skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I cannot upvote this hard enough.

It is purely a tax decision on how this person is hired. If they worked there as a w-2 employee, would the OP be similarly hand wringing?

Contract to Hire is a very normal way to hire.
Subcontracting at least SOME of the work is actually a sign of specialization, and can create much better work then just doing everything in house.

The OP has no idea how the style he likes so much was actually created. It could have been created by a Slovakian national working on an internship for all he knows

If you want quality signoff agreements, then make those. Don't get all scared the first time you find one part of the project is not 100% done by staff that's been there for decades. It's a company. It hires people. That's what makes a company different than a freelancer.
We Must Make Freedom Our Goal
A deductible (present in most systems I've used) minimizes this buffet style spending.
sans buying the book (which I now would like to), can you provide an example of a well patterned home as you did for Colonial/McMansions?
Ahahahaha no. Have no never wondered why standards bodies (which decree official weights and measures) are operated by governments? Many times throughout history, measurements of everything from land area to the standard weight of coins have been adjusted by governments to suit their policies (sometimes in the interests of fairness and trade, sometimes in the interests of refilling the treasury or paying an army).

Certainly, one can turn to science and make objective statements about both mass and purity. But unless you have melting facilities and deal in raw metal (rather than stamped coins) there is no advantage in this. As a hypothetical sovereign individual, you'll lose out when trying to trade raw metal because without the word of an independent (and government-licensed) assayer the buyer will discount the value of your lump'o'gold to allow for the possible unreliability of your claims about purity and weight. Most people don't have the facilities to assay precious metals themselves, so they rely on a third party to certify such claims; the implied social contract stamped into a coin or ingot has much greater value than the actual metal itself.

Please, look into some history of money. currency abuse is not a recent phenomenon by any means.
Thanks, fair enough. Maybe I misinterpreted something I read - I guess a couple of hours is still a hell of a lot quicker than raising money via angels or VC, so it could be that. Or maybe it was the other way around, i.e. the founders have to decide more or less immediately whether to accept the investment at the proposed valuation?

Not that any of this technical detail is especially interesting or relevant, I suppose. :)
I don't think they were wrong or that you overreacted.

The thing about design firms that have a very distinctive look is that they have probably taken the time to refine and largely automate the design process (Photoshop actions, etc.) Take for example Metalab (which I would guess is who you hired, as they immediately came to mind as fitting this mold): all their work looks nearly exactly the same; I can spot one of their sites on first glance. When you have as refined a style and spec as they do, you can probably get freelancers to make you designs which conform to the spec pretty well.

The bottom line is that companies like them (not saying they do this because I don't know, but it's as good an example as any) don't make money by doing crappy work; they make it by sticking to a token style. If they can get somebody to duplicate that style using their tools and guidance for cheaper than they pay employees, why wouldn't they? You get what you wanted and they make more money -- everybody wins.

You're entitled to react however you like, obviously. If you wanted a staff member and would feel unsafe about using a freelancer, that's your prerogative. My point is simply that the company probably arranges it such that it doesn't matter in the long run (except to their profit margin).
Your example and "begs the question" are different cases. In your example, when people say "it doesn't follow that" they mean one can't draw the following conclusion from what has been said. That's the same meaning as in the technical sense. The only difference is that in a technical context, there's a whole lot more evidence backing up the statement. It's a difference of degrees, not fundamental meaning.

On the other hand, "begs the question" is a logical fallacy in the technical sense; it means someone has assumed what they were trying to prove. It has no relationship with "raises the question." They're not trying to say the same thing.
: EZUnsecured.com Review - Jade Rock Enterprises LLC - PPMP Group 
If you need Unsecured Financing, go to EZUnsecured.com - They are the best Unsecured Financing Consultants still in Business and they helped me out big time last month when I needed a Loan. I was looking for Reviews on them and I found this one that explains it a little better since I don't have time to sit here and write a Press Release on them
Ahh. Interesting bit of clarification. In either case, it's hard to argue as everything is theoretical at this point. Maybe they could not have justified taking on your project at all if they didn't farm it out to this freelancer.

So, for your budget (and I'm way over simplifying here) you could have gone elsewhere and gotten work more or less of the caliber of this person working through a lesser firm, or gone to this name-brand firm where the work would not have been done by an a-lister, but the project management and creative oversight would have been handled by them. Theoretically, they would have ensured an outcome on-par with their reputation, even if they potentially had to do some internal re-work if her output wasn't up to snuff.

This sounds, to me, like the scenario where the design firm was trying to expand their business a little bit and was doing so on a trial basis, with you and her both effectively as guinea pigs. I've seen this work really well and really poorly. If their signature is at the point where it can be easily reproduced under guidance, then you missed a good opportunity. If their style cannot be implemented by anyone other than these 4 or 5 people, you got lucky.

