skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Miscellaneous comments on the article, from the perspective of a Greek-American who's lived some years in Denmark. Admittedly a bit disjointed and anecdotal, but then so was the article...

1. The biggest "contentedness" aspect imo is not only people's economic position, but extraordinarily high confidence in it. To compare with neighboring Germany, Germans are economically not much worse off, and their poverty rate is only moderately higher. But middle-class and especially lower-middle-class Germans feel much less secure about their status. In Eurostat surveys, something like 10-15% of Danes report worrying that they or a family member might fall into poverty, but it's ~40% in Germany (and higher in other parts of Europe).

2. I haven't found this part to be at all true: Newspaper editor Anne Knudsen had an interesting theory relating to why the Danes continue to respond positively to happiness surveys: “In Denmark it is shameful to be unhappy,” she told me.

It's possible this isn't what she means, but in my experience Danes are much more likely to be open about things like being treated for depression than Americans are; it's still seen as shameful in the US to a much greater extent. The social system also supports it, e.g. students or employees sometimes take off time due to mental-health issues or stress, and are usually pretty open about it.

3. I don't find the "Jante Law" particularly useful as an interpretative device for understanding Scandinavian society, at least in the big cities (I've never lived in Herning or Randers or such, so can't speak to them). The novel it comes from is mainly a satire of small-town mentality of the era it was written (the 1930s, when most of Scandinavia's population lived in such towns). Some parts are distinctively Scandinavian, but in my opinion most are not. For comparison, read Sinclair Lewis's 1920 novel Main Street, a satire of American small-town mentality, and you'll find a very similar mentality being parodied. And you still find it in the U.S. quite a bit; there's a deep suspicion in smaller town and rural areas of people who are perceived as thinking that they're "better" than their roots.
Those innocent who choose to fight are also greatly harmed by the current system of plea bargaining because as the linked article shows it's all about the conviction rate and not about the guilt or innocence of the accused and when the might of the state is brought to bear those innocent that decided to fight rather than to accept the plea are still convicted in suspiciously large numbers.

So plea bargaining as we see it at present does not appear to help those innocent who fight their cases. Because it's all about winning for the state, not about guilt or innocence.
Also on github: https://github.com/ivan-tkatchev/yalz77
Hey. I've been freelancing for about 5 years more or less. (Disclaimer: I did recently accept a job as an employee, but not for any reason that should discourage you. I think freelancing is awesome and expect to do it again at some point in my life.)

Copyright - Maybe a lawyer can speak to this issue, but my understanding is that you own the copyright to any work you produce until you indicate otherwise. In the context of freelancing, that means that you should have a clause in your contracts that gives your client the copyright to the work once you're paid in full. No explicit transfer needs to be made and nothing needs to be filed (unlike trademarks and patents).

Value of time - You should value your time according to the value you can produce and what you will be happy with. This is tricky, and others have written a lot about this (and have said it better than I could) so search Google for "hn increase freelance rates" and you'll get enough material to keep you busy for a while. Just one warning to add: Don't undervalue yourself! It'll kill your motivation and put you in a vicious cycle of unproductivity. Chances are the lessons you learn here will be learned the hard way (speaking from experience).

Contract - Rather than thinking of this as a legally binding document, you should think of it as an outline of the process you're about to enter into with your client. Use it beforehand to make sure you're on the same page about your relationship, rather than afterwards to try to protect your ass. How/how much/when will you be paid? What are you expect to deliver, and when? How are you going to handle disagreements or unforeseen problems with your client? How much availability should the client expect of you, and vice versa (just as important!). The answer to all of these questions should minimize the risks to both parties and set you up for success. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8976924 is on the front page as I write this and should get you started).

I could write about this for days, but I'll stop there for now :). If you have any other questions though I'd be glad to answer as well as I can.
If only this was true for sensor dust as well.
I did some web searching and found this recent article: http://www.cnn.com/2014/09/22/us/nfl-nonprofit-taxes/

So there is a little bit of shadiness going.
After you solve a problem Project Euler lets you browse through a giant list of solutions by those who have gone before. It's really fun to see and compare all the different approaches.

If I could do one thing to augment the project I would make it possible to filter previous solutions by language and/or author.

For example, if I'm learning rust, I would love to see all the rust solutions right there together.
Find medium to large sized businesses if you can - you want a client who has expectations inline with your professional services and may support a higher billable rate.

Smaller companies may have less savvy owners/managers who don't have an understanding of what you're doing, leading to scope creep (why can you "just" change this?) and miscommunication in time, quality (etc) expectations.

Set expectations clearly, especially ones that seem painful to bring up (especially time, budget constraints).
Top 15 Sites Built with Ruby on Rails – Part 3
It is not perfectly acceptable to claim "just works" if the user has to read documentation. It violates the definition of "just works" if you have to crack open the docs.
This. Flagged the submission.
I took a look at some of the poster's other comments and they were coherent. This one sounds like a Markov chain generator or dictation gone wrong.

Or mania. That's a possibility.

... Getting downvoted? Seriously? Anyone want to step forward and claim the original comment made perfect sense?
There is a good chance you will (initially) undervalue your time.

You are paid to know things and to find out how to learn things you do not know. You have to stay in constant training and re-learning. You are an expert in your field. Something you learned two or three years ago? You have to forget that and learn some other thing.

You have to own hardware and software. You have to buy health insurance. You have to save for a rainy day. You have to save for retirement. You want to go out to eat like normal people. You want to buy a house. You have to do billing. Not every client will pay. You have to hire an accountant. You have to pay taxes. You need to file papers with the county and form an LLC.

Are you going to work 8 hours a day 5 days a week? No, you will probably "work" 12 hours a day 7 days a week. Someone calls with work? Are you available? You have to get paid for being available.

Still think $40 an hour?

A few things I have learned (solo since about 1996 but spent the recession years 2007-2011 in a corporate job):

You are not a freelancer. Banish the word from your vocabulary. You are X. X being whatever it is you do/are. You are a company. You are a professional. That's just the work part. You are also a salesperson, a bookkeeper, a marketer, etc.

You will need some steady clients. Clients that call enough during the year(s) to provide some stability. You can't hustle for every single job. Relationships matter. How much stability you need, I can't say, but, ideally, you already have a jump-off client or two already.

You will have to do the numbers on your rate, but, I promise you, it is more than you think and more than you may be comfortable asking for, initially. Remember, your rate covers your availability, your expertise, your equipment, insurance, retirement, etc. If your salary is $75,000 that is not close to how much it really cost to put you in an office, with a computer, health insurance, matching 401k, etc. A company that hires the solo you is also paying for the flexibility to release you back to the wild at the end of a project without having had to hire you or fire you.

Value your time, your skills and yourself. You are a professional.
> You can design user interfaces that work for both, and mouse-driven systems profit from many of the UI changes that make for good touchscreen user interfaces — a clean, simple interaction design and large click targets, for example.

I don't think this is true. With a mouse, you can easily make very precise small movements, so a tiny button positioned right next to where you already have the mouse cursor (perhaps, for example, over another tiny button) is very easy to reach. A tiny button farther away is much harder to hit because you make larger and less precise movements to get there from where you were. The size of the target is not as important as its proximity to the cursor's current position.

On a touch screen, with no relative movement, the situation is pretty much the opposite: If you have tiny touch targets right next to each other, it's very hard to hit the right one, and you can't see if the cursor is positioned correctly before you click. If they're farther apart, it's easier to hit the right one, or at least harder to hit the wrong one. (And obviously larger targets are better.)
The Law of Jante is like institutionalized ego death, perhaps making Danes the first enlightened nation. Entertaining to consider, at the least.
It looked very intriguing, and I installed it, but the reviews for the Firefox version are really terrible. Just a heads up in case someone should also install the addon, but not catch the bad reviews.
People are predatory, and will use your licence to their full benefit. I feel like a jerk saying this, but this example is exactly why I licence my intellectual property under GPLv3 as much as possible. I retain rights, and others are forced to play by my rules lest they enjoy litigation.

But more importantly, if my work is stolen, I have legal recourse because they aren't releasing the source to their derivative work.
It's missing the essential keyword "We". I'd submit a patch but I'm too drunk right now.
"Groot" is Dutch for big; until I followed the link, I was wondering if it were actually about C++. (OTOH, that would be "grootste", wouldn't it?)
This is interesting because it raises the whole meta-question of -- could you have developed feature X faster if you'd already done refactor Y? In my experience the answer is usually "yes", but if you have a mostly-moribund code base already, then it's usually "no".

Hey, reasonable people can disagree! :)

EDIT: "You should not use it because you read about it on the Internet, or because it's the new hotness.". That's a bit of a cheap shot, at least when leveled at the posters in this thread, I think. Hopefully most professional developers are slightly more responsible than that. (Again, experience may differ, so...)
The Leauge Office is; the teams aren't. The teams make all the money, so it doesn't matter too much.

But it still doesn't make much sense for even the League Office to be tax-exempt. It doesn't meet any of the general criteria of operation for the public good. It would be hard for the government to address, since that status has a lot of history and the league has a lot of money and goodwill behind it. And there's some complication with player pensions or something. The best scenario would be for the NFL to give it up voluntarily; it wouldn't be a high price to pay to remove a common criticism.
Meh. Good effort, I guess.
Not all torrent files are illegal
Rosalind is a great way to pick up some bio along with your algorithms.

The instructors also created a course on Coursera called "Bioinformatics Algorithms" that I highly recommend. It's basically an ordered set of rosalind problems but accompanied by a textbook and lectures. It was one of the most interesting things I did last year.
>Yes. It was. It is. This disagreement by you is false.

> See, we can both do that. Fun.

Which immediately disproves your original assertion that the Windows 8 on the desktop was objectively terrible. That was just, like, your opinion, man.
I haven't tried cygwin in quite a few years, but I hear that it's improved a lot. Still a large installation though, but very useful if you must use windows.
It's an interesting question.

An arbitrary cut-off is indeed a strange thing to have, probably some element of practicality went into designing it. Where I live there are a number of courts where one can appeal, I personally think that the ideal would be a court where no conviction would ever be overturned should be the cut-off. We're definitely not there and that system isn't perfect (nor will it likely every be), but it is one of the reason why I am mordicus against the death penalty.

Too many cases got overturned many many years later and in plenty of those cases the accused had already been executed. See also: project innocence.

Justice systems will always be imperfect but regardless of that we should strive to improve them and find better ways to release those that are innocent as fast as possible (and, incidentally, to make them whole).

The state and its functionaries should definitely not be rewarded on metrics that might disadvantage the innocent.
> I don't think it's fair that a group of corrupted politicians get to decide the fate of a nation literally on the other side of the planet.

I'd suggest you direct that towards Russia then. You can't have it both ways. You can't vote to join Russia, and then complain that you can't use your US services. As common as it may be to think here, the internet and internet services are products. America doesn't ever have to let you use its products. The idea that you are now entitled to them because you've ever had them is a fallacy, and your anger is misplaced because of it.

I personally watch http://liveuamap.com/ every day. I think it's scary that a person could be trapped in their home by an invader. But it's Russia doing that, not America.
New account created in the last few hours. One post only raving about the OP. Hmmmm....
I've been freelancing for the last five years. I do web dev, so it might be different if you're a write or graphics designer or game programmer or whatever.

Really, however you and the folks you work with want to structure your work is how it is. There are things that are worse for you and things that are better for you, but it's a question of what you and your clients what more than anything.

As to the stability of contracts, they are only as good as the person signing them; generally if someone has given you money as a deposit, then there isn't a question about if the signature is binding, but rather what different parts of the contract might mean... the meaning of "functions in most browsers" or "has an easy to use method for adding XYZ" is really where you should be sweating.

That's typically the issue: usually the people I work with want things to be working well and done correctly, on a predictable schedule. Delaying delivery until payment is made is one strategy. A better strategy is to work with people and businesses you can trust... if you have a contract and there is no question about the quality of the work, generally enforcing a contract isn't something that requires lawyers.

The facts about negotiation apply to your rate: if your client will pay you $500/hr, then that is what your time is worth. Instead of worrying about what it is worth, worry about what you have to make in order to do the things you need to do (or, if you prefer, what your rate needs to be so you don't have to go get a job).

Generally, clients (end users, not, for instance, agencies) don't like hourly pricing for the same reason that I like it: it transfers the liability for additional changes or unforeseen troubles with the agreement.

So you might find that you're better off with fixed pricing, which involves knowing what your hourly rate needs to be and how many hours you expect will take to do the work, plus the cost of acquiring the client, plus a hedge for unforeseen work that will need to be done without issuing a change order. Multiply that time three, and then you'll probably not get too screwed by a contract :D
Solved up to problem 25 so far, https://projecteuler.net/progress=joshstrange
>> Right, wonderful, we could see how your story developed, if you had used line wrapping in your text editor. As is this diff is not at all informative.

https://github.com/mcwm/novel_story/commit/e50c8ca7c583a6599...
Since you're already familiar with C# you may look into ASP.NET, or even look into Websharper/F#.

Otherwise, I second the recommendation for Codecademy, for the JS/HTML/CSS or Ruby approaches.

Alternately, I quite like Racket's web tools; very easy to get started with a minimum of fuss. You'll want to know at least some HTML/CSS first, but once you get used to writing HTML with s-expressions it's hard to go back ...
This reminds me of the DUMBO Neural Cartography by a team at the Architecture School at Columbia: http://www.thecloudlab.org/dumbo_neural_cartography.html
baseline for freelance work is take your current (previous) salary and div by 1000 . 50K a year before? $50 an hour freelance.In reality you need more, but its a good "minimum" .

It actually may be more accurate to look at total comp: $50k a year + $12k in health benefits + $3k in equip + $4k in vacation + $1k in retirement benefits ~= $70/hr.
The creativity machine (2006) [pdf]
Great Looking Solar Power Is on the Way
This is brilliant. Love your description of the different platforms. I really don't think today's Ubuntu desktop is any worse than Windows. In fact, the Unity desktop is much easier to use than windows 8, which is thankfully going away.
You can see the source code of a previous iteration of the algorithm here: https://bitbucket.org/andrealanci/topicmapping/src
Freeddo Says Lets Meet Over Coffee
This is sort of tangential to the other issues being discussed (which I agree are important), but compared to the era of software distributed on physical media, today "Xcode is not installed by default" does not mean that much given that installing it only takes a few clicks in the App Store. Yeah, it's a few gigs to download, but Apple has always been forward-looking, and on a fast internet connection that's only five minutes' wait.

Not to mention that, also unlike then, it's easy to access tutorials and videos galore on the Internet to show you how to get started with development.
My Issues with Outlook for iOS
What do you need for a non-boring life? You can hop on the plane, you know, and be in any place you consider non-boring in a few hours.
This is really cool, if they can get a decent sample size I bet this will become quite enlightening. Until then, just cool.
He's talking about specs (indieauth and micropub) rather than a storage format, so it will not be trivial to change from one format to another in the future.
Yeah, but they have a concept. I really hope they follow through with it.
The map contained in this article may not represent the most scientific measurement, given that each street was mapped once by one person, but they had to start somewhere. This is a brilliant idea, though.

I've always been interested in the idea of collecting additional layers of information. Places are associated with emotions and we don't have any good ways of capturing that right now. I can think of several interesting future applications of this concept, given advances in technology and cultural adoption. It would be interesting to look at a map of the city and see where people where most happy, inspired or awed so that you could go there if you're feeling down. You could also get an idea of places to avoid, other than the obvious dark alleys. Law enforcement could map the emotional states of victims and suspects in space to better understand the course of events in a crime, or people could map their daily feelings of anxiety to better understand what triggers their own happiness. Employers could find out what areas of their office cause the most unhappiness (meeting rooms?) and the most relaxation, and potential employees could get an overall gauge of the stress level of a given work environment. It almost seems like something out of Star Trek. Someone pulls out their tricorder and says "We don't know what happened to the last people who beamed down here, but it says they were very anxious and afraid. Set phasers to stun."

There are questions about the general efficacy of measuring brainwaves, but receiving more information is generally a good thing. Biking seems like a good place to start, if only because people are already wearing bulky helmets so recording equipment won't look or feel too out of place. This concept obviously as a long way to go, but there's a lot of potential. Anything that allows people to see the world in a new way can have a big impact, even if it isn't immediately clear how.
Corporations already get higher returns than VCs

http://avc.com/2013/02/venture-capital-returns/
It seems like an interesting question: which would be the ideal unit for diffing? For software we just use the line of code, but for prose perhaps it would be by sentence? Should the VCS notice when sentences are transposed? It seems there could be more tool development in this area...
I find that if I look at features I write and ask "Could I have developed feature X faster if I had already done refactor Y?", then the answer is usually "yes" as well. The problem is that this isn't the question you're actually faced with when you make a decision (it is the question you're faced with when you're an engineer that actually has to write the code, which is why engineers and management usually differ on the worth of refactoring). It's "If I do refactor X, will it save time on the feature Y that I actually end up launching next?" And for that question, the answer is usually "no".

In other words, we suffer from hindsight bias. For any given feature, there is usually some combination of refactorings that will make it easier. The problem is that these refactorings are only evident in hindsight, once we've actually started to write the feature. If you speculatively do the refactoring, it surely will make some features easier to add, but those features are probably not the ones that you actually end up adding.

The way I solve this in my personal programming (where I am both engineer and manager, so my incentives are aligned) is to do any refactorings I wish I had immediately before writing the code. That way, I know exactly what I'm aiming for and exactly what will make it easier, and there's no guesswork involved. Over time, this also seems to produce optimally-compact code, albeit sometimes non-intuitive to someone newly introduced to the project.

Unfortunately, while this seems optimal from a project perspective, it runs counter to the incentives of both the engineers (who want to seem like really fast & reliable coders to management, and not say "This feature will be delayed because of decisions we previously made") and managers (who want to hear "This feature will be delivered tomorrow", and not delayed because of decisions previously made). Solving this incentive mismatch is an open problem; companies with technical management often do better at it but there's still a big information loss here.
Supporting evidence: https://github.com/mikar/hodor
How is it that they can stop you from displaying it on TV's larger than a certain size, then? I've always been confused about that.