skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Growing a career in freelance web development/design
I recently made the decision to begin freelancing, so I put together some profiles on oDesk, Elance, etc and started looking for clients. I was relatively lucky to land a client a few days after starting to look at a reasonable rate (was a fixed price, at the end of the project >$20/hr)editing a premium one page WordPress theme for a small business in Australia. I then made some simple web advertisements and a simple personal page for a friend of mine.

After finishing that first project (a bit later than I wanted, but the client was happy), I went back to those same sites to continue my search for clients. After researching on my own and spending time on these types of websites, I quickly realized that I was not going to get a steady flow of work at reasonable rates. I turned my attention to friends and acquaintances who either owned businesses or need things done that they didn't have time for themselves; those resources were quickly exhausted.

Currently, I have a very minimal portfolio hosted at http://kylechalmers.me, this is the second iteration and was my minimum viable product.

I am getting my clients (very) slowly through freelancing sites. I have started to make business to business calls to local businesses who either have a poor web presence, or none at all, however, as expected, I am not getting many clients through this method.

I've ordered a stack of business cards to leave around at local bulletin boards (grocery stores, restaurants, etc), and have begun to think about going to small business meetups and similar events to start networking.

My question is, as a freelancer looking to expand my business with the intent of moving into more technical projects later on, how do I go about most effectively growing my business and network? And more specifically, how do I start getting a steady flow of client coming to me, rather than me searching them out (which I still expect to have to do, at this point atleast)?
Steven Sinofsky, Bill Gates? There are many.
Host in in the gh-pages branch of your site and access it via https://captbaritone.github.com/winamp2-js/<filename>

Github pages is awesome.
> The cryptographic technology necessary to do so already exists, in a way that would limit access to the manufacturer, so that's not the issue.

This is a genuine question: Does it really? Everything I've read on the topic has shown that that's not really the case, at least not without implementing it in such a way that it has some rather serious human weaknesses anyway. However, I'm rather ignorant on the topic, so I'm genuinely curious.
I don't need a device just to play music and ask it questions. I already own a computer!
I'm sure if you shake the data a little more you'll see that a very small minority do most of the work.

This has always been true - in corporations, in teams within corporations and in startups.

I think you should evolve your product to reflect and incentivize this rather than fight it. Give the core guys the most equity - figure out a good way to calculate who those people are. Its a problem that mankind has been trying to solve forever.

Instead of focussing on community, focus on creating a system that is secure for someone to start working immediately with the core-team. With deep git integration you could have somethign worthwhile there.
The sad part about that is that if he were to use <button> properly styled like the div he would have keyboard navigation for free using
Scientists strip zebrafish of their stripes
There's multiple video players for Android that take 'oculus' style side-by-side video and allow you to watch it with head tracking. OK - the inter-eye distance and distortion<>lens mapping might not be 100% but it mostly works.
Interesting. These seem to strike a balance between Apple's decidedly glosss-but-normal-shaped emoji and Google's flat-but-ghost-shaped emoji. I'd say that we really need an open emoji standard, but we all know how that goes.
It is amazing that Google has it's hands in a vast amount of different industry.
If you have time to watch this talk it is a great mix of inside baseball, anecdotes and a gripping tale of how WebKit and Safari came to be.
European certifications are still in process for us to officially ship, but there are some boards in Europe either brought or re-shipped by customers.

The motors spin freely when unpowered. It will skate like a normal board, but with a bit more drag.
Good job.

Heads up... seems to be two <head> tags on your home page.
Thanks, that was the goal :). The official guidelines can be found here (http://www.cdc.gov/vhf/ebola/hcp/case-definition.html). And while they're great, they're not really usable. It's a ton to read through.

We wanted to go with a "Don't make me think" approach.
Oh, my apologies then.
The problem with voice recognition software that doesn't require a physical action like pressing a button (Siri) is that they do a terrible job at distinguishing between when your actually trying to talk to it and when you or audio/video say(s) something in conversation to someone else/playback that might sound like the command keyword.
Location: San Francisco, CA

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: JavaScript, HTML5, CSS3, Mobile Web, Photoshop, Ruby/Rails, iOS, & more. (M.S. Computer Science in Human-Computer Interaction)

Résumé/CV: http://resume.linkedinlabs.com/1746q8plx

Email: b r e n t at doorty.com

Currently seeking web development gigs in SF, with the ability to work offsite/remote for months at time.

I have a range of skills and evolving interests that center around developing compelling products that leverage new technology.