If I had to flip a coin though, I'm guessing you gave up a good opportunity here...
I don't think the OP has any idea what amount of work the non-outsourced people in the project would be doing. For all he knows, the style he's talking about is the only thing the non-outsourced people ever do, and the rest are all code monkeys who do all the grunt work.

If you hire a company, and like their output, you're very likely overreacting if you find out they outsource regularly after signing on the dotted line. I mean, you know that 1/2 the stuff you get in a restaurant is created in factories, frozen then shipped there, right? Or is that fraud because everything wasn't created on premises.
Uh, isn't this --- respectfully --- ass backwards? The benefit of going national is that you greatly expand the risk pool. All I know about insurance I got from listening to Robert Schiller's financial markets class on iTunes, but, I'm pretty sure that's how insurance is supposed to work.
It's not inappropriate. The point is that when people perceive something as free, they intrinsically opt for the most expensive option. They also will get costly tests and procedures that have at best an extremely remote chance of being useful. The whole reason tort reform, which the original author did mention, is needed is because doctors know this and then prescribe expensive, unneeded tests simply to cover their asses. Between that perverse incentive (which he did address) and the patient's lack of fiscal accountability, enough people have an MRI done every time they sneeze to have a huge impact on health care prices.

When insurance companies instituted even very small patient copays on non-generics, usage rates of generics skyrocketed. Just having to pay $5 more (for a product that actually costs hundreds more, but is chemically identical) aligned people with their economic incentives and caused a massive shift in consumer behavior.

Brand name pharma companies fought back by giving vouchers to doctors to pass out to patients that covered their co-pays. Brand name medicine market share went right back up. Insurance companies have no effective way to combat vouchers and are forced instead to raise health care rates.

Also you're just plain wrong because you're applying rational thought to people who are in a panicked state. When someone has a health problem, they'll do anything and everything to fix it. We all value our own lives as effectively worth infinite dollars, which makes any treatment rational from our perspective. Society, on the other hand, cannot afford to be so generous.
You overreacted.

If you want quality guarantees, make those.

If you want a certain style, specify that.

Otherwise, calm down, breath easy, and be aware that companies sometimes hire people. Actually, that's pretty much the definitive factor between hiring a company and hiring a freelancer: The company is made up of multiple people, some of which you may not know.
You'd be surprised what people with any talent at all can do under the thumb of their betters. I'm with the other responder thinking you likely just missed out.
He didn't hire a consultant. He hired a consulting company. BIG difference.
Envisioning Development: What is Affordable Housing?
Mouth-breathing teabagger reasoning: It's soshullism, therefore it must suck. Also, Canada's cold and Europe can't decide on a common language, so no point taking those people seriously.

I also find it odd that these people can focus on the comparably miniscule problem with the Canadian and British systems, while completely ignoring the glaring faults of ours.
I don't know if this helps, but a search for adsense competition (on google no less) brought up the following:

http://www.associateprograms.com/articles/208/1/Adsense-Comp...

Which has a list of different things like adsense you could use. Out of curiousity, is there any reason why you can't switch to using these companies for advertisement? I can see how google has a complete monopoly on ad-words, but surely adsense is a free market.
touche, but President Obama is commander-in-chief, and he hasn't wavered from his stance, even when voting against the Iraq war as a senator.
LABjs : Loading And Blocking JavaScript
People who run lotteries do not think that the lotteries are stupid. I know a lot of people who work in the gaming industry, you can trust me on that.

Some may think people who play the lottery are stupid. There's a very big difference.
If you make it legal to optionally sign away your right to sue, then everyone will lose their right to sue, except for the few adverse venues of last resort (public-funded hospital emergency rooms, perhaps) that won't be able to decline services.

The same thing happens with the "let people shop interstate for insurance" idea. If you look just a couple moves ahead into that game, you see that that proposal is just cover for "adopt the lowest common denominator of insurance regulation nationwide", because every rational insurance company will simply move to Alaska or Wyoming or wherever regulations are least onerous.

The exact same thing happens in banking, which is why Charlotte is a US banking hub.
Steve Souders - High Performance Web Sites
A pre-approval may cost $10-20. An unnecessary procedure may cost $1000. If you cut admin costs by $100 at the expense of $1000 in unnecessary procedures, you will lower the percentage of overhead quite nicely. You will also be wasting $900.

Is there any reason to believe the (highly competitive) health insurance market is far from the optimum overhead/healthcare ratio? If you know better, why don't you build a startup to exploit this and get rich?
Aww, after I saw the integration examples I got my hopes up for a Show Steps for this...

