skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Partly, my rate as a freelance developer is to cover four things that generally would be paid by an employer, but which I (personally) don't consider directly billable when free lancing:

1. Times I'm not working, the effort of finding clients, etc. A standard job ensures that I have work next week (at least, in general) and comes with much longer lead-ins to periods that I'm not working for them, so I don't have to charge (as much of) a regular employer to cover that situation.

2. Training and research. Keeping my skills up-to-date is something I've insisted from employers and just silently charge for when free lancing. Things like covering books or other training materials, sending me to conferences, etc. (In essence, you're paying my 20% time and reading materials during the hours I bill for rather than during the hours I'm 20%-ing or reading.)

3. Most employers will provide some kind of benefits, which I have to cover personally and which cost more as a freelancer. This causes not only my hourly rate to sound higher, but the employer to actually have to pay more, because generally companies get discounts on group insurance. (I'm rolling the differences in dealing with taxes in here.)

4. This one varies by person, but I don't charge for certain kinds of short communications, directly. My rule is generally that synchronous communications always cost money, and asynchronous communications with <15 min of my time invested don't. I find it's easier to just charge more on the core work hours than try to bill for the 30 ~2min emails you sent me over the course of the project.

Together, these make the free-lancing price sound higher, but actually comes out pretty close to what the cost-to-employer is, which is normally higher than the pay rate of the employee, once benefits, training, etc are factored in.
The Design Details Podcast
Funny, when Facebook force Messenger as a separate app, I uninstalled both... I'm using the web interface now, and though not great, isn't bad. As a result, I'm using facebook less, and the more emails I get from them, the less I want to use facebook. I can only speak for myself though.

I'm really hoping that more companies do spend time on their mobile sites/interfaces... because I can't be the only one that's starting to abandon the spyware apps in favor of mobile web.
or, they should be funded by charging the customers of their service with a price that is profitable.
> most production servers i encounter that serve google's copies of jQuery also serve GA. i know this because i have to manually allow those requests using RequestPolicy. yes, they're technically different products. but that wasn't my point.

so...when you said "in exchange for" you meant that some sites also use Google Analytics?

> check out: https://sites.google.com/a/chromium.org/dev/Home/chromium-se...

That's not a page of "Google's SSL-based tracking" methods. That's an attempt to enumerate ways browsers leak information.
FTFY: "sudo" code ==> pseudo-code
Visions of the World 1000 Years from Now
Not loading, but seems like it's referring to this: http://netflixroulette.net/api/
I Got 99 Problems but My Pitch Ain't One – Protecting the C-Band Spectrum
Thank you! Game of the Year!

I wish I had this in school. This might just spark a new interest in pure math for me.

...

I think I broke it: y = x^2 / ( 6000/t^(t*t) )
Times Square’s Biggest and Most Expensive Digital Billboard Is Set to Shine
Ah! Imagine my pleasant surprise when I discovered that ConTeXt has built-in features that you need a bunch of different LaTeX packages for. It was painless to, for example, flow text around figures.

The bad thing is... academic journals and conferences accept only LaTeX. Research articles often end up packaged in a larger work like a PhD dissertation. Amending markup from LaTeX to ConTeXt is painful. So one ends up using the inferior tool (LaTeX) for typesetting one's own larger work too, like I did :( (Though I used Koma-script classes instead of standard LaTeX classes.)
Those rates really don't seem all that high. I mean 250 hour * 40 hours/week * 50 weeks year = $500,000. That's kind of a lot. Except then the article itself mentions employees getting a few million a year in stock from Facebook or Google.

I feel like there exists a market for getting start-ups launched on the right foot. Twelve weeks (480 hours) for $1,000,000 with a bonafide rockstar to get your concept not only up and running but well designed to be carried forward. Do you guys think people would pay that? If no, how much do you think people would spend?

If your idea is good and the work is good it would easily be worth it. Of course proving that you can deliver ahead of time is more than a little difficult.
Australia, la ICNIRP sigue negando los efectos de la telefonía móvil
Because professional writers caught up with the times and use it to mean what everybody understand it to mean.
Hands-on Scala.js, Presentation at PNWScala
It is not just race but cultural as well. Brazillian Japanese who immigrated to Japan also face discrimination, even though they are ethnically Japanese.
I'd imagine, it's that the damage caused by massive inflation does not start and stop at what financial institutions would prefer. (For that matter, financial institutions would probably prefer a haircut on their Japanese bond holdings, over the 3rd largest economy going up in smoke.)
Did Google Shutdown ___________ Yet?
Harvard's endowment is $36.4B: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_University

Stanford's endowment is $21.4B: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_University