I've been creating and designing websites for 15 years. Most recently, since the release of the iPhone, I have been focusing on mobile: Initially, as an iPhone (iOS) developer and then returning to web, particularly mobile web design. Over the last three years, I've created various interactive iPad and desktop web apps for clients at a healthcare agency. On the side, I've started several companies in the web and mobile space (see Vendee and SeniorServe) doing the entire design and full-stack web development with mobile apps. Though, I haven't had long-term success with my side projects, understanding what makes a business successful is a skill I try to continue to develop. As far as design skills, I have worked in UI/UX in industry, and I have a Masters in Computer Science with a focus on the relationship known as Human-Computer Interaction. Rather than simply a software engineer, I consider myself a well-rounded developer with many skills to bring to the table, and I'd like to find an organization that leverages this desire and broad skill set.

Recruiters: I'm interested in creative companies that investigate and implement solutions to complex problems. Some of my areas of interest include wearables/fashion, travel, fitness/wellness, mobile, augmented reality, and dog friendly work places. Particularly interested in offsite/remote positions.
I think she's talking about adding link rules based on the #includes. But yeah, you can learn how to use Make, or you can write yet-another replacement tool that other people who never learned to use Make get excited about.
Just keep typing. It will fix it after you type the word "case".
EDIT: I can't read. :/

The linked article mentions that by Oct, 2013, the price for 1Gbit from EPB was reduced ~$70/month, and the folks who were paying ~$58 for 100mbit got bumped to 1Gbit at no additional charge.
"An annual tradition is a back to back viewing of The Thing from Another World, The Thing (1982), and The Thing (2011) after the last flight has left for the winter."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amundsen%E2%80%93Scott_South_Po...
South Park Accurately Sums Up Freemium Games – (Freemium Isn't Free)
It would be super useful for me to be able to do some filtering. For instance, show just internships in NYC.
Feds Arrest Alleged ‘Silk Road 2′ Admin, Seize Servers
Does the average person like to purchase an item they already own if they see an advertisement for it?

If that item is a car, probably not.

If that item is a type of beer, or a model of razor blades, or a certain liquid to put in your washing machine, sure.
No, I do not feel any anxiety about it
Good. Maybe they'll stop throwing so much wasted money at Google.
Thanks! Some stacks have more info than others for sure. The quality of the data will get better as more companies claim their pages and verify their stack (e.g. http://stackshare.io/mailgun/mailgun). For stacks that are not verified, we're inviting users to be community moderators and contributors to these pages to beef up the citations :)
The only reason I can see this being construed as controversial is because people haven't been reading the headlines for the past few years.

Why require a kill switch when you can just order the car to drive it's occupants to the closest correction facility?
MARKETING REBOOT: LEADS – Backwards Up the Funnel to the Win
Why are peanut allergies on the rise?
Economist Espresso daily briefing for smartphones
What's the best time and day of the week to post on Product Hunt?
working in the south pole: very cool.

working for war profiteers: very uncool.

among other crimes against humanity, raytheon produce those illegal cluster munitions that indiscriminately kill kids long after the battle moves on.
It is estimated that over 800,000 Raytheon cluster bomblets have been dropped on the civilian population of Iraq.

ckem.
I am not really worried about privacy, but this smacks of false equivalency.

> You carry a smart-phone that presumably has GPS, a microphone, and a camera everywhere you go. There's a camera and microphone on your laptop too. Both are cloud connected. If the NSA (or any other super-power) wants to spy on you, they can and will.

People are regularly discovering and shaming companies for transmitting more information than necessary from smart phones. It's true that the NSA could zero-day your phone, but you've still got opportunities to detect or react to that. If nothing else, put your phone in airplane mode.

This device, on the other hand, is designed to transmit everything it hears. There is no way to tell where that data goes and it may be difficult to determine exactly what it contains. Where it's possible to determine if your phone is sending unauthorized data, it seems very hard in this situation.

I don't trust amazon more or less than anyone else. I think we should just be honest about the nature of a device. A phone has an "offline" mode, this does not - its whole purpose is to be an omnipresent microphone. Those are two fundamentally different things.
Not a good sign when the link to your company in the article doesn't work. Also not encouraging that there's no Apache rewrite rule from www to root for a production site.
Subscription fee + highly curated content + no ads (I think?) ... maybe this is the future of the newspaper business in the digital economy?
Do you currently think April 2015 is a realistic time when I can buy it "officially" to Sweden or should I find a friend in the US?
actually, it doesn't have a battery, so it won't replace an ordinary bluetooth speaker. I was optimistic too :(
Lost in Space: Half of All Stars Are Rogues Between Galaxies
Advertising in its current form is broken.

I was recently in a class where we performed a case study on Google. The professor asked if anyone had ever clicked on an ad. One kid out of 60 had clicked on ad for cheap protein supplements, but hadn't bought any. Everyone else scoffed, pointed out their use of AdBlock, and cited their gullible parents as the only people they knew who might ever possibly accidentally click on an ad. Furthermore, the strong majority of our class viewed targeted ads on Facebook and Gmail as extremely creepy and unconvincing.