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=integrate%5Bexp%28-t%28...
You are partially right. Not about the banking system (which is as much a joke and tool of the NK government as the currency), but insofar as you are better off if most of your assets are in the form of rice or some other physcial commodity. On the other hand, it's pretty likely that having more than a certain quantity of any commodity outside a government-operated warehouse is classified as 'illegal hoarding' and would be grounds for confiscation and imprisonment. North Korea practices such an extreme form of socialism that private property is a meaningless concept there. For all practical purposes it is a feudal society which claims all people, land and commodities as state property.
But can you honestly say that something like Facebook would have gained the critical mass it had without essentially starting out as an Ivy league "Myspace" in an era dominated by Myspace and Friendster?
Where was this when I was working through Calculus 2...

Kids have it easy these days.

Seriously, this is really cool.
Good easily forgot idea. Thx.
I'm not surprised, and I'm glad Google has cut them off.

Every article I checked on studiobriefing.net appeared to be a direct, word-for-word copy of an article also found on contactmusic.com. This is easy to verify just by cutting and pasting sentences from the articles into Google.

Google is extremely vigilant against such blatant content duplication + ad spam, and for good reason: it muddies search results, dilutes advertising value, and really pisses of the original content provider.

Will any of us miss this parasitic, ad-ridden web site?
Schneier on Security : The Security Implications of Windows Volume Shadow Copy
The Problem with Patriotism/Nationalism
Savage 2: A Tortured Soul - Real time strategy game for Linux
Priceless:

This is pretty nice I would like to see the interface
enhanced so I could enter several math problems at once (for
example: Chapter 7, problems 1-19 (odd)) and have the output
in a printable / customizable format (ie a script font that
looks like my handwriting).
I wonder if they manually check all the letters...would take too much work I'm thinking, so how can they check for spam or bots that auto send lots of them with spammy messages? (you could send varied spam messages as well) EDIT: didn't read the part about 1 card only
Just to play devil's advocate, here's a mind bender for you: we should be grateful to that asshole.

Until you or I get cancer, that is.

Last I checked, the probability of you and I having at least one life-threatening health problem in the next 100 years was pretty close to 1.0.

What's actually happening, regarding that asshole, is that you're paying 95% premiums for 85% care. It gets worse than that, because the 15% being shaved off is at the high-cost end, which is precisely where you need your insurance.
The article Bruce's post was based on http://blog.szynalski.com/2009/11/23/volume-shadow-copy-syst... was linked on HN 2 days ago, but got no comments.
Another problem with the idea is that the investor approving your founder visa has additional leverage over you. This extra leverage will take the form of lower valuations, lower investments, and (even more) investor friendly terms.

For proof, look to H1Bs. H1B employees are paid significantly less than non-H1B employees. Don't like it? STFU or go back to your home country.
Can you verify that studiobriefing.com is copying contactmusic.com's content and not the other way round?

I don't have a vested interest either way, but I would be interested to know what your method is for proving that one site is copying the other instead of vice-versa...
Did the title get edited or something? It seemed absolutely clear to me, and I don't even see IMDB mentioned anywhere?
All of the articles I've seen thus far on studiobriefing.net are scraped verbatim from another source, assumedly celebrifi.com. This is against Google's terms of service, and this activity is likely to result in a ban. Instead of whining about how Google is persecuting an innocent website, these guys should have an honest discussion among themselves about what they are trying to do with the website and why their activities might have pissed off Google. Or they should hire competent in-house SEO help. For a 2k monthly retainer, I might be available, as long as I can telecommute (I don't want to move to SoCal).

There's usually a reason for Google bans. It's best to address this reason directly and honestly instead of stirring up drama. If the entirety of HN became consumed with righteous indignation, Google still wouldn't reinclude a low-value affiliate spam scraper site.
How Robber Barons Hijacked the Victorian Internet
How much water do you need? Are we talking a pond or the Caspian Sea in space?
CCL is supposed to have nice bridge to Objective-C and Cocoa on OS X. It also compiles very fast compared to SBCL and supports threading on Windows (which SBCL does not).
> high taxes on the land you're using, government not allowing you to bury lines below roads and other obstructions, and similar regulatory issues.

Citation?

Honestly, I'd think that the main reason that telegraph lines could only profitably be installed along railroad lines would be because of maintenance concerns.
ActiveRecord is a small part of Rails. Lots of people use Rails without using ActiveRecord.

See http://whitepages.com for an example.
Yes, the domain was originally imdb.com.
I completely agree.

There's an additional problem with this proposal - may great startups don't feel they need investment, which allows them to avoid VC's or hold out for favorable terms. From what I've read, this trend is increasing, and I'm pleased to see that founders with technical backgrounds are gaining power relative to investors with expensive watches and MBAs.

But with this proposal, investors would control more than money - they'd control the right to reside and work within the United States.