NSA's budget is ~$11B: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Security_Agency

The entire black budget is ~$53B: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/national/black-...
What I've read is that inflation in Germany in the 1930s was actually very usefull. They had an enormous amount of debt they were incapable of servicing. The huge inflation cut the debt to pieces very efficiently. The inflation was not the cause of German problems, it was a symptom of problem of having a too large debt. It is sort of like blaming the flu on the fever. The fever might feel bad but it is actually your body's way of fighting the flu.
Cisco hired a law firm to write a summary, which they made public: http://www.duanemorris.com/memo/VP8Compilation.pdf

TL/DR: VP8 was found not to infringe one patent. The other proceeding in the German courts was stayed until it was determined if the patent was valid. Before that could happen, Nokia and HTC settled all of their outstanding suits for some undisclosed amount. All remaining actions between those two parties were dismissed without prejudice (including the VP8 lawsuits). Separately, Google is still proceeding with two lawsuits in Germany to get the Nokia patents declared invalid.
It gets easier to envision if you think less of "apps" and more like "systems which will exist within an existing business which already has many, many millions of dollars flowing through it." If the new/improved system significantly increases how many millions flow through the business, then that is the only thing that needs to be said, right? After that it's just administrivia what sort of charging model gets worked out.

If you're an insurance company and you need a computer system to support adding a new line of business to your products available, there are very specialized programmers who can help you do that. (Or you can hire Accenture and, for a 150% premium, you won't need to know that any programmers were harmed in the making of your system.)

There are virtually infinite examples of this.
I would believe this, but where does it say that Google found the Chinese gained access to surveillance data in their systems after they discovered the Chinese had gotten access to dissidents' accounts?

> Your assertion comes from a statement that Microsoft later retracted (according to your article) and said was from an incident unrelated to Aurora.

Definitely. Microsoft was hacked to get a list of surveillance targets, but not as part of Operation Aurora.

> Most likely, it was some script-kiddie checking that he wasn't being monitored, and that Microsoft employee mixed it up with the Chinese attack.

A script kiddie? Unlikely. I mean... man, I hope our surveillance services can't be owned by script-kiddies...

Another example of a state sponsored attack on Microsoft surveillance requests is SEA who hacked into Microsoft to gain access to the team that does data intercept requests for the FBI.

Other readers, please be aware that lern_too_spel and I have a bit of a feud (I guess?). Please find our latest discussion here for context: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8614037
At a high enough rate (e.g. war time Germany, 1980s Brazil, Zimbabwe), hyperinflation will turn your nominal returns into next-to-zero real returns. Conversely, default doesn't have to be "we won't pay nothing". A country can partially default.
Perhaps you haven't seen parallax websites.
> Their historic sickening opposition to open codecs

What are you talking about? I'm not aware of any historic opposition to open codecs at Apple. Hell, they're still big into AAC, which is an open codec. And even ALAC is now open source and royalty-free.
Georgia Sports Injury Claim Attorney
Thanks for the link! I'll check it.
Did YC shutdown yet? It sure seems a lot of them YC companies fail, so...
I mostly listen to albums start to finish from my own largish collection (~90 GB when encoded as 192 Kbps AAC), so I can't really comment on the consumer experience. As for the artists, Taylor Swift's stance reminds me of Metallica and Garth Brooks. It kind of saddens me that they focus on this kind of nonsense, rather than the myriad ways the industry screws its own artists.
Probably you should read another version of how inflation "helped" Germany. When you have hyper inflation like that it may be good for paying back your debts, but your creditors soon realize that their payments are worth nothing (because you just print paper, you don't create value like that), and you disintegrate all private investment in your country. Why do you think the Third Reich nationalized every industry out there?
I thought the licensing thing is not an issue if you switch to x264 (open source)? Better video also - smaller file size, less artifacts, doesn't desaturate the image.
Snapdeal ties up with FINO Paytech to set up e-commerce stores
at least, post a link
Jcabi-aspects – Useful Java AOP Aspects
I think the point here is that we don't see this kind of research because nobody invest in these super fast and expensive workstations that could mimic the future hardware.