There are two ad models that work in my opinion:

1. Native advertising: Ads disguised as useful content. This works for changing people's perceptions, especially if its done through official or generally impartial channels, such as news outlets. People think they're getting honest information about BP's charitable acts and Coke's health benefits, but they're really being lied to. This doesn't generate any direct sales, but it can really influence consumer sentiment on different brands which can have a massive impact on sales indirectly. This method is extremely sneaky and unethical, and that's probably why it works.

2. Snapchat's new model: Opt-in, high quality ads. I liken these ads to movie trailers. They are well-crafted and curated, and you only have to watch them if you want to. This way, people who click on them are already intrigued and have committed to watching the ad, making for a more engaged and curious user base. This method is still being developed but I can see it become big in the next couple of years.
Frein was probably a case of too obvious. You have a woodsman hiding in the woods. Where do you look? Looking in old buildings is obvious, but also exactly where you'd think frein would expect the police to look and the last place he'd hide. Still should have looked a little closer, but it's like I knew you'd know I would you'd know I would know not to hide there...
It's unfortunate it doesn't have a battery. For this price point it would have made a great bluetooth speaker with some extra intelligent assistant functionality.
Are you the CEO of a large tech company? No? You could be blogging.
Is it possible just to treat Emojis just like we treat regular typeface fonts? Is there something preventing me from downloading Apple's Emoji "font" and setting it as the default on my Android device?

This would allow developers to specify their own preferred sets (and allow users to override).
To quote my friend, "at NSA they probably call it Amazon Echelon".
Note that graphics are licensed under CC-BY-4.0, which means if you're using this on your blog you have give attribution to Twitter Inc (most likely in your footer).

No, thanks under these circumstances.
Like he probably thought he would't screw up the same way Ulbricht did?
Making & mending clothing, fashioning tools, etc... that was part of barely scraping by a living. In many climates clothing was necessary to survive.

This is also part of why people worked 16+ hours per day. Washing clothes, mending tools, caring for animals, washing dishes, cleaning the house, ... washing machines, dishwashers, electric ovens, all these labor-saving devices are the big difference between subsistence families with no time, and you today with lots of time.

Originally you did it all yourself. You have a sheep; you shear it, your wife spins it to thread and knits, your children help along the way.

This, by the way, is really where the family unit comes from. Running a household plus making a living used to be a full-time job for several people.

Then, yes, the weaver appears. Maybe the weaver is a shepherd. I have wool; I'll make you a shirt if you give me enough potatoes and cabbage to eat for a week.

The freedom to not grow/gather your own food is how the trades came about.

To my understanding, at least.
This is a repost of an old article about the Sugar parsing library. This parsing technique uses shift/reduce (much like YACC in some ways) and precedence techniques and handles infix, prefix and postfix operators. It also handles confix operators (read the article!)

Overall, a good read, and I'm glad that ProgramMax decided to rehost this article from Douglas Gregor.
Welcome, Ali
Q&A with Mark Zuckerberg (archived)
> Particularly at the level of last-mile infrastructure, it's inevitable that there's going to be a monopoly on high-speed service. So it makes sense for it to be built out by the municipalities themselves.

Both sentences are debatable. Regarding the first sentence, it's possible that the optimal firm count in some communities and especially sparsely populated areas is one (i.e. an actual natural monopoly), but in most communities I would expect it top be at least two or three, since broadband can be delivered through phone lines and cable television lines (which most communities are wired for). There are obviously other feasible media, like power lines and wireless. Could you explain why you believe that last-mile infrastructure is inevitably a monopoly?

Regarding the second sentence, it's debatable that government control is a good solution even in situations where the optimal firm count is one. An ideal government solution may be better than the average private solution, but likewise the ideal private solution may be better than the average government solution. We ought to compare the average case for both solutions, which is to say, the actual outcome we can reasonably expect to get given our specific inputs (our system of government, existing infrastructure, market demand, etc.). I won't claim to have any convincing evidence either way, but I'm not so confident that a government solution is obviously going to be better than a private solution, even in a true natural monopoly.
"hears you from across the room - connected to the cloud"

No, thanks.
I think you have misinterpreted Paul Graham's "Do things that don't scale.".
FBI Arrests SpaceX Employee, Allegedly Ran Silk Road 2.0
If you tried using the barcodes, what you'd find is that before the mid-90s, many publishers did not make the barcode match the ISBN. Although the book has an ISBN and a barcode, the barcode data is for some alternate publisher/bookseller system. It was very frustrating to realize this when cataloging my books around 2000.
That checked exceptions aren't nearly the boondoggle they're made out to be.
Lollipop, the Latest Version of Android, Is Grown-Up and Accessible
Everyone should note that he worked at SpaceX for 5 months..
Zuckerberg: Here’s Why Facebook Forced You to Download Messenger
The more technology integrates with us the less freedom we have and the stupider we become.
Antarctica is personally very important to me and I've done a lot of research on it, there are some great old old videos made by the USG when they did a survey down there. I too hope to visit it some day, jealous you already have it planned!

