Lenin's Body Improves with Age - <AUTHOR> http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/lenin-s-body-improves-with-age1/ <comment><USER2> I'm still amazed that this incredibly ghoulish display survived the fall of Communism all the way to this day.

<comment><USER3> Lenin was genuine. He did things out of perceived neccesity that many are critical of in hindsight, but few historians would argue Lenin wasn't actively trying to improve the lives of men. Many around the world have much respect for the man. This is a way that people honor him. The only reason to seriously object would be if it somehow went against his wishes.

<comment><USER2> In 1921, Lenin had his soldiers steal nearly all the grain produced on peasant farms, then distributed it amongst his soldiers and cronies while five million people died of starvation: [https://www.google.com/search?q=soviet+famine+of+1921&source...](https://www.google.com/search?q=soviet+famine+of+1921&source=lnms&tbm=isch)

When America donated enough grain to relieve the famine, Lenin deliberately prevented it from reaching the starving rural peasants.

Lenin, by the way, purchased no fewer than nine Rolls-Royce cars during his brief reign.

I'll give you that he was genuine. So was Hitler.

<comment><USER4> So was Sir Winston Churchill, by whose policy 10 mln Bengali people died from starvation. I see no difference between one greedy self-important politician and another. Its a pity we are defenseless in front of them.

<comment><USER5> It seems as though this was a murky situation that administrators/provincial governments did not understand was happening at the time (much less a central government back in London!)

Which would make it very different from the other famines being mentioned here.

(Also, according to Wikipedia the figures you cite seem to be a multiple of current estimates).

<comment><USER6> It's not like the British Empire didn't have any experience of dealing with famine in the colonies, though. In the previous century a quarter of the Irish population died in a famine and another quarter or so fled to the US.

It's not that I have anything against Churchill, but it's easy to come up with excuses for politicians or historical figures one would like to support while assuming both omniscience and ill-will of the others.

<comment><USER7> And 25m Indians in the late 19th C. The British had turned most Indian arable land over to cotton. The British food producing arable land had been turned over to wool. The market for Indian cotton collapsed when the superior American production recovered from the Civil War. The El Nino drought wiped out the remaining food production and what grain was produced was being exported back to the UK. They guarded from starving Indians with soldiers.

The same weather system flooded China, flood defenses had been neglected while the Chinese were fighting off European colonists. Another 25m starved.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> In case you were as curious as I was to see a picture of Lenin's body: [http://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/01809/Vlad_18094...](http://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/01809/Vlad_1809464c.jpg)

<comment><USER6> I've seen it in person. Rather than being ghoulish, it's thought-provoking - it's odd to see an actual historical figure in the flesh, if not the spirit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> It seems like a bit of a Ship of Theseus. Even at this point I wonder how much of what you see of his face can be said to be 'original'. But still people visit, as if Lenin is still there.

<comment><USER10> I wouldn't be surprised if nothing you can see on the exhibit is "original". First, they clearly admit in the article that they focus "on preserving the body's physical form—its look, shape, weight, color, limb flexibility and suppleness—but not necessarily its original biological matter. After 145 years, it's quite possible that everything was substituted. Second, Russia has a long tradition of creating a PR-pumped image of healthy, almost immortal leaders. That could be a natural part of such cult practices.

<comment><USER11> >Second, Russia has a long tradition of creating a PR-pumped image of healthy, almost immortal leaders.

Well, North Korea probably yes. But I haven't noticed such tradition in Russia.

<comment><USER10> Perhaps the immortality part was an exaggeration, but I was thinking about the way the Kremlin avoids admitting any health problems of the leaders. That happened in case of Yeltsin and allegedly in case of Putin's absence in March this year. Recently there was an interesting article about this "health PR" dating the tradition back to the USSR era, but I can't find it right now.

<comment><USER12> This is hardly unique to Russia - after all, FDR avoided being photographed from the waist down and wore special braces when standing and Kennedy had many secret health problems. I think this is more a fact of projecting an image of power in any society.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> If they could get him just fit enough to ride a horse shirtless, he could run against Putin ;)

</comment><comment><USER14> He reportedly wanted a private funeral and to be buried next to his mother.

I do wonder how they keep him from spinning.

</comment><comment><USER15> Wow theres a german article on a swiss site called "20 minutes" that is a complete rip of this article, it came out yesterday and is even titled the same. Unbelievably bold plagiarism.

</comment><comment><USER16> complete non sequitur but in the same vein (boosh) if you are into weird body stuff check out this guy:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Hunter_%28surgeon%29](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Hunter_%28surgeon%29)

</comment><comment><USER17> I wonder what their endgame is here. Seems like Sisyphus has met his match.

<comment><USER18> > I wonder what their endgame is here

MechaLenin.

Hey, it worked for Nixon and they only had his head in a jar, not the whole body.

<comment><USER14> No need to worry, if that happens we will just reactivate Jeremy Bentham.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Lenin is basically a love doll.

"Now, I am become love doll, the destroyer of men's opression" \- Vladimir Lenin, 2015</comment>


Delicious2google – Import Your Delicious Bookmarks To Google Bookmarks Easily - <AUTHOR> http://blog.arpitnext.com/2010/12/delicious2google-import-delicious-google-bookmarks.html <comment><USER2> Link to the actual export tool:

<http://persistent.info/delicious2google/>

</comment><comment><USER3> Other than Google, what are good alternatives to Delicious?

<comment><USER4> I wouldn't say Google is a good alternative, its social aspect is nothing compared to delicious.

I'm currently trying <http://pinboard.in> \- first views are good.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Privacy policy? Does this tool record the URLs it exports? Not that I'll trust what the policy says. This is the sort of tool that should ideally run on one's own machine.

</comment><comment><USER6> Export as HTML, import into Chrome. I gave my father verbal instructions and he had in done in about 3 minutes. Not sure it requires an external tool that I must trust to use.

<comment><USER7> You don't get your descriptions or tags that way though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Google bookmarks doesn't appear to have RSS feeds.

<comment><USER6> The way you're using delicious is how Google wants you to use Reader. I realized this when a bunch of upper classman always talking about sharing articles and links on Reader.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do you sell the software of a failed business? - <AUTHOR> Hello,
My parents attempted running a holiday-booking venture that didn't go anywhere. In the process, they had a fairly advanced web app built with things like custom refund policies and self-service registration for the hotels.
This web app cost a lot and it would be nice to get back some of that money, so how would you go about recovering the cost?
Any failed business sale forums I don't know about? <comment><USER2> Bespoke software is a bit like building a one-off car. Some chunks, like the basic framework (e.g. Rails ~= car engine) are commodity, but the bits that are custom aren't really worth more than scrap metal to other people unless their requirements are very similar.

And even then, if the people who were working on it aren't part of the sale, the new owners are going to face a chunk of cost just getting familiar enough with the project to alter it in the right direction. Most people will be better off starting from scratch.

Unless what's been developed is a fairly complete and self-contained solution to a common problem, I think it's hard to see it being worth much at all.

</comment><comment><USER3> The first thing to do is figure out if they have the legal right to sell it. If it was developed by a contractor the odds are very high that it is not a "work for hire" and the contractor owns the copyright, unless there was a copyright assignment in the contract. Saying in the contract that it is a work for hire is not sufficient.

(I am assuming this was in the US)

Google "computer software and work for hire" for more info. Sorry for giving no links, but I'm tapping this out on my iPhone while waiting for a take out pizza to become ready.

</comment><comment><USER4> Not an expert in this aspect at all, but you could always try a site like flippa.com...

From what I gather its just a place to bid on websites, apps, domains, etc.

<comment><USER5> Flippa is probably his best bet, but you'll usually only get a couple hundred, depending on the site's ranking and traffic. Better than letting the domain just expire though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Finding a large software player in that market (or a similar one) is a good way to find a buyer.

-Find out who sells the big management systems. They often have projects that may extend into your market. It's cheaper for a big company to buy existing code that can be rebranded than to start from scratch, especially if you're willing to be flexible.

-Find consulting shops that work in that space with larger hotel chains. They might be able to sell this in and give you a success fee.

-Find a "founder" with sales/marketing experience willing to take this on as a real project. Lots of non-technical people in the space have connections, but no capital/product. You're basically bootstrapping their company with technology investment.

-See if there are 'resellers' or marketing reps that sell similar systems in the space. They might be willing to help you find a company that can market & support the product for you.