I don't think speech recognition algorithms are patented. At least not the Google ones, since AFAIK they use neural networks. You could train your algorithm centrally and then ship all the neurons, weights and biases of to the individual device and keep the training data secret.
I'm the lead engineer and founder of http://OfferLetter.io - We guide engineers (and designers and PMs) by helping them navigate the "last-mile" - that is, the offer selection/negotiation process - in exchange for a fee from the candidates. (We got brief shoutout in the article along with Dave and our friends at HackMatch)

I want to specifically address 1) Sam Altman and 2) Chris Fry's respective points about the problems with regards to models that align with the candidate more directly (like ours):

1) Much respect for Sam, but he's dead wrong with respect to the 'negative selection' problem - yes, good people have no problem finding work, but the key problem is that the opportunity cost remains phenomenally high for suboptimal decision making. We have actually worked with outstanding engineers who are at YC portfolio companies, simply because they wouldn't have known how to get what they're worth otherwise and push for more. And Sam is missing the point entirely with regards to worth - people in the industry are not getting paid based on their merit - not at all. The gender wage gap is perhaps the most stark example of this, but we see it, starkly, along many other demographic slices as well.

2) With respect to Chris Fry's comments - I was actually in Twitter's eng org when Chris raised the internal engineering referral bonus from 2.5k to 10k because the company wasn't getting the volume of quality people it wanted. Chris is a really great guy, but I find his point about "[at] Twitter, you get the best résumés on your desk already [via recruiting department, referrals, etc]" somewhat misleading - there's no way he would have raised the referral bonus as sharply as he did if he really felt that. In fact, there wouldn't have to be an referral bonus structure at all. Twitter is wonderful, and I loved my time there, but even there we weren't getting all the high-quality people we wanted.

[#plug: check out http://OfferLetter.io - we all deserve to get what we're worth]
Japan is a country with too many people saving too much money.

So, one proposal: institute a small yearly wealth tax.

Avoids a lot of the problems with inflation-based approaches, and doesn't penalize people nearly as much for having liquid assets.
You're thinking about it incorrectly. Here's what the $200/hr developer does:

Identifies business challenges and offers a custom-tailored solution that will generate more money than it costs. Then that said developer will effectively pitch their prospective customer from that angle.

A business, if convinced you're correct and capable, will be happy to pay $500,000 to a developer who will develop software that will make them or save them $1,000,000 in the next year.
It depends on your definition of "rockstar" but your pricing appears high.

To share an anecdote: I was having a chat with a HNWI who wanted to "get into startups" about the cost of launching a product that he was thinking about (something similar in complexity to OpenTable). He had very high estimates in mind, something along the lines of what you're talking about and half a year.

I told him it was probably possible to do it much faster by employing experienced developers at a high hourly rate but whose experience would drastically cut both mistake time and planning time. He asked me to get him a quote, so I contacted two guys I knew from the functional programming meetups, both with PhDs and recently published papers, both with half a decade experience in a big famous company based in Silicon Valley, both having worked with each other on consulting projects for years, and they spent a week drafting a rough, serious quote.

The estimate came to around 25-40x cheaper than what you're talking about, and two months (part-time, on the side of their research work) to launch + USD 2k/month post launch to maintain it with no new features.

Of course, the HNWI changed his mind (in part due to a co-investor on another project who objected to the "high" estimate and told him to use free or cheap fresh grads instead... welcome to the world outside the US) and I profusely apologised to my contacts for having wasted their time, but it did put an order of magnitude on the "high quality contracting" idea.
Interesting, though the readability problem from the original text has much to do with trying to justify text in a very small column, which means excessive spacing has to be used.
Actually, no. First, there is some legit content on TPB. Secondly, however (and more importantly, in this context), for an ISP to block content in one illegal case implies (in a legal sense, rather than a technical one) the ability to block it in all such cases, which then exposes them to liability for the illegal content they didn't block.

Effectively, the only sustainable way to maintain common carrier status is to maintain a deliberate ignorance of the legality — or lack thereof — of any traffic they might carry.
The big five U.S. Internet companies have doubled in the last 5 years
I think you can index even plain json columns, it just will be slower than jsonb.
Demonstrate how you're going to raise their revenues (and do it!) so that it when it comes time for contract renewal, your worth is easily demonstrable (you paid X in exchange for Y millions).

This is a nice theory, much promoted on HN by a few high profile posters a while back.

Unfortunately, it doesn't necessarily scale well beyond a team size of 1. This may or may not be a problem, depending on the kind of work you want to do.

It's also worth noting that if you're going to play that game, you need to be much more of an all-rounder than just someone with technical skills. This will suit some people very well, but it's not for everyone.

In short, demonstrating a direct return on investment is a safe and reliable way to convince clients of your worth if you have the option, but it isn't the only way.
is it faster than the native mux?
From what I gather (mostly through blog osmosis), you kind of fell into that career through the experience you had marketing BCC. How would you suggest someone do this intentionally, and in varying specialties?

That is, how do you decide to specialize in a marketable niche? Sure, if I already knew the marketing business I could probably worm my way into doing marketing contracting. Similarly, if I were an expert in cryptography I could start fielding requests.