But please please please upload the footage, I would love to watch it.
Everyone else scoffed, pointed out their use of AdBlock

If your entire class was running AdBlock, then your sample is far from representative of the general population.

There are two ad models that work in my opinion

The thing is, opinions don't matter in this game, facts do. Do you really think major brands like Coca Cola or McDonalds or Ford spend such astronomical sums of money on advertising without being pretty good at knowing what returns they get?

You might think that no-one really buys a car because of the product placement where the successful business owner drives that model in their favourite TV show, but you'd be wrong.
Python Forensics – SQLite Investigations
I just had an interesting experience interacting with a CTO who writes a blog. (If he is okay with it, I'll post his name later.)

I was between jobs, and I asked myself, "Where do I want to take my career next?" and I decided that I wanted to move in the direction of Big Data and Analytics. I already knew of an analytics company that was doing cutting edge stuff with Kafka and Storm, so I sent the CTO an email (I had briefly met him once before at a Meetup). He said "Yes, let's talk" and we scheduled a talk for 1 week in the future. I had that week mostly free, so I decided to spend that time studying the company. And I was amazed and how much I could learn about the company, because this is pretty much the first company I have ever applied at where the CTO writes long, thoughtful posts on his personal blog.

I have worked at WineSpectator.com and Timeout.com and ShermansTravel.com, and even though all of those are publishing firms, none of them have any public information about their technology (this is changing, slightly, in the case of Timeout.com). With each of those companies, I basically went in blind, with no idea of what they were doing.

In contrast, the analytics company was transparent: they had released some important software to Github, so I was able to review the code, and read the issues that other developers had raised. They had also started a mailist on Google Groups, so I was able to read over dozens of public conversations regarding the strengths and weaknesses of their technology. And the CTO posts 2 or 3 posts each month, to his personal blog, most of the posts being long and in-depth. I read everything he had written during the last year, and so I was able to get a good sense of why he had made the decisions that he had made (why use Kafka and Storm) and where he'd like to evolve the company's technology stack.

Because of all that, I felt like we were able to have a high-quality conversation (via both Skype and email). I didn't need to ask stupid beginner questions like "So, uh, what do you guys do?"

The argument against blogging is similar to the (now largely discredited) argument that used to be made against open-sourcing one's own technology: if you give away the company's secrets, then your company has no unique advantages. I can recall, during the 1990s, people would look at you like you were crazy if you suggested you were going to give away part of your technology. But over the last 20 years, the whole tech industry has become much more comfortable with the idea of open-sourcing some of a company's technology.

Having a public blog is a bit like having a public open-source project: it raises your exposure, and perhaps even facilitates the process whereby others can help you. And the limits of both strategies are the same: I think it is rare for a company to open-source 100% of its technology, and I think it would be rare for a CTO or CEO to share 100% of their thinking on a blog. But sharing part of the technology, or part of one's thinking, can clearly have benefits.
If you're interested in having someone help you make those projects prioritized and structured, and to help keep you accountable to making progress on them, let me know.

It's part of what I do for people, I help them actually get to these types of projects and feel like they're redeeming the time that they have.
I've been meaning to do that and of course never got around to it. I plan to review the video before I head out there, so I'll be in a good position to put it online. Contact me via email (in profile) and I can send you a ping when I do.
The second type is not new, eg the original Soap operas.
A cute game to train your ear to hear English and click on a square to show that you heard that particular sound.

If you choose correctly, you will eventually reveal an underlying picture. If you choose improperly, you get a beep.

Even as a native English speaker, I lost focus a few times and clicked the wrong square. It can also be a good "attention" training game as well.
I think "Good News for Bitcoin" should be attached to a little trademark icon every time the phrase is uttered.
I would starting blogging and redirecting your SEO clicks back to your personal site. I did that and it has been working well for me

Example, I wrote a django article a year ago, and if you google Django development it is #3 in the search (at least from NYC/NY today with fresh browser (no cache))

https://www.google.com/search?q=django+development&oq=django...

I didnt intend for this to be the case, but luckily I have gotten freelance clients this way.
Likely the International Geophysical Year http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Geophysical_Year#...
As long as your phone's on, it can store whatever data it wants locally and shoot it off to Google/Apple/wherever so they can accomplish their nefarious purposes the next time it connects to the internet. If you're not extremely uncomfortable with the idea of a megacorporation leveraging your cellphone to gather info about you, you should also not be uncomfortable with Echo -- it can't do anything your phone can't already do.
I made a joke like that on Slashdot once and the black helicopters did show up. Well, the Secret Service, anyway.