I don't enjoy being so cynical, but having witnessed the abuses of the H1B, I am absolutely certain that VCs would use this visa to gain power and push around the founders.
I cannot imagine what you could do to "de-risk" a company with zero capital, zero customers and zero product.
Much of the ER flooding comes from two sources:

1. Uninsured people who go to the ER because they legally can't be turned away there.

2. Panic attacks. Untreated anxiety/panic disorders are a huge burden on the hospitals. Most repeat panic visitors have never had a specialist (a) tell them what they're experiencing, and that it's non-fatal (and that there's absolutely no benefit in going to the ER for a panic attack) and (b) prescribe them medicines that can actually help them. Any guess as to why this is the case? Because those people are uninsured.
A better solution would be to just fix immigration. Adopt something similar to the Commonwealth point system http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highly_Skilled_Migrant_Programm..., where you get points for being young, educated, in a useful profession, etc. Get enough points and you're automatically allowed in.

A system like this would reduce the distortion, and allow talented people into the country to bootstrap or e.g. work at Google.
North Koreans in shock as cash is 'banned'
I don't think this is the #1 issue with health care, Matt.

I think the #1 issue with health care is that virtually all market health care in the US is provided through insurance companies who collude with providers to set prices.

It's hard to convince me that our big problem is that people are paying for unnecessary care when we have no idea what care costs. Per-service cost numbers are arrived at via allocation schemes based on bulk purchase agreements between hospital chains and giant insurers.

Unnecessary care certainly is an issue, but how do you rank it when you don't know what an MRI, a hospital bed, an ambulance ride, or an appendectomy should actually cost?
John Andrews: With the Proper Resources….
Every time I see both a complaint about Google's ad policies and learn any facts about the case beyond whiny blog posts, it somehow turns out that the complainer broke the rules of the agreement - and often quite flagrantly.

This case certainly doesn't break the trend.

As a web-geek, am I supposed to feel bad that someone failed to game the system?
Never give up.

Never surrender!
Interesting: "Each core can run a separate OS and software stack and act like an individual compute node that communicates with other compute nodes over a packet-based network."

I'm going to ding them a few points for trying to birth a new acronym though.
Well, gmail IS pretty good at filtering spam
Why is technology important?
I just get the message that I haven't install a flash plugin....
As I just commented on over here[1]

Just before our exit, we ran our company from a condo. Here are some
pictures under 'Environment'[2]. One major upside for us working in
residential space was the cost. Electricity, rent/condo fees, parking,
and internet fees are all less expensive than commercial rates. As well
owning residential space is far less expensive than owning commercial
space.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=972838
[2] http://www.igeejo.com/blog/default/photos
Google is not required to provide customer service. If "SEO" is important to you, I recommend rereading Google's terms of service and landing page quality guidelines. Google Webmaster Tools is the best way to get feedback on your particular site, though I don't recommend using it on every site in your network.
Anything is better than Borders' page (except possibly a blank one)... even a rather cold, drab, boring error page that at least describes the error (we are over capacity, sod off) would serve better. I don't think we really need to do any extensive focus group testing to agree on this much...
Anyone know why they're doing this?
Don't be naive. Sure, if you have a small sum of gold buried in the yard, it can hold its value through times of political uncertainty. But to exercise any meaningful opposition to a despotic government, you need to be rich ( in order to pay people to do your will) or well-organized (in order to urge them via the media). In the former case, you can be taxed - governments levying taxes on the very wealthy usually goes down well with the much poorer majority - and in the latter, you can be declared a subversive and censored.

You might find it instructive to examine the history of ancient Rome around the time of Nero and Caligula. If you find history books dry reading, get a copy of 'I, Claudius' which presents the history of that period in narrative form and is both educational and entertaining.

This is not to say that opposition to a tyrannical government is hopeless - indeed, history with littered with examples of such leading to revolution. But currency alone is a weak check on a determined oppressor. And (as we are sadly reminded by news from Africa on a regular basis) revolutions often result only in a change of players, but the game remains the same.
I agree with this big time. I hate increasing the "vocabulary" of my program unnecessarily.
If Google won't let them open any new accounts, CAN they still open a Google Webmaster Tools account?
Insurance companies don't directly pay for the total costs of pre-approval so they optimize to minimize personal costs independent from the total cost to the system.

In other words doctor's offices don't bill them for the time a sectary spends filling out their forms. Which means doctors include that overhead cost as part of the cost of procedures. Also while each insurance company's internal system is streamlined each doctor's office needs to deal with several companies’ which increases their overhead costs even more.

It's like a large game of Prisoner's dilemma where several people have already defected. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoners_dilemma

PS: A doctor making 200k/year spending 5 minutes on a pre aproval cost's someone more than 10$. The patent needs to show up which costs them even more money etc.