What if, however, I'm just a proficient developer qualified in relatively mainstream technologies. By simple analysis of economic principles, I'm not highly valued due to the availability of general talent, so I have to subspecialize in some valuable niche. But how do I choose that specialty ahead of time? I can always choose an arbitrary specialty, but it's possible the demand isn't there.

My specialty, for example, may be in compilers, but I have an inkling feeling that being able to untwist some truly horrific legacy Win32 COM garbage may be the more lucrative endeavor. How do I test these theories without wasting a huge amount of time and money?
Wouldn't it be more accurate to say that neutrinos experience time normally, but observe everything else to be unimaginably slow?
This is fantastic. As long as Go isn't one of the things I'm happy.
He meant patent-free codecs, not open codecs. i.e. Vorbis, FLAC, Opus, Theora, VP8.
Because it's 4.367 light years away [1].

[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=distance+to+alpha+centauri
The point of this exercise isn't to suggest that Google is failing or on the verge of death itself (and I don't think many respectable people would make those claims). It just mocks the fact that they inevitably shut down a good portion of the (typically free) services they offer, and provides some warning and insight for people who are considering using one of these services in the long term.
Now if only I had a baked in solution for a replica set, with hot master failover and command forwarding in PostgreSQL like I get with MongoDB.

Quirky bolt-on solutions, and those requiring a contract with EnterpriseDB or others need not apply.

I really don't mean for this to be as snarky as it sounds... I'd really love these features in PostgreSQL along with PLv8, I'd rather use that than MongoDB... unfortunately having a good in the box solution for MongoDB over PostgreSQL is a bigger breaking point than lack of Joins in my use case.
Great book, though I recommend the SML version over C or Java for a clearer illustration of the concepts in code. Viewed side by side, the SML code looks concise and obvious vs. the long and wordy C/Java code. It just seems to lend itself better to the task, in that some of the pattern matching burden is already handled by SML.
I don't really get a sense from this article that Barlow is a double agent.
What a clueless site. They rank Chrome OS's chances as 'Sketchy' - clearly they have no idea what's going on in the education market right now. They also included a bunch of things shut down ages ago to pad the numbers.
Hey I do this too! Glad to see I'm not the only one who hated how they forced their users to download another app.
I'm the same way. I consider the album to be the fundamental unit of musical expression (although there are obviously plenty of exceptions). The Spotify interface on iOS is absolutely unusable for this. There is no way to assemble a music library and browse it by artist and then album.
It's pretty typical for Pivotal Labs to charge 500k to write up an MVP for a startup.
Yes, free codecs probably would be a better term. Open here refers not just to the availability of open source tools, but them being open for entry for any participant (including for example projects and individuals who can't pay any license fees).
THE COPYRIGHT MONOPOLY WARS ARE ABOUT TO REPEAT, BUT MUCH WORSE
Facebook developing a professional website, ‘Facebook at Work’
I didn't understand consulting until a post on HN awhile back. It was a friendly guy who liked to hangout and chat with fellow devs. While visiting a city, Chicago I believe, he met up with coffee with a guy possibly also from HN. They talked, went back to the office, and he talked with another employee for awhile. The guy in question I believe had a background in SEO so he just kinda shared what he knew for 2 or 3 hours. Then they shook hands and went their separate ways.

A few weeks later he e-mailed back asking how much he would have paid if that friendly chat with an official consulting job. The answer was around $10,000. Yes it was only 2-3 hours of time, but built upon thousands of hours of experience. And the changes they could immediately implement would generate more than $10k in increased revenue so it would easily be worth it.

My point here is that it doesn't matter jack shit how many hours are spent on a project or how cheaply it could be done. What's infinitely more important is how much money can be made. If you can get more money out than you put in and putting more money in means you get more out then you put as much in as you can afford. Now for someone to plop down a million bucks on three months worth of work means they'd have to be unusually confident in a project's chances of success. So that number I gave is pretty high. However paying big money to a seasoned vet to get the ball rolling makes an unbelievable amount of sense.
Becouse that is working quite nicely for Europe.
No. You can't create an index on a json column that will be usable for arbitrary containment queries which is the awesome thing provided by jsonb.

What you can already do however is to create a functional index if you always search for the same elements in your JSON bodies.

This will then run at the exact same speed as any other btree index (which is still faster than the gin indexes for jsonb), but at a considerable loss of flexibility (or a ton of storage usage).
This is a good read, though it curiously omits mentioning that the NSA's twiddling of DES's S-boxes turned out to have made DES stronger rather than weaker. That seems like a pretty important note in the story.

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Encryption_Standard#NSA.27...)