team-building exercises and the like. The small companies I've worked at certainly have had company-organized activities, but they always felt (to me, at least) much more informal and optional. My main examples are a company I joined at ~12 people, and left around 100, and another company where I joined around 60, and is now probably pushing 300.

My current job is interesting because I was there when we had the company-organized stuff that most people wanted to participate in (while those who didn't were free to abstain, and there wasn't pressure to conform). Now we're getting large enough to either not have those things anymore, or have things that try to appeal to everyone, which ends up feeling more forced sometimes. On the plus side, we're still doing one-off informal things all the time that are generally employee-driven (rather than "official"), and the different activities attract different sub-groups within the company who are interested in those things.

It's sad that more founders don't understand the concept of corporate values. Instead of trying to hire folks who look the same and want essentially the same experience from their job, it is possible to build a strong, diverse organizations united by shared values.

I don't necessarily see that as good or bad. A strong, diverse organization isn't going to be the same (socially) as a more homogeneous org. I'm not going to draw a value judgment about either of those, because I think they're both valid choices that each company should be permitted to make for themselves (assuming they aren't actively discriminating against protected classes). It's certainly a choice that affects the company's trajectory and probably likelihood of success, but, again, I think that's a choice. Maybe the diverse org will net you a $1bn exit, and the "socially-integrated" choice gets you a $250mn exit, or even no exit at all. IMO it's about the journey and whether you felt it was a worthwhile experience.
I think you're playing a semantic game with the words "teach religion" in my comment.
Sounds like too many big changes for a minor version bump.
> "Now the world is worried about what we put in our systems that we export."

That's not remotely a new state of affairs.
Nor is it new for them -- Russia in particular -- to have very good reasons:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siberian_pipeline_sabotage
No, the problem isn't that it will "upset people" in the US. Virtually none of the readers of HN in the US see this issue as controversial.
What you're asking for (publisher control of the look) contradicts the complaint about eye sores on your website. The majority of publishers will do whatever they can to get attention and we'll fall back to the flashing, blinking, and terrible contrast ads of 10 years ago.
Same; Catholic school grades 1-12, taught evolution, and not in a "teach the controversy" way.
Panda: A System for Provenance and Data (2010) [pdf]