skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Sales for a small web consultancy: am I too small to hire a salesperson?
I run a small, "boutique" web consultancy under my own name. Thus far I've done my own sales and project management. I'm a back-end developer and sub out my design and front-end. I've finally hit my new year's resolution of delegating more: I'm now subbing out most of my back-end dev as well, leaving me to focus on client relations and management.
My subs are all remote folks I've coded in the trenches with and trust. My customers are all word-of-mouth and view me as a "developer + team" rather than a Brand, LLC type of firm. I follow the (somewhat risky) model of One Large Client + Several Smaller Clients, and cashflow is usually decent.

The sales cycle in my business can be lengthy -- a few weeks of courting followed by a few weeks of estimation, proposals, and contracts. I typically receive leads from my contacts and do the rest myself, but I want to delegate this process as well if possible.

Question: how can I leverage a commission-only tech-knowledgable sales-person in this situation?

Challenges are:

a) I can only take so many clients at once (until I scale up operations), so I definitely won't be this salesperson's only source of work.

b) Beyond procuring the lead and getting the customer excited about the business solutions we can provide, it seems that the bulk of the sales cycle (the in-depth proposals, etc.) is out of scope for most salespeople.

Is the occasional mid-4-figures (USD) commission enough to attract a salesperson who can do more than just get me leads? One who can go deeper with potential clients before I have to jump in?

Advice and feedback welcome, as I'm sure I may be overlooking some possibilities here.
The Highest-Paid CEOs Are The Worst Performers, New Study Says
The weather is terribad. The winters are long(sometimes october-march), cold, and dark. There is a few weeks of spring which is mild but rains the entire time. The last few weeks have been the best weather I've experience in a long time but it still rained 5 days a week. It was just nice on the weekends. Then the summer is hot and so humid you cannot breathe.

The Pittsburgh area gets less sunlight per year than Seattle does (which is somewhat known for being dreary). This one really gets me. Sunlight make me function better. I go to California and the radio stations are talking about how it's been "overcast" and it's like the most sunlight I've seen in my life. Overcast in Pittsburgh means the skies are grey.
I think if you have a 50 field data object, and you have cases where you transmit only 5 of those fields, the problem is your data modelling, not the serialization library.
See Machiavelli: both The Discourses on Livy and The Prince are quite insightful on these topics. I recommend reading both near the same time.
and constantly have positions open
This has already gotten a lot of attention. This machine would use a bunch of energy, do a bunch of damage, and unless we stop putting plastic in the ocean the problem remains. The only way to properly clean the oceans of plastic is to stop manufacturing and distributing plastics that do not readily degrade.
I generally understand the motivation of these companies, but damn I really hate that they all build IDEs. I wish they would focus on command-line tools or libraries and integration with (say) eclipse for those that really want an IDE. Having a different half-assed IDE for each hardware platform makes for a frustrating day at work

Build automation for embedded systems is such a PITA. My previous job we had a build step that used AutoHotKey to click through the manufacturers 'proprietary tools'. You can imagine how reliable that was
I think your current website is great. Is the new one a drastic improvement?
This underscores what appears to be an interesting strategic move by Facebook: build an ecosystem of applications, which in turn encourages people to use their other products. In turn, this provides continued competition against Twitter, Tumblr, etc.

The interesting thing about this app is that it's an experiment: viral success of social applications appears to be a hit or miss sort of thing, so why not throw many things at the wall and see what sticks á la Paper, Home, Messenger, or buy something already big á la Instagram or Snapchat.

One benefit of this strategy is that it raises barriers to entry for your competitors: the more modes of social interaction you offer, the fewer opportunities for your competitors to chip away at your empire, and the more enticing your properties become to advertisers.
Essentially, the only reason there is a modding community for Minecraft is because it's Java-based and people can just decompile the shipped code and hack stuff onto it.

So you have the modding community adding value for free, while Mojang sells the game and takes the profits, but doesn't seem to be investing it back.
IBM has a pretty good Pittsburgh location now. There seems to be a bunch of startups and other places for tech jobs like FedEx in Moon. I think the tech market is thriving in Pittsburgh.
>> "Mr. Flynn, who said he thought up Slingshot as a way to push his brothers to respond to his photo messages" (From NTY)[1]

What a bad reason to create a product. People don't want to respond to your messages so your create a way to try to force them to respond. Realistically they probably won't care enough to reply and now won't see your messages at all.

[1] http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/06/17/facebook-releases-s...
NetApp, Google, Apple, PNC, UPMC, and a few others pay experienced devs over $150k. Medical device companies may, I don't have first hand knowledge (they pay UX consultants the same rate as in CA). Dev jobs in IT depts of industrial firms won't pay that much, nor will web startups. But that is the same as the bay area.

My personal experience (10 years in mnt view, 4 years in Pittsburgh): not even close when you compare free cash flow. I have way more now in pittsburgh for savings, vacations, etc. You have to consider total cost of living (taxes, real estate, cost of living, etc). I'd estimate even with 25% more salary in CA, you would have more spending money in PA.

The big thing you give up is diversity of jobs and choice. If you like to hop around a lot, try new things, there are simply not as many good options. I'd still recommend bay area right out of school, but seriously consider Pittsburgh, Seattle, Austin, Raleigh, etc when you are at the stage you want to buy a house.
I'm starting to believe that we have a .com-like scarcity problem with programming project names... Smarty PHP templates: http://www.smarty.net/
School districts in the South Hills suburbs are fairly good and rank highly in the state (Mt. Lebanon, Upper St. Clair, Bethel Park, ...). If working in the city, you can take the "T" (light rail) into town from the South Hills.
It's very easy to say such things, but the physics is much harder.

http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/12/wind-fights-sola...

http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2012/08/solar-data-treas...
Study Asserts Startling Numbers of Insider Trading Rogues
So... secular, non-cultish meditation schools? Spirituality without the guru-worship trap?

This might be controversial here, but I'm going to say it anyway. There's a lot that the old spirituality of India did very well. They came up with an incredibly rich array of meditation techniques, suitable for just about any temperament and inclinations. But they had an Achilles' heel: the divinization of the guru. That was the open door where all the evil came in.
Cool but the demo isn't working in Chrome for me.

It would be nice to wrap something like that in a web component so that it'd be trivial to reuse without a framework.
What do you get in NYC that you wouldnt't get elsewhere (or that's hard to get elsewhere) ?
Legitimate question here, since I am thinking of moving there but I have feelings the place is just overhyped as a tourist spot.
Cool little site. Definitely fun. Definitely seems like the NY Times is shifting towards Buzzfeed though.
If spirituality was an entirely new term that we invented today, we would call it brain hacking, or consciousness hacking.
The article is a bit unclear, but it appears that what the blackmailers got were the signing keys for the software.

Losing signing keys would be pretty bad for Red Hat, too.
Has anyone used Elixir in production yet?
Tech-tastrophe – Save Yourself From Presentation Tech Failures
I know developers in Pittsburgh that were making 120-150k at FedEx Ground HQ. I know plenty that make over 100k. Although I see postings for 45k and wonder if they ever fill them. I'm not a Dev but I make almost 90k. If I moved to California I could probably find something at 120k but I don't know that 30k is enough of a difference. If you are talking about 50k vs 150k then it's a no-brainer to move.
Similar journey here but without the burglary or prison.

BBSes (300 baud modem on a C64 hooked up to an old 13 inch TV) -> warez -> learned 6510/6502 assembly and started cracking -> hacking/wardialing as a means to get access to computers where I could do C programming with 'real' C compilers -> found my way onto the Internet/ARPAnet in the mid-80s -> moved to Amiga (continued cracking on 68k) a reasonably 'real' computer with DICE C (Thanks Matt Dillon!), etc -> software developer.

Got away from the illegal "hacking" when it started becoming a serious thing with serious consequences and I was no longer a minor, and out of the cracking/piracy thing when I was earning good money and could afford to buy things.

There are a few people on HN with similar stories that I know of from back in the +hack/#hack/#Amiga! irc days (my handles there varied but were often some variant of my name: gfm, geo, etc).
Show HN: Wavepot – Digital audio workstation of the web
I agree that yes there is a great deal of demand for crypto on the client side and I don't think privacy on the Internet is going to move forward without a reliable way of doing cryto in that sphere.
However I agree with the poster that client side JavaScript is not the answer to that demand. At this time it's a leaky boat and can be exploited.
This would be similar to this acquisition IMO: http://www.macworld.com/article/2083997/apple-acquires-snapp...
As far as I can tell, California & Democrat = live in San Francisco. If I say "non-urban" it puts me... outside of San Francisco.
exactly, it's the angular way
502 Bad Gateway

nginx/1.6.0

(edit: it works now. But it didn't 15 minutes ago)
You might find this Spotify jukebox project interesting https://github.com/samcreate/Apollo-Player
>> "...my respect for Harper's, and perception of them as a serious publication, just skyrocketed."

Really? I have always thought of Harper's as first among equals in the respectable, serious-journalism cohort. I think it's the best grown-up publication available in America today.
Then take away that kids computer and all technology, and ground them for a month.

These problems were solved by previous generations, when did parents become such pussies?

When my generation was growing up (and I'm only 29), if we acted up we were expecting a beating at home... And we didn't get our own computer, TV and iPad or console...
Notes from another pricing workshop by Michael Dearing

http://yurylifshits.com/post/52854299110/8-pricing-strategie...
> What fills that vacuum?

Religion is a cultural construct to address certain issues like morality, cosmology, etc. It didn't fill any void, its just an outward expression of culture. Current culture is to handle these things inwardly and via some level of rational inquiry. We don't need a turn-key replacement. The only turn-key replacement for religion is more religion. Religion as a category and part of human experience needs to be eliminated. There's nothing to fill past that point.

This is like saying, "Now that we don't have phrenology, we need a new phrenology." No, we just accept we can't figure out how people work or what kind of people they are by feeling their skulls. We live with the ambiguity and use other tools to determine what people do via personality testing, statistics, psychology, etc which do not have the false certitude the pseudoscience of phrenology did the same way modern understanding of the world does not have the false certitude that religion delivers.

>Gordon Gecko was a fictional villain in 1987 cinema

Gecko and non-fictional villains of that age were all baby boomer monotheists, if not extremely faithful churchgoers, and often justified their negative aspects via faith. Or on a more everday front, see the Prosperity Gospel, The Secret, etc. George Bush still justifies a lot of his disastrous decisions in office via faith, including the invasion of Iraq which has killed at least 120k innocent civilians. Pardon me if I find the "but without religion we're lost morally" argument unconvincing. If anything, religion lets us act immorally without consequence.
Jean de La Fontaine was a lawyer from an affluent family who married a woman from another affluent family very young. While we cannot deny his work I don't know if using someone who was born into a family that allowed him to not both seek a law degree and not actually have to work as a model in comparison to starting a sustainable business.

Sure, he was lucky. But being born into a wealthy family was his luck, not just writing a few lines out of the blue and being thought of as the first poet to understand the nuance of French.
The long tail might be lucrative but there's more overhead, and mainstream(ish) music provides economies of scale.

Put another way: if they can make a penny per view on Psy's Gangnam Style video that's $20m for hosting and distributing one video. Maybe they can get 2 billion combined downloads from indie videos, but that requires hosting and distributing hundreds of thousands of videos. It makes sense, business-wise, to want more favourable terms from indie labels just because their content doesn't monetize as well, doesn't draw advertisers as well, and isn't viewed as much.
What is it with all the posts mentioning ethnic food? I can't be the only one who finds it crazy. I eat normal grocery store food and barely have use for restaurants at all. Yet there are apparently large numbers of people who decide where to live on the basis of restaurants? It's very strange to me.
Does Facebook really make it this easy to hack profiles?
Mac: Bluetooth 4.0 nachrüsten für Mavericks und Yosemite
another vote for compound indices.
The "barrier to entry" argument would be true if Slingshot was first. Slingshot was created as an attack on Snapchat.

And that's after Facebook's previous attempt to attack Snapchat, Poke, failed miserably.
YouTube is about to begin testing the new service – which will charge people to watch and listen to music without ads, and download songs to their mobile devices – within the next few days, initially within Google.

So, Adblock Plus and Youtube to MP3?...
I really liked the RTP area when I was down there. Plus they seem to have a pretty good tech scene. It's kind of like Pittsburgh with decent weather.
I'm not familiar with Bay Ridge - but you can live in Queens, New Jersey, better parts of the Bronx, even Staten Island and Long Island and have shorter commutes than that for similar rents in safe neighborhoods. Yes, it's not the glamorous Manhattan life that people think of coming home to - but public transportation in New York is the best in the country and you're free to stay out as late as you want...
Could this be used for automatic GPG encryption before storage on disk?
Awesome! No, I'm not. I wasn't familiar with it until I googled it just now. I'm not of an especially entrepreneurial bent, although it is starting to have more and more appeal. I've been doing contract work, and I can't see why I wouldn't want to turn it into a proper business. Hmu! I'd love to talk about what you have going on.
Why You Should Adopt Google's Nested Approach To Office Layouts
> Last night I woke up at ten am, did my laundry, then went to a juice bar, worked for a few hours, walked around, ended up literally coding on a bar while watching the US. vs. Ghana game, then took the train over to Herald Square and coded in the park. It was a beautiful evening. Around midnight, walked up to Times Square to squeak in some power before all the stores closed, then worked in another park until 3am, and took the train home. You can't really do that anywhere else, at least in the states.

So your gold standard is "a city where I code in bars and parks until the middle of the night?" Yeah, I think there's more than one place in the US where you can do that.
The information is there in sequences of images through parallax precisely when the camera translates. We know how to do 3D reconstruction of scene geometry from a single moving camera.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fLnd9ucUu9Y

Skip to 1:15 to see a textured reconstruction.

The first real-time example was Davison et al's MonoSLAM paper of 2007, I think.
That's absolutely insane! Even after paying the ransom, how could they be sure noone were still sitting on the keys? Assuming it's code signing keys, it sounds incredibly irresponsible to not (force) update all devices anyways.

Is really the only thing protecting the safety of those devices the promise of a blackmailer to not abuse the private keys they were sitting on?

... makes me wonder what else we don't know about all the other vendors...
5 Free Samsung Galaxy S5 mockup – #freebie #psdfiles |
Wow, I think this new decision cleans up a number of loose ends left by the district judge. It's not especially clear in the Guardian article, but this is the Circuit Court (one layer below the Supreme Court) decision of the appeal by the Conan Doyle Estate of a District Court decision made at the end of last year.

The District Court decision by Ruben Castillo (http://freesherlock.files.wordpress.com/2013/12/klinger-orde...) went largely in favor of Klinger, saying that the pre-1923 stories were public domain. But it left a lot of uncertainty about how incidental details ("increments of expression") from the later stories were to be treated. There's a good summary of the District decision here: http://tushnet.blogspot.com/2014/01/guest-post-betsy-rosenbl...

In addition to affirming the earlier District decision (Klinger can publish without fear of being sued), this brand new Circuit decision by Richard Posner seems like it clears up a lot of the uncertainty and offers much clearer guidelines for future decisions. And it does it decisively and with considerable flair: http://freesherlock.files.wordpress.com/2013/02/klinger-7th-...

We cannot find any basis in statute or case law for ex-
tending a copyright beyond its expiration. When a story
falls into the public domain, story elements—including
characters covered by the expired copyright—become fair
game for follow-on authors...

The decision itself is worth reading, definitely clearer and more engaging than most of the newspaper coverage.
We live in the age of wonders. The internet and mobile devices create endless possibilities for people to communicate, learn and interact. And at Facebook, a company which can, if it chooses, pick from among the brightest engineering minds and focus their efforts on any problem it chooses, the power to concentrate years of programming knowledge on the capabilities afforded to us by this astonishing bounty of personal technology has produced:

"A new way to share photos and videos"

And they don't even seem to have a monetization strategy for it.
Do you have the skills and access to proper ingredients to cook: Mexican, Indian, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Polish...?

That's a pretty typical (and healthy!) diet in a large city. I myself have recently relocated to a middle US city from NY and definitely miss the cuisine. I find myself feeling much less healthy and craving my old dietary variety.
Soundhound has a button to search on spotify after finding a song. It's a bunch of clicks, but that's what I do now.
The History of Mana: How an Austronesian Concept Became a Video Game Mechanic
Q: Websockets not working with Ubunuty VPS + Dokku + Flask Application
Privacy is Dead
> OK, AFAICT there is no bounds checking. When you want to read a message, you give FlatBuffers a bare pointer to the start of the message -- no size. So you can't use this to read data you don't trust I guess.

I think the key use case for FlatBuffers is mostly for very-high-performance communication between a set of processes that you control to scale out high-performance systems into distributed systems while keeping the communication overhead minimal, not for, e.g., communicating between untrusted machines over a public network. So, I don't see that as a huge problem in the key use case.
How to Optimize Your Landing Page for Paid Traffic
The salaries are not that much lower, and the cost of living is so significantly lower that you'd net more in Pittsburgh. I live in Pittsburgh and have had several jobs that pay over $100k. You can rent an apartment in the nicest hippest area here for $800/month (or less). You can own a home in a reasonable area for under $100k.

I speak from experience as sure my paycheck was larger when I lived in DC, but I could never afford to own a single family home. Now I own what would be the equivalent of a mansion in DC for less then what my suburban Maryland townhouse went for.
I love how the very first paragraph implies that the problem is Netflix (as the example company) getting special, preferential treatment, when in fact, Netflix has been obviously punished for not paying ransom money, and has led the charge on the net neutrality movement that led to this bill.

But this is the Washington Post, the Pravda of the Beltway. What do you expect? Honesty?
Is it supposed to be all smooth sailing launching gp2 instances from standard snapshots and vice versa ?

It may be just me but I've had really weird and serious new errors today in us-east-1 launching new instances, or even starting previously stopped ones with no changes to the instance whatsoever ! General slowness, "reachability" health check failing, with the system log showing that the kernel couldn't be uncompressed, maybe because the bootloader couldn't find the root device in the first place ? I'm not using custom kernels at all.

The timing is too strange for it to be a coincidence, but nothing on the AWS status page.
How I got a dev job at Khan Academy without a CS degree or dev work experience
You can debounce your web calls. Here is an example: http://davidwalsh.name/javascript-debounce-function

This means that you do not make a web call for each keystroke. That is a huge speedup.

I don't know why you would need to leverage Angular to make a typeahead, but it's a nice writeup nonetheless.
This web API doesn't come close to helping with this problem, as it doesn't allow you to play entire songs, or know when the current song is over.

Realized I didn't make it a link. http://letsparty.fm
There's nothing keeping a properly implemented secure erase from working -- all the data on disk should be written out encrypted so secure erase is just cycling the key. It has the advantage of being much faster and something you can do in software (and repeatedly)

Of course, for retiring a drive there's no good reason not to just physically destroy it.
This quote is best understood from within the context of the article. At my first glance, I thought the same as you, then I read the article. Basically, they're not saying that people shouldn't feel pressure to reciprocate (obviously), they're saying that people needn't feel pressure when "creating" something, because everyone else is "creating" stuff too, so most of it won't be excellent quality. They're not trying to discourage creation, but to make it that it's not intimidating to create, because of the vast amount of crappy content there will be (so yours won't stand out as particularly bad). That's my understanding of it from a (skim) read of the TechCrunch article linked.