-Be flexible on how you get paid. For example, provide the code to market for 24 months for a percentage of gross sales. That would mitigate the buyer's risk, while still providing you with upside potential.

My experience in buying sites is that without customers, it's basically a huge risk, so prices are very low.

</comment><comment><USER7> For a point of view from the buyer's side, you may want to check out these articles/interviews from Rob Walling regarding his purchase of HitTail.

You'll see what a buyer is looking for when they are looking to buy a site which is mainly that there are customers. If you have none, like other people have commented, it will be very difficult to sell the code for anything unless you just happen to find someone who is looking to build the same thing and could use your code as a shortcut.

Notice how all his due diligence questions are related to customers. There's nothing about the code.

I can't remember where I heard it, but I think in the Foolish Adventure he says the seller said she invested $1 million dollars into the site. Rob was able to talk her down to $40 or $50k because, in his view, he was only paying for the established customer base and Google page rank. Anything more than that and he would have been better off building himself.

If you don't have any customers, unfortunately, you're just going to have to accept that you're not going to recoup the investment. It's a sunk cost.

[http://foolishadventure.com/audio/online-business-for-the- re...](http://foolishadventure.com/audio/online-business-for-the-rest-of-us- rob-walling/)

[http://www.softwarebyrob.com/2012/02/28/the-inside-story- of-...](http://www.softwarebyrob.com/2012/02/28/the-inside-story-of-a-small- startup-acquisition-part-3/)

[http://techzinglive.com/page/921/165-tz-interview-rob- wallin...](http://techzinglive.com/page/921/165-tz-interview-rob-walling- hittal)

</comment><comment><USER8> "Holiday booking" (tour booking, <insert stuff here> booking...) is a pretty common need. You can trawl sites like peopleperhour.com and such to sell it to people looking for this type of site; and/or adapt it to people with similar needs.

</comment><comment><USER9> You could try flippa.com

</comment><comment><USER10> Unfortunately, there are thousands of sites for booking out there, although honestly, most of them just use Expedia's rebadging API. I don't think the software is worth anything. If the site has any level of traffic, though, selling the site can bring something in (although by someone who will just throw out the software and drop Expedia in to take advantage of the traffic) and there are sites for selling sites/projects/businesses.

</comment><comment><USER11> With difficulty. From around 2006-2009 I ran a hotel reservation business in six languages across China with 3,000 individual relationships, map integration, digital fax integration, custom call-center, etc. Didn't sell any of the software: didn't even try. Did, however, look at investors to take it to another market. Ultimately though, I just moved on. Despite the time spent, I look at it as cheap experience.

</comment><comment><USER12> Can you outline the app a bit more? I'm struggling to understand the target market.

What can the app do exactly?

Where was it sourcing its hotels / flights / hire car data etc?

<comment><AUTHOR> It was meant to be hotels in a single country, it's still operational at [http://bookinbulgaria.com](http://bookinbulgaria.com)

In this business, the big competitors all reserve a bunch of rooms in the hotels and manage their booking themselves. The hotel is then not allowed to touch these rooms.

The model here was to give the hotels a reception-desk piece of software and have them use it to maintain availability. A lot of the hotels that signed up had nothing like this, so it was definitely a win for them. Armed with exact availability, you can have a much better booking system (and of course, if the hotel only wanted to give you a chunk of their rooms, they're perfectly capable of doing that).

Hotels can sign up on their own (including local bank details, etc) and just need to be reviewed before showing up on the site. It supports i18n, scheduled payments, lots of bells and whistles.

The fact of the matter is that this failed because of market reasons (too small a market, dominated by big players, primarily) but it may have a niche somewhere else on this planet. :)

<comment><USER13> Is it possible to pivot into another market sector.

For example, holiday home rentals? bed & breakfast? car rentals? I think there is a lot of potential in the car rental market... e.g. allow private vehicle owners to rent out their vehicles. There are probably a few insurance details to work out, otherwise it sounds like you have 80% of that sort of system built already.

<comment><USER12> I'm thinking the same.

My brother works in the travel software industry (for a big player) and that market is an extremely hard nut to crack, unless you are coming at it with a boat load of contacts and money.

The big tour operators (I know this from the European side) are quite well tied into the bug boys contractually. They often will enforce sole-usage on hotels to prevent this kind of side market entry your parents have attempted. the hotels can be penalized or dropped from the operator's books, for simply offering rooms outside the tour operator.

<comment><USER14> Interesting. I have a client who has a booking engine for their very specific education tour company and have been wondering if I could port the software for resale. They sell direct to the traveler no agents or 3rd parties so it works well for them but I've been curious if this model is adopted widely..

I don't know enough about the larger industry and what barriers there are to entry however. What kinds of tour operators in Europe are blocking entry to the market? Is this just tour groups making certain hotels exclusive, or the booking sites?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The justin.tv/twitch/socialcam founders sold their first startup's site (kiko - the first AJAX calendar) on ebay once it failed. The ending bid was over $250,000. Not sure if ebay is the best place for this but it is an interesting story. Flippa, as mentioned by someone else, also fills this role.

</comment><comment><USER16> Consider the buyer persona (other independents in the hospitality industry in emerging markets). Find forums, meetups, trade associations for those people. Point of strategy, focus on the value, features, & benefits of this app to potential buyers, versus discussing what you're trying to get out it.

</comment><comment><USER17> How much money went into its development if you care to share?

</comment><comment><USER18> [http://sideprojectors.com](http://sideprojectors.com)

(I maintain the site. So let me know if you have questions!)

</comment><comment><USER19> What are you looking to get for it?

<comment><USER20> I'm pretty sure the answer to that will be "as much as possible" \- the OP is trying to find out what's possible.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> eBay</comment>


The Amazon Tablet - <AUTHOR> http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2011/08/the-amazon-tablet.html

<comment><USER2> tl;dr: VC plans to buy Amazon tablets for his family because he is inpressed by a third-party Photoshop job that prominently features Barnes and Noble.</comment>


Scroll Down to Riker - <AUTHOR> http://scrolldowntoriker.com

<comment><USER2> Implementation wise, it uses 75 image frames that are displayed according to percentage of the page scrolled. Before I looked, I thought this might be a HTML5 <video> controlled using the scroll events - wonder if that would be feasible?

</comment><comment><USER3> Also submitted 19 hours ago, but with no discussion:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6627541](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6627541)

<comment><USER4> How is it possible to submit the same URL twice?

<comment><USER5> Missing / at the end</comment></comment></comment>


Creating a Realistic Looking Button with CSS3 - <AUTHOR> http://blog.anomalyinnovations.com/2010/03/creating-a-realistic-looking-button-with-css3/

<comment><USER2> I'm thinking of writing a couple more posts about the little details that improve the overall look and feel of interfaces. If you guys have any thoughts or ideas about it, do let me know.

<comment><USER3> This was a very great writeup. Thanks!

I'm overzealous with keeping the amount of tags in my markup minimal. The button in this post looks sharp and detailed, but it would be nice to see a comparison with the same button being constructed with less tags. ie: just the anchor and one bold tag, or just the anchor, in addition to showing the best- looking result with three tags.

<comment><USER4> You can just have JavaScript that switches out one tag for a bunch.

<comment><USER5> Trivial, with jQuery!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> A great, detailed description of how to make a button look 3d. I don't care so much about the CSS part, it actually explains how the "light" behaves to create the 3d impression.

I think I'll use this to recreate the same in Cocoa. Just yesterday I was going crazy trying to create a decent looking custom UIToolBar button which would work with tinting. This might be the ticket.

<comment><USER2> I would love to see you implementation. With this post I was trying to strike a balance between the 3D aspect and the CSS code to it. Glad you liked it.

<comment><USER6> I think you succeeded in that balance. While I was reading it crossed my mind that even though I don't need CSS for cocoa, having both a precisely algorithmic description in CSS and a plain-English description of the same concept really helps to internalize the content. Neither one of the two would work as well as both of them did.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I have little interest in CSS3 or buttons to be honest, but appreciate the love for the details here. The detailed breakdown made me smile.

</comment><comment><USER8> Doesn't work on IE8. Active state missing on Opera. It looks nice though.

</comment><comment><USER2> I saw this through Twitter, essentially the same thing that I have but done with just one input element. It works only on FF though. Still very impressive - <http://twitter.com/dtinth/status/11969821668>

</comment><comment><USER9> Thanks for this incredible post. Having spent most of my coding days with server side languages, this opened my eyes to the art form that is front-end design.

<comment><USER2> That is exactly the type of audience I want to write it for. I've just started doing design recently. And writing this post helped articulate my ideas. But more importantly I think it can help developers get into design by using a more pragmatic approach. As opposed to the "Trial and I don't know why it looks bad" approach that I was taking a year ago.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> nice article, I like the attention to details, but if you are looking for something nice and quick and easy, copied and pasted from gmail

<http://pastebin.me/edc9b5fefc2cd756c7dd92452407a5b0></comment>


Ask HN: What is your process for planning/starting a new project? - <AUTHOR>

I'm a fairly experienced developer but have only worked as a solo developer on projects. I run a small company of 4 where the other employees are sales & marketing oriented. I've recently begun a project to take our current website and create more of a self service web application. When you're starting a new project, what is your planning process like? Do you go as far as to wireframe/document every screen? Do you rely on any specific tools to help plan the overall architecture? For me, Once I've settled on an idea I'll design a few flows in Sketch (usually the most important part of the project), then use MindNode to create a high level architecture (Rails controllers / actions, models) then I'll hop into the code and build out what I initially mocked up in Sketch. The process then repeats for the next major part of the project. I'd love to hear a bit about and learn from your process. <comment><USER2> Your process sounds pretty effective to me, especially for a shop with 4 people. I've also only really got experience working with smaller teams. The only thing I would say I do differently before I commit to any ideas and wireframe is to ask everyone part of the team what they think, especially if they are not developers.</comment>


These are the SDKs Pokemon Go uses to build a hit game - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@kevinleong789/what-sdks-does-pokemon-go-use-c85217b48323#.7uwi0qasl <comment><USER2> Am surprised there isn't a whole lot of SDKs in there. Some of the ones are surprising at least to me... haven't heard of Upsight before. Maybe the take- away is, use fewer SDKs, make it more lightweight and less crash-prone? Who's going to get that ad SDK slot? Everyone is probably fighting over that.

</comment><comment><USER3> I find it interesting that the Google SDK isn't in it. Also why would they have both Crashlytics and Apteligent/Crittercism? Don't they do the same thing?

<comment><USER4> There's an article I read saying that they will have sponsored locations soon. So I doubt they will monetize via a 3rd party ad SDK anytime soon. They'd rather sell the inventory themselves.

<comment><USER5> With explosive growth, the last thing they want is to monetize it so soon. They'd follow the FB and Youtube playbook to get it to even higher scale and stickiness first before selling it themselves. The sponsored location type ads make more sense that throwing up a video ad, which totally ruins the experience.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Anyone knows the diff between the Unity and Nvidia's game engine? Reading the Nvidia's SDK site, it seems to do similar things as Unity.

</comment><comment><USER7> Interesting insight. Now I have to go check out Upsight for our app.</comment>


Ask HN: Where can I move cheaply to work by myself for a year? - <AUTHOR>

I am a US citizen and want to quit my job and move to a place where I can work on a project for maximum one year, but I could settle for 6 months. I've traveled a lot and am willing to eat the cost of a round-trip ticket. Language won't be an issue; I speak many languages and would be thrilled to learn another.
I'd need to find a location that has high speed internet, is reasonably safe, amenable to a US citizen legally staying without an income for six to twelve months, and whose cost of living is far less than the bay area. I know places in the US where I could do this, but I'd like to take the opportunity to live somewhere else.
I welcome all suggestions. Thank you! <comment><USER2> Manila. 1\. Great weather (except for this most recent typhoon, we were all safe in the city) 2\. Fast internet 3\. Lots to do both in terms of day and short cheap trips to both domestic destinations and nearby Asian countries 3\. Inexpensive cost of living- food, housing rentals and transportation. Only thing expensive is buying clothes (import tax) so just don't shop here. 4\. Friendly people and easy immigration process- long stay visa 5\. Almost everyone speaks English. Can easily learn Tagalog (esp. if you speak Spanish)

<comment><USER3> Yep, I don't think there is any better place than the Philippines for cheap places for people from the U.S.

English speaking needs a bit more emphasis. Not only does nearly everyone speak English, but English is an official language right along with Tagalog. Most signs are in English. you have little to no need to learn Tagalog. When two Filipino's from different parts of the country have a conversation, they are just as likely to speak in English as they are in Tagalog. It's likely they get more practice speaking English in their day to day living unless they live in Tagalog speaking areas.

You missed a huge point. You can stay there for a year without having to do a visa run. You just have to renew your tourist visa regularly. It's fast and easy.

I would suggest also looking at other areas of the country. I live in Dumaguete which isn't too big and not too small. There are houses and apartments all over the city for $100 - $150 / month. There are even pretty decent hotels you can live in for around $300 / month (which of course comes with paid everything.) A nice month to month foreigner run apartment would cost around the same. I haven't tried to live in Manila but I'm assuming it's generally more expensive than the rest of the country.

<comment><USER4> Do you know where you can find a good place to rent without already being on site ? AirBnB obviously costs a lot more

<comment><USER3> Right, I wouldn't go through AirBnB here. Just do a search for hotels in the city you are looking at and that should give you an idea for prices for the short term. The best way to locate houses and apartments is to drive around the city collecting phone numbers and to talk to other foreigners. Stay in the hotel while you are getting familiar with the city and see what kind of deal you can negotiate for long term stay. You don't have to stick with that deal, just keep it open as a fallback option. There are some sites where you can get prices for rentals and purchases, but those are sky high. Your only option is boots on the ground.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> May I suggest San Miguel de Allende México "the best city in the world" It has the second largest population of US citizens outside of the USA (second to london)

[http://www.cntraveler.com/readers-choice-awards/best- cities-...](http://www.cntraveler.com/readers-choice-awards/best-cities- world_slideshow_item24_25)

Because of the large expat community is expensive for mexican standards but cheap compared to the US

You could also use it as a platform to learn spanish.

My second suggestion is my own home town Zacatecas, México much cheaper than San Miguel de Allende, good climate (it gets cold but it doesn't snow)

[http://www.visitmexico.com/en/zacatecas](http://www.visitmexico.com/en/zacatecas)

if you have further questions you can email me at: agarciafdz at googles email free email service.

<comment><USER6> If Mexico is a consideration you can get 20BG symmetrical fibre internet from Axtel for under $50 a month. Various locations. It's excellent internet, have used it in Mexico City which is a very easy place to live inexpensively and well.

Not sure how old this map is or what areas are covered exactly: [http://juridicoriva.com/cobertura2.html](http://juridicoriva.com/cobertura2.html)

I found the coastal sides of Mexico a bit difficult, but that's because the internet is slow and the humidity is very very bad for electronics (unless you like living with AC on constantly). But cheap and quick to get to for a beach or surf-weekend when you need to get out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Thailand. Cheap, good food, fast internet. Easy to get around without fluency in Thai. Enough expats to speak English with when you want to, but not so many that you are easily isolated from Thai society. Chiang Mai has good weather most of the year and is less congested than Bangkok.

</comment><comment><USER8> Jerusalem. Reasons:

[1] your screen name translates to "good/OK" in local Arabic so you can answer both "Who are you?" and "How are you?" with the same sentence. Think of the efficiency gains!

[2] _very_ multilingual society - Hebrew, Arabic, English, Russian, Yiddish, French, (Amhari?), Aramaic + others

[3] safe (yes), cheap, good internet, tourist visa renewable every three months by crossing border

<comment><USER9> cheap? come on! Jerusalem's not cheap at all!

<comment><USER8> You might be right, and cheap is relative. I spent time there in 2007, which is a while ago. My money was in euro and I came from Ireland where cost of living was quite high. Both dollar and euro are now weaker against the shekel than in 2007, but I think it's still a good destination for someone from an area with high wages and comparatively strong currency.

1 Bed apartments can be had for between $500-$600/month and sharing is a lot cheaper than that.

[http://www.homeless.co.il/rent/inumber4=1$$inumber4_1=1$$sea...](http://www.homeless.co.il/rent/inumber4=1$$inumber4_1=1$$searchfor=%D7%99%D7%A8%D7%95%D7%A9%D7%9C%D7%99%D7%9D)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm admittedly biased on this one. Consider the following:

* Low cost of living (housing ~33% of Bay Area) * Extremely low crime rate * Beautiful outdoors. Mountains, streams, heavily forested,... * Easy access to high bandwidth internet * Same timezone (or 1-2 hours) to all US Customers * Small but high-quality dev & University communities * Frighteningly devoted local & state infrastructure * English as the main language * No visa restrictions * No international plane ticket expenses

Here's the kicker. It's West Virginia.

<comment><USER11> He'd have to buy a pickup truck, though.

</comment></comment><comment> WD-42 Everywhere is cheap compared to the Bay Area, with the exception of New York and maybe London. Move as close as Oregon and you'll see your cost of living drop by half.

</comment><comment><USER12> If you're staying in the US, I heartily recommend Pittsburgh. It's really cheap (1br apartment + food + transport will run you $1000 - $1500 / month), or $500ish if you don't mind getting a room in a bigger house. There's a ton of stuff to do when you want to get away from the computer.

</comment><comment><USER13> You can live in India. Best cities would be Bangalore, Delhi or Mumbai.

Pros of living in India:

1\. Cost of living is way too less compared to Bay area. You can rent a very decent house for INR 20000 per month (~$333) or ~$4000 per year.

2\. Bangalore was ranked the 19th best city in the world for startup environment by Startup Genome report.

3\. Tons of startup groups and meetups, people are really helpful and supportive.

4\. You can find smart people to hire at a fraction of a cost.

5\. Good internet connectivity.

6\. Getting VISA for extended stay would be very easy considering you're a US citizen.

7\. Language would not be a big barrier because most of the educated population understands and speaks English.

If you want to know more or have any questions, my email is in my profile.

<comment><USER14> I am not sure where you would get a house in Mumbai for $333 unless it is way out on the outskirts. You could share a flat for that though. Food is cheap if you like Indian food. Don't drink the water.

You can get 10 year tourist visa that is good 6 months at a time. All you have to do is leave the country and come back. It used to be you had to be out for two months but they scrapped that rule some countries.

Setting things up on a tourist visa will be a pain. Getting internet will be a pain. Better to split with neighbor or have Indian flat mate do it. Internet may go out sometimes.

Same thing with getting a scooter or car.

There will be a lot of tech stuff to be involved in though.

<comment><USER13> I can't say about Mumbai because I haven't lived there but in Delhi and Bangalore you can get a decent house in many of the major locations for $333 a month. You would need to search for it though because finding houses is a big challenge these days.

Getting internet is not a pain, it takes 2 days to get one from any private company like Airtel and about 1.5 weeks if you take it from a government company like BSNL. The connection works fine most of the time though occasional hiccups are inevitable in India.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Ecuador. You will not regret it. My first choice would be north of Quito, in the Ibarra region. Second choice would be Cuenca and the surrounding area. In fact, there's a good chance we (wife and two kids) will be heading down there for a year in a few months.

</comment><comment><USER16> So as a disclaimer I currently live in New York so I am not saying this as a resident.

From my times visiting Nashville it seemed like a really nice city. I put some light research into rental options earlier this year and the prices seemed very affordable, especially in the suburbs. A few friends of mine rented a good size house down there for rather cheap and love it.

</comment><comment><USER17> OP was clear about looking outside the US, but since I (and others) seem to really want to talk about this:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6702111](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6702111)

(Not trying to steal the OP's thunder--this is a separate discussion.)

</comment><comment><USER18> Mom and Dad basement!

</comment><comment><USER19> Don't forget to add about 10-20% to the prices for exchanging money or using your debit card. I live in Chile right now. Living in Middle America would be _much_ cheaper.

<comment><USER20> You need to get yourself a Schwab Investor Checking account - no ATM fees and only 1% for foreign exchange. I travel a lot and this has saved me bundles.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Costa Rica. It's a short flight to the states, and you get a new visa every time you leave the country for 72 hours aka visit a neighboring country for a weekend.

<comment><USER22> You can visit Panama next door for a while, it's very low cost for foreigners. They use the US dollar so no currency exchange needed. If I remember correctly it's simple to get a 30, 60 or 90 day tourist visa.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I highly recommend Saigon, Vietnam :) It meets all of your requirements, and close enough to other Asian countries to travel if needed.

$2 pho, $1 banh mi.

</comment><comment><USER17> Also see:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6703058](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6703058)

</comment><comment><USER24> Tonga, Tokelau, Tahiti and some other small Pacific islands now have something better than dial-up.

Edit: typo

</comment><comment><USER25> Middle America if trying to minimize cost. Cheap US city if you want to balance it with other factors.</comment>


Why I think AirGram is awesome - <AUTHOR> http://www.jakeaustwick.com/why-airgram-is-awesome <comment><AUTHOR> Live Link that works: <http://www.jakeaustwick.com/why-airgram-is-awesome></comment>


Tumblr vs Posterous [2010] - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/why-tumblr-is-kicking-posterous-ass-2010-1

<comment><USER2> I think the most interesting thing about this article is the discussion about NYC vs Silicon Valley. Having visited the Silicon Alley area of NYC recently, I think there is still some time before NYC truly becomes a startup hub. That being said, I have no doubt that it will</comment>


Is Java the Cobol of tomorrow and Go the Java of the future? - <AUTHOR> http://influxdb.com/blog/2014/04/30/java-is-the-cobol-of-my-generation-and-go-is-its-successor.html

<comment><USER2> The argument on looking at Go's trend in isolation is a really weak one. Let's also look at Clojure in isolation: [https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=clojure](https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=clojure) \- and oh look, Clojure runs on the JVM.

> _If I were a developer getting started today, I'd make a career bet on Go_

Advice on picking languages as career bets are especially weak. In my experience, careers are being built on being able to get stuff done and in the long list of things that a developer has to learn to get stuff done, the language itself is very uninteresting considering everything else combined. Personally it takes me 2-3 weeks to become functional in any new programming language, I've worked with half a dozen thus far in production and I played with another dozen in my free time. The language itself is like a drop in an ocean, compared to more fundamental knowledge that makes one productive, like math, algorithms, concurrency and parallelism, hardware, usability, domain specific knowledge, libraries, frameworks, being able to interact with a community, etc...

> _Go is a simple language by design. You can read the spec and other > materials on the Golang website and start being productive in a single day_

Simplicity in the language doesn't translate to simplicity in the solutions that you're building. This is a fundamental divide, since often people are mistaking simplicity for easy, for being familiar. It's not in the original sense of the word - simplicity is the opposite of complexity, which means interwoven or entangled and in the context of software it means building reusable / modular components, that do one thing well and that can be stacked / connected together to build bigger solutions and to keep complexity manageable.

Go is in fact anti-simplicity. Its lack of generics, given its static typing, is a really good example of a design fuck-up, since for building reusable higher-level abstractions, one really, really needs generics and this is an objective fact - note that we aren't talking about dynamic languages here, which don't care about static typing or for being close to the metal. There's no point in denying that and Go will end up like both Java and C++, both of which didn't have generics in the beginning - and so it will end up with a half-baked solution with lots of corner cases and that people will hate, until the next language comes along also lacking generics, because "simplicity", repeating the cycle ad-nauseam.

In fact a programming language is supposed to be extensible, because both in natural speech and in our systems, we are extending our language all the time to manage complexity. If this gives birth to features that are harder to learn, that's a freaking drop in the ocean compared to all the shit that we must do when implementing complex business logic. I recommend watching Guy Steele's "Growing a Language" presentation, it's very enlightening: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ahvzDzKdB0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ahvzDzKdB0)

But then again, extensible languages and higher-level abstractions are raising the bar to entry, which often goes against the other generally accepted solution for managing complexity, which is to hire more average Joes that can sit in a chair and type.

> _Simple languages are easier to learn._

 _Familiar_ languages are easier to learn. There, fixed the typo. And if you're only learning familiar stuff, then you're not learning anything new ;-)

I keep going back to Alan Kay's quote which will be relevant for a long, long time: "Most software today is very much like an Egyptian pyramid with millions of bricks piled on top of each other, with no structural integrity, but just done by brute force and thousands of slaves."

<comment><USER3> I love Go because it fits in my head. There are tons of applications for which Go won't be the best fit, but Go is fantastic for some others.

<comment><USER4> Everyone loves that. But most people also want to write algorithms that work on different kinds of collections.

I think its just a matter of Go arriving at a good proposal for generics.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Do I believe Java will be the next COBOL. Absolutely. Do I believe Go will be the next Java. Absolutely not.

1) It ignores where Java is being used. It is dominant within the enterprise. Features like a single binary, lack of a reverse proxy or taking advantage of multiple cores aren't at all compelling. We have dedicated ops teams happy to automate deployments, hardware load balancers and are rarely doing anything CPU intensive.

2) It ignores language trends. Functional programming is what is hot right with Scala and Clojure being what most enterprises are choosing to adopt for the next big project. Why ? Because they can leverage all their existing Java libraries/practices but without the boilerplate and language overhead of Java.

3) It ignores architectural trends. Go's concurrency approaches are nice but aren't that special and again aren't that useful in most cases. Unless you are someone like Cloudflare it is far easier to just horizontally scale your app servers across seperate instances. It's more expensive but hardly worth deciding your platform over.

<comment><USER6> We've been using Scala for a while now. It's a major step-up from Java in terms of sheer programming enjoyment (contrary to what the criticism parrots who don't actually use it would have you believe). Java is still very widely used, but most don't use it by choice anymore but rather because it's the default or what the existing code is written in. Go is a non-starter for us due to a lack of support for existing Java libs, and isn't all that interesting compared to the alternatives.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Maybe it makes sense to understand why Java is where it is today. It is not because programmers thought it was the best technology, but because of politics. At the time of introduction, Microsoft held a clear platform monopoly and the key skills in demand were C++/MFC and the like. Sun was the underdog and Java was positioned to become a counterweight to this monopoly and many companies supported it heavily just to provide a balance. From a developer standpoint Go is superior, but would the same political support happen for a Google-invented language?

<comment><USER8> You paint Java as the child of corporate scheming (maybe unintentionally), but it was more nuanced than that. Java's success was due to several trends coming to together at the same time.

The bulk of serious programming in the early 1990s was in C or C++. Cross- platform C libraries in those days were either abysses of mind-blowing complexity or just pure snake-oil.

Since everything MS did was Windows, anything that came along to provide a good development experience (which Java did in comparison in those days) AND be cross-platform (one of its founding principles) couldn't help but be successful.

So politics was certainly not the only factor.

<comment><USER9> Just adding up to those points.

Compiling at the time was a problem. Adding a new library could mean hours of digging up to find out why you can't even link the damn thing in your project - if that's even possible. That's before even talking about cross-platform.

Java was also a modern OO language, safer to use than C++ and with everything you needed right there in the JDK, all of that backed with solid documentation ( internet was not what it is now, if you were the lucky few with access at all )

In particular, java had a great easy approach to threading out of the box, working everywhere.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > Go's performance isn't a big win for Java developers since they're already > doing pretty well. But for us dynamic language refugees, Go's performance is > liberating. No dealing with reverse proxies to send things to multiple > processes. Real threading and the ability to take advantage of every core. > Async IO, but without all the callbacks.

Jesus, are people really this excited about features that existed for at least 15 years in other languages?

This one language for everything mentality is ushering in a huge NIH cycle.

<comment><USER11> Near-C performance, static/strong types, async io without callbacks, well integrated multithreading... maybe I'm missing something obvious, but which (not obscure) 15-yo language provides this set of features?

<comment><USER12> Performance - not really that near to C

Static types - of the worst kind that get in the way of creating any significant abstractions (no parametric polymorphism or generics) and don't provide much safety (no nil safety). For a new modern language, this is just weird.

Well integrated multithreading - yes. 40-year-old error handling strategy: also yes.

Haskell, Scala, F#, C# are all much better choices that I think fulfill all your criteria (Well, one might argue that functional languages are obscure, but that's increasingly not the case these days)

I find the popularity of Go rather depressing. If Go becomes the next Java, the inventors of C would set the programming world decades back in the past for the _second_ time.

<comment><USER12> in reply to cookiemonster11, the wrong part is that it doesn't work well.

When you asked for exceptions you actually wanted an Either type, which means the function either return a result or an error ( _not_ both).

You also want something that propagates errors automatically (the monadic bind) in case you don't want to check every result.

An Either type lets you get the best of both worlds. It lets you model exactly whether an error can or cannot happen (unlike exceptions that are not optional). It lets you check every return value directly via pattern matching (similarly to Go) but also, the compiler will warn you if you "forget" to handle the error case. Finally, the bind operator lets you chain operations in a way that only executes in case of no errors, plus attach a single error handler at the end to handle any of the errors (in a manner similar to exceptions)

So yeah, there are better solutions today.

<comment><USER13> How I wish nullable types worked in C-like languages:

You cannot dereference a nullable value normally. However, inside a (x != null) block, or rather anywhere the compiler can infer that the value cannot be null, it automagicially turns into a non-nullable type. And there's the null-safe dereference operator (.? or similar) that returns null in case the first value is null.

Similarly with casting - if you have an if block with an instanceof check, within that block the variable has the type given by the check.

You still have to have a runtime-checked NPE in some cases (in case of hotswapping, casting to non-nullable types (which should be allowed but throws a _checked_ excption), etc), but mostly this avoids the issues with NPEs, I think.

I agree that pattern matching can be powerful, and underutilized in most language designs.

Alternatively, I've been growing more in favor of the idea of not having null at all in the base language - if you actually need it it's relatively easy to implement if you have boolean algebra on types (Nullable<x> being equivalent to Either<x, Null>, where Null is an enumerated type with one value, null. Like what you said). And that way it's explicit, and people are more likely to use a better (read: more informative) exception type). Null ends up being an exception with no additional information, which can work in some cases, but often you want additional information. Even just "NotInitialized" or something like that is often better.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I think the author is mostly right, but he fails to recognize that the difference between COBOL and Java is much, much bigger than the difference between Java and Go. Right now, I think that the full Java ecosystem is "better" (to the extend that can be meaningfully measured) than the equivalent in Go, to an extend COBOL probably never was to Java. Obviously that gap will close, and fast, but it's an example of just how relatively close those two languages are.

And then this:

> Any developer that cares about their demand in the market (and salary > potential) and any employer wishing to hire should factor language life- > cycle into their language choice. I'm sure there are still COBOL programmers > out there, but I wouldn't want to be one of them if I was looking for a job > and I wouldn't want to be an employer trying to find a competent COBOL > programmer or anyone that wanted to learn.

Few things scream "name your salary" in this business like being a competent and willing COBOL programmer. I'm not sure that learning COBOL from scratch is a viable career path these days (there's a chicken-and-egg problem, you're not going to become great a any language without actually working in it, and nobody is going to let you work in it before you're pretty great), but I WOULD "want to be one of them if I was looking for a job".

<comment><USER15> > Few things scream "name your salary" in this business like being a competent > and willing COBOL programmer.

Uhh.... if you can find someone looking for a COBOL programmer in your area, perhaps. But the number of COBOL jobs out there is pretty tiny. Anyone with a COBOL system is looking frantically for a way to decommission it. That's not the kind of project I want to base my family's income on.

<comment><USER16> "But the number of COBOL jobs out there is pretty tiny."

No it's not. They're not advertised on monster.com, true. It's used in niche markets (well, if you call e.g. banking a niche market) and those systems aren't going to be 'decommisioned' anytime soon. There are literally _dozens_ of just vendors of Cobol compilers / environments / toolkits in business _today_. Like the GP said, I'm not claiming going into Cobol as a 21 year old is a wise career move. But Cobol consultants certainly bill a multiple of what Ruby, Go or even Java consultants bill here in Western Europe.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Dream on. You cannot predict the future from the presents past. Go is hyped a lot but at the end it's not that much needed as Google wants it to. Java is easy to learn, very fast and hast tons of frameworks and documentation.

For other stuff there is still c++ and python with QT and if for some folks ofc there are ruby, perl, Haskell and so on.

Also, and this is an important point go was invented by Google and Google is not the cool hip company it used to be it is. Ow the complete opposite and part of orwells vision...

<comment><USER18> > You cannot predict the future from the presents past.

Every time you open your lungs in the expectation that they will fill with 20% oxygen and nothing toxic, you are 'predicting the future from the presents past'. The past is the only basis for forming expectations about the future, even if you're dealing with smaller probabilities, such as the rise and fall of programming languages.

> Also, and this is an important point go was invented by Google and Google is > not the cool hip company it used to be it is. Ow the complete opposite and > part of orwells vision...

Really? Go is obviously very trendy right now, and Angular - in my anecdotal experience - is on top in the front-end wars. Google is coming up with plenty trendy technology at the moment. Unless the Go compiler's phoning home, the Orwell stuff is just laughably irrelevant, and will be treated as such by the bulk of developers.

I have no idea if Go is destined for really big things. But the fact that it's a small ecosystem now doesn't matter - Java was pretty small back in '95\. It depends on whether it allows developers to solve the next decade of engineering problems in a satisfying way, relative to its competitors. We shall see.

<comment><USER19> > Every time you open your lungs in the expectation that they will fill with > 20% oxygen and nothing toxic, you are 'predicting the future from the > presents past'.

The fact that one is breathing right now doesnt mean one will still be breathing 5 minutes from now. You can predict the future.You can maximize chances something happen,you just cant be sure 100%.

Yet chances are that :

\- Business arent going to drop the JVM "en masse" for Go,just because Go is cool. And frankly , from a syntax perspective , Go is not that great. It has almost no functional features, and a very weak OO model.

> I have no idea if Go is destined for really big things. But the fact that > it's a small ecosystem now doesn't matter - Java was pretty small back in > '95.

Nothing like what the Java ecosystem is today existed before Java, that's a huge difference. And the fact that the JVM runs multiple languages makes it unlikely it will be obsolete,ever.

Concurrency backed in a language is cool,but not necessary. concurrency can easily be a lib or a framework.

I've been in enterprise long enough to know that enterprise likes boring enterprise languages for most part(java) and glue languages (scripting languages) because deadlines ... while Go might have been great at replacing C,which it doesnt, I still think there is some room for a safer C for system programming. I dont think Go features are interesting enough for entreprise solutions. There is nothing Go can do that the JVM cant.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I don't see why the future wouldn't be polyglot, in the sense that there isn't one language as dominant as Java has been.

There is now much better language interop than in the past, e. g looking at C interop in Julia and Java interop in Clojure and other JVM languages.

Using HTTP on distributed queues on less unreliable, faster networks than in the past makes building distributed systems using many different languages easier (SOA, Microservices).

On the clientside there are strong proprietary ecosystems which dictate the use of a specific language (more or less), Android, Windows (C#), Apple (Obj. C, Swift).

Therefore I think it is plausible to assume that no single language will (have to) become as dominant as Java has been

</comment><comment><USER21> If Java is the Cobol of tomorrow and Go is the Java of tomorrow, doesn't that make Go the Cobol of the future (after tomorrow)?

<comment><USER5> Or it may go down as another part of the Google's failed projects list alongside Google+, Glass, Reader, Wave etc.

<comment><USER14> Unlike any of those projects, Go is fully developed under a liberal FOSS license, so if Google looses interest (and Go is actually good), development can be picked up by the community.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Same could be said for Idris, Haskell, Scala, Clojure, Node.is, etc. Nothing against Go, I like it, it's just one more language to choose from.

</comment><comment><USER23> I had a chance to do a bit of Go work while at Google. Coming from the complexities of C++/STL, the simplicity was a blessed relief.

Unfortunately, I don't think that simplicity will last. Other popular languages like the C family and Java were pretty simple when they started out. But C became C++ became C++ with STL, with all the attendant complexities. Similarly, early Java was a pretty clean language, but they added generics and various libraries, to say nothing of the swamp of a tooling ecosystem built around the language. "Your experience is in Hyperstruts? Sorry pal, we only work in JToolkitMVC."

If Go becomes a big success, I predict it will walk the same path, gaining complexity either in the language itself or in the surrounding libraries or frameworks. Simplicity is a sign of immaturity, and it will not last.

</comment><comment><USER24> I won't try Go until it implements generics and changes its hide-error-by- default behaviour.

<comment><USER25> Completely agree on the second part. It feels utterly silly that they refuse to use exceptions on the basis that errors should be explicit, but then allow for errors to be silently ignored just by not assigning them to variables.

<comment><USER15> In practice this is not a problem that is encountered pretty much ever. If you are afraid of it, run errcheck[1] on your code, and it'll tell you if you've missed anything.

[1] [https://github.com/kisielk/errcheck](https://github.com/kisielk/errcheck)

<comment><USER25> If you don't mind me asking, what is it that keeps it from coming up? I understand that the multiple return values help, since then you don't need to go with the clunky C-style of passing in pointers that will be used as output.

Error codes always feel like they rely too much on everybody deliberately following good coding practice, since the default is to ignore the error code. I prefer using exceptions, because then the error can't be ignored by default, and must be explicitly silenced if it is not desired. Then again, that is a large python influence on me.

<comment><USER2> I also think the arguments against using exceptions are flawed. For example it's a common pattern to use a supervisor that catches exceptions and depending on context and severity, to log the errors, to restart the guilty component, to send an error report, to fallback to something else, to crash the whole process and so on.

The idea being that unexpected errors happen and you need to react to them in some way, preferably without relying on the developer to do something for everything potentially error prone that he does, because we can't anticipate everything bad that can happen, yet in spite of this, we can make the system resilient to errors.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I am a rare (for Hacker News) C# dev and I've just been toying around with Go. There is stuff to like but my feeling is that the biggest weakness of the language is that it is designed to solve the problems that Google has (surprise), which is only a fraction of the problems that the world has.

It is a scalpel verses a swiss-army knife. The question is which do you need.

If you are doing Internet-related things (server-side plumbing and apps, not search), it looks like a pretty darn good fit. It naturally leads you build up a set of small start tools that you combine to build a larger service. The channels metaphor is a really nice way to deal with concurrency.

If you are building anything else (desktop, LOB apps, DB front-ends, mathy stuff, etc.), it looks a bit limited. For example, it doesn't have a modulus operator. Not a big deal but it shows that the language designers are more concerned about supporting their target domain than supplanting Java, much less C#.

Really, the thing that I fine the most troublesome is this feeling that the designers of the language have such a focused vision that it will hinder the growth in the future but, for now, it needs that to keep from becoming overgrown like C# is.

<comment><USER27> Modulus Operator? Like the following: [http://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/0w4e0fzs.aspx](http://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/0w4e0fzs.aspx)?

If this is the case, maybe you should check the doc: [http://golang.org/ref/spec#Arithmetic_operators](http://golang.org/ref/spec#Arithmetic_operators)

try this: [http://play.golang.org/p/WA0vX7zmNb](http://play.golang.org/p/WA0vX7zmNb)

I'll leave a copy of the code so you can try it locally as well (and in case the link to play.golang.org breaks)

package main

import "fmt"

func main() { a := 47 b := 6 c := a % b fmt.Println("input: ", a, b) fmt.Println("output: ", c) }

[edit]: someone beat me to it :/

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I've spend some time with Go, but never felt overly productive with it. As someone else in this discussion mentioned a simple language doesn't mean that solutions in this language are simple! Look at what real problems you have to solve in you applications, and then tell me that generics in a statically typed language are not important! Go applications are full of useless code to circumvent this restriction. Want to make something immutable? Not very convenient in Go, very easy in most other (statically typed) languages.

While Scala has a complex type system it is a simple language at it's heart. For example try-catch is not a special language feature but another application of the powerful pattern matching. It will take a little longer to learn Scala compared to Java, but you get a much better tool to solve the most problems. And you get all the libraries and the tools (any Go IDE on the level of IntelliJ or NetBeans?) of the big Java ecosystem.

But even if you don't want to use Scala, you could be more productive with Java than with Go. From a Java perspective Go has not much to offer, not even fancy concurrency.

</comment><comment><USER29> am very happy the author is happy with go.

>>Deploying Go code to production is as simple as copying a single binary file up to a server and running it. No reverse proxies, no dependencies to install on the target server, no class paths. Just copy the binary and run.

This fairly depends size of system we are discussing.

>>Some developers have noted Go's lack of features or a few other things: no exceptions, nils instead of options, inability to specify dependency versions, mark and sweep GC, no macros, no generics.

languages such as Java too grew out from such weaknesses and are still growing

>>If I were a developer getting started today, I'd make a career bet on Go.

Fairly good but it depends on what market attracts you.For e.g. if you were to target financial markets with big responsive systems , i doubt if they have loads of Go lang hires vs the same on say Java hires.But if we were to target a different market,it would change too!

</comment><comment><USER30> I think a very big difference between Cobol and Java/.NET is that it is being used in far more places (mobile,desktop,enterprise) and that the runtime is open for other languages (F#,Scala,Python, Ruby etc) because of this the main languages are constantly evolving as well and lots of libs and platforms are written in the main languages, maybe something like Scala will replace Java or Java will become more like Scala but I guess it would not be so easy to replace the the JVM or .NET as it is to replace a (almost) single domain language

</comment><comment><USER31> One thing to bear in mind is that "Go" isn't very easily googleable so that graph could well be unreflective of genuine interest.

<comment><USER32> Most of the time, you can just Google "golang" instead.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Im thinking what will happen is there will be a version of java (along with the frameworks and technologies ) that will become Cobol and new version of Java will move on and improve. I dont think it will be the next Cobol. When cobol was around, not so many were using it and technology is limited.Today, Java is just everywhere.

</comment><comment><USER34> > Is Java the Cobol of tomorrow and Go the Java of the future?

If so, does that make Go the COBOL of the day after tomorrow?

</comment><comment><USER35> No, Go is the Go of today and Java is the Java of today. I do belive Go has future, though.

</comment><comment><USER36> I imagine the interest/time graph is strongly influenced by users installing the JRE

</comment><comment><USER37> %s/Go/Elixir

</comment><comment><USER38> Betteridge's law of headlines says no.

<comment><USER39> Except the original title didn't use a question. The submitter did.</comment></comment>


oDesk to merge with Elance - <AUTHOR> https://www.odesk.com/blog/2013/12/odeskelancemerge/ <comment><USER2> As long as oDesk does not change at all, I'm happy. The only reason I hire on oDesk is because it is NOT elance - have had horrible experience with elance both with providers and the company itself and how it conducts business (or what it calls business).

Although this is called a merger, it is only that in name. It seems elance's CEO will call the shots.

[https://www.odesk.com/blog/2013/12/mergerfaq/](https://www.odesk.com/blog/2013/12/mergerfaq/)

"Who will lead the new company? oDesk executive chairman Thomas Layton will continue in the same role at the combined company, and Elance CEO Fabio Rosati will serve as chief executive officer."

There's a huge wave of consolidation in the industry in the past 5 years. Just last year freelancer bought vworker. It is ripe for disruption as the dominant sites grow bloated and complacent, only seeing acquisitions as the way to grow.

<comment><USER3> > There's a huge wave of consolidation in the industry in the past 5 years. > Just last year freelancer bought vworker.

I really hope oDesk - Elance won't go the same way freelancer - vworker went.

I used to have an account of RentACode, a long time ago. It was mostly a good experience, considering the state of freelancing back then. When my significant otter got fired, I dug the account and handed it over to her -- it had a bunch of good reviews and some of them were for tech writing jobs, so I though it would be useful to her (she's not a programmer, she does marketing).

RAC had, in the meantime, become freelancer.com. The first thing it did was chew through the money I still had in my account -- two or three hundred dollars the withdrawal of which I had procrastinated for a long time, keeping them there in case I'd suddenly decide to take new jobs on RAC (then vWorker) again. I didn't get anything other than automated answers from their tech support, and eventually settled for that being dead money.

Now freelancer.com is a scammer's heaven. It doesn't have escrows by default, the rounding of of fees is done quite liberally, there seems to be no mechanism to stop automatic bidding (with ridiculous sums that do nothing but bring the average bid price down, since it's obvious that whatever is behind those posts is never awarded a project), and their support for disputes is unhelpful at best.

My gf is actually still unemployed and still gets projects on Freelancer every once in a while, but after being scammed twice -- with copious help through lack of reaction by Freelancer -- both her and her clients generally eschew its payment system altogether. She usually insists on a 100% milestone on Freelancer.com the first time she works with them, and then it's PayPal all the way.

The eschewing of the payment system seems to be quite generalized, because their lack of reaction and real buyer _and_ seller protection basically means people end up paying fees for something that is then little more than a glorified job advertising website, since it otherwise fails to offer anything for the (hefty) fees they take.

Freelancer.com is a pretty sore sight nowadays. I browse its range of contract offers every once in a while; there's generally nothing for me (I do systems programming and embedded stuff -- people don't usually hire freelancers to write operating systems or make gadgets, unsurprisingly), but most of the projects _and_ most of the bids depress me. Ads along the lines of "looking for an app expert", looking for reasonably non-trivial applications that work on a gazillion of platforms, awarded to poor people for sums that seem small even to me.

<comment><USER4> Hi Weland, I'm the CEO of Freelancer.com. I thought I would reply to your comment, and I'm also happy to get someone to look into your account if you get send me your username.

A few comments- we do have escrows by default- called Milestone Payments. We don't however force people to use them if the two parties decide to come to an arrangement where they don't want to use them. The vast majority of projects do. Also you have a chance to not accept the project as a freelancer if Milestone payments have not been created after you've been awarded. So I can't see the issue here.

Rounding of fees? I have no idea what you are talking about here. We round project commissions to the cent, like everyone else.

Automated bidding- we changed our system some time ago to dramatically stop bid spam. I'm not sure how recently you have used the site. We have removed "public" bids entirely. Now you can only leave one private bid, this has got rid of the problem you talk about.

I would have to disagree with you for disputes and support. We have the largest support team in the entire industry with 250 people in our own facility that operate 24x7x365 and speak 10 languages. We have a paralegal team doing disputes that I believe is the most sophisticated in the industry as well in terms of how it resolves issues.

Our business is going from strength to strength and we are the only company that is publicly listed, so our financials are transparent. Our revenue is growing at almost double the growth rate of our nearest competitors, so I would have also disagree about your comments about the state of the site.

Happy to answer any other questions you may have or you can email me directly at email@example.com. Also if you shoot me your account username I will have someone take a look at it.

Regards Matt

<comment><USER3> Frankly, I don't have too much to offer with regard to the support issues. I only helped my GF with it, and it was a while ago. If it improved in the meantime and my comments are no longer representative, I'm really sorry. I should have made that clearer.

However, as for the other matters:

> we do have escrows by default- called Milestone Payments.

Actually, you don't have them by default :-). By your own admitting:

> We don't however force people to use them if the two parties decide to come > to an arrangement where they don't want to use them.

My (admittedly foggy, please correct me if I'm wrong) memory tells me that RAC had escrows _by default_ , i.e. the buyer had to place the money in RAC's escrow before the coder could start work. I distinctly remember that RAC's seller instructions clearly said you _should not start coding_ before the project is awarded to you, because there is no way to be sure the buyer actually has the money to pay you. When the project was awarded, the money was placed in escrow. I actually had a dispute settled over this matter: my client had simply vanished. I waited for two weeks before telling him I'd get the project into arbitration if I don't receive feedback, and waited another three before getting it into arbitration. The RAC arbitrator decided that if he failed to respond within some reasonable period (a couple of weeks, again), I'd get the money, because the deliverable I had submitted was indeed in accordance with what had been agreed.

Freelancer.com doesn't force buyers to do that, giving rise to the following phenomenon: a scammer opens an account -- with zero reviews _but_ a verified payment method -- and posts a job ad. It's well-paid for something otherwise reasonably simple, like some content writing, but the job has to be done quickly and the buyer claims he can't offer a milestone payment that quickly -- he doesn't have the money on hand, bank transfer takes time (he usually lists his country to be something like Zambia or Congo, where it's probably fairly safe to assume that banks don't go too smoothly with all the firing in the street and whatnot). Since the pay is higher than average, a lot of freelancers are happy to do it. Needless to say, they never get their money.

I'm sorry to say, but when this happened, your large support team did absolutely nothing. They simply reminded her that she should ask for a milestone payment, which a lot of buyers actually don't want to do for credible, or at the very least legitimate reasons. If you don't want to force people into escrowing, you should be able to deal with cases like these.

This wasn't an isolated incident because the same type of job ad appeared several times in the following weeks. We actually tried to warn other freelancers about it and we found at least another dozen people got the same treatment, quite possibly from the same guy who was opening different accounts, and from the same support team.

Edit: Oh yes, rounding of fees.

This page: [http://www.freelancer.com/feesandcharges/](http://www.freelancer.com/feesandcharges/) claims that, for a free membership plan, Freelancer.com gets 10% of what gets paid to a freelancer, or 5 USD, whichever is greater. Fair enough.

But if I try to bid for 100 USD that gets paid to me, the bid now gets to 111.11 USD, which looks an awful lot closer to 11%.

I initially assumed this had something to do with including the 3% amount that the employer is charged for the posting, too, but it doesn't add up. I never really bothered understanding how it goes; as I mentioned in my other post, I haven't done freelance work on what is today Freelancer.com since the days it was still called Rent a Coder. But in the best case, this is poorly documented. I, for one, can't make sense of it, and I'm probably better at doing math than most freelancers who do content "writing" or social media promotion on your website.

Even later edit: just to be clear, I'm not trying to scold your business model, nor your efforts as a company. If your current model works for you, then it's awesome. Matters of finance and corporate politics are beyond either my possibilities and my wish to comprehend. Freelancer.com isn't doing bad financially (though, since I'm not living off its dividends, that's irrelevant to me) so I presume there are people for whom it makes world a better place. For me, it doesn't.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> We're looking for a lawyer to help finish up our merger. The previous guy did 90% of the work and then stopped responding to our emails!!! This shouldn't take an experienced lawyer more than a few hours.

Pay: $10

</comment><comment><USER6> I have mixed emotions about this because I have made a solid income at times with oDesk's time tracker, but I don't want it to become the standard way of doing things. That's because majority of the work I do now is on a subconscious level, so I'm basically thinking about a problem all day and it may only take an hour to code up the solution. I guess a workaround is to double or triple hourly rates, but I don't see that happening, because as more places merge, we may find ourselves in a race to the bottom.

That said, I got burned on eLance by charging a flat rate for a client that was never satisfied with my work. I made less after several weeks than other contractors make in an hour. I guess that's the main reason I went to oDesk (though I always liked eLance).

Please, somebody, somewhere, come up with a daily rate mechanism that doesn't invade workers' privacy.

That and finding a way to spread workloads across multiple developers (to reduce stress and make for a better product) are the two main challenges I see right now in freelancing.

<comment><USER7> Our company Lambda ([http://getlambda.com](http://getlambda.com)) helps negotiate contract work for our freelancers. We often set up the following arrangement: the client pays in advance for a week or two of work, and we agree that "a week" contains X hours of developer time. If there are hours unused by the end of the contract, we refund the money. It's an elegant way to avoid most payment issues.

<comment><USER8> How much work have you managed to get? Do you restrict where dev's are located (e.g. north america?)

<comment><USER7> We get about 15 qualified leads a month (on average, each project is worth about $25k). We're focused on the US and Canada only for the moment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Oh, good. Now the experience of begging for slave wages fixing people's wordpress installs can be even more streamlined.

<comment><USER10> This kind of trite comment adds little to the discussion.

I have some people that work with me on oDesk that I've found over the past few years. I don't pay them a lot by US standards, but they're good people. I've sent them various hardware, like Kindles and a new laptop to help them do their work better, and it has worked out well, although I was kind of nervous about it at the time.

<comment><USER11> Yes, this is the thing. If you are living at a US/UK standard or slightly below, DO NOT waste your time on Elance or ODESK. These sites are not designed to employee US workers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I sincerely hope this doesn't affect the thousands of families making a living working off of oDesk. This change will have real effects on REAL people, let's hope they are all positive. :)

<comment><USER13> Are there certain people who aren't allowed to work on Elance who work on oDesk?

<comment><AUTHOR> It could be argued that oDesk is more fair. I tried elance once and AFAIR they encourage you to pay in order to appear higher in listings. This was a turnoff. oDesk's approach to contractor/job listings seems to be centered around smart algorithms and analytics instead.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Ugh, let's hope Elance's CEO doesn't fuck up ODesk. Elance is kindergarten quality compared to ODesk's site.

</comment><comment><USER15> It would seem that the two main incumbents in this market (founded in 2005 and 1998, respectively) are getting nervous about Freelancer.com's (founded in 2009) rapid growth (predicting ~73% in 2013) and recent IPO [1].

[1] [http://www.zdnet.com/au/freelancer-more-than-triples- first-d...](http://www.zdnet.com/au/freelancer-more-than-triples-first-day- listing-expectations-7000023244/)

<comment><USER16> It dropped rapidly in the first few days too [http://www.asx.com.au/asx/research/companyInfo.do?by=asxCode...](http://www.asx.com.au/asx/research/companyInfo.do?by=asxCode&asxCode=FLN)

<comment><USER4> Hello Dong

I'm the CEO of Freelancer.com (Freelancer Limited ASX:FLN).

Our share price dropped rapidly in the first few days because the issue price was 50 cents and it was the biggest opening on the ASX every (so I was told by the exchange). The share price opened at $2.50.

A month later we are at $1.40, almost three times our issue price. I think that's pretty good. You would expect a bit of a pullback from such a strong opening (5x !).

Regards Matt

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> We're running out of vowels to prefix startup names. Peak Vowel was definitely 2007; the iGeneration is iSick of oIt.

Never use a service whose name you could make up thoughtlessly.

<comment><USER18> Says uNdoware...

I tend to evaluate a service based on what they provide, their reputation and sometimes the care put into their branding, but rarely do I make a blanket judgement on name alone. Anyone on HN should know how challenging it is to pick a name in the competitive domain landscape.

<comment><USER17> I wasn't making a blanket judgement -- you are making a straw man. I was simply criticizing their branding, which is just as reasonable as any technical consideration. And if you don't believe that, Richard Stallman has a beard for you.

<comment><USER18> This sounds like a blanket judgement to me. Not "reconsider using" but "never use"...

"Never use a service whose name you could make up thoughtlessly."

Not to mention that while you could make up a name thoughtlessly, those behind it might've spent weeks brainstorming, getting feedback, checking their options, etc.

<comment><USER17> Again, not a blanket judgment; a blanket judgment is quite specifically when you say, "for all Xes such that Y, then Z." You could argue that there was an _implied_ blanket judgment motivating the assertion that no one should ever use a service such that that service has a boring name; but in fact, given a choice between two equally worthy services, I choose the one with the more intelligent marketing, simply as a way of selecting for things that don't irritate me, and in some small way making the world a slightly less blearily straightforward place. And by encouraging others to also follow this maxim, I was hoping to amplify its world-shaping power further. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> "Elance buys oDesk" seems like a more accurate headline.

<comment><USER20> Seems more like, oDesk cant get a price they want selling, and their CEO just wants out...

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> This merger is likely a response to competitor, Freelancer.com going public in Australia this year. It also positions the much larger, Elance/oDesk for an IPO next year. Smaller, niche freelancing marketplaces like Guru.com, 99Designs, WorkersOnCall.com and others will now be looking for acquisition exits from the new giant. The freelancing marketplace industry has been growing 100% year over year for the last 7 years and is expected to continue for the next five years. Once tied to the economy, the freelancing industry trends have now disconnected from the economy in general and are on a steady trend no matter how employment levels rise and fall. All in all, the merger is good news for the industry which saw its first exit this year.

</comment><comment><USER22> With vworker first being absorbed by freelancer and now this, there's a decided lack of competition developing in this market.

I think these guys know that a startup will struggle to compete, getting the critical mass of devs and employers is the same problem as starting a social network.

I share the view that ODesk quality is an order of magnitude better than elance, I think only those using elance will being thinking anything positive at this moment...

<comment><USER23> Our startup Lambda ([http://getlambda.com](http://getlambda.com)) competes with both, but we're not the least bit concerned. I already thought of elance/odesk as being effectively the same, in the sense that they're both known as places to find cheap, off-shore labor. I don't know any devs in NYC who've seriously considered working through either site and don't expect that to change. Likewise, I don't know many hiring companies that have used their sites for anything more than throwaway projects.

We have a few other competitors targeting the high-end of the freelancer market, but that's still open territory.

<comment> k-mcgrady I've been working through Freelancer/Elance for about 5 years now. I'm quite an experienced iOS dev and typically only apply to the higher priced jobs which then tend to lead on to repeat work. I just took a look at your site. Although I would consider myself quite experienced I'm not a 'rockstar'. What kind of devs do you accept to join Lambda? What do you consider an 'exceptional developer'?

<comment><USER23> That's interesting. I love to talk with you sometime about your experience with those higher priced jobs. I'm particularly curious about what kinds of clients are mosting higher price jobs on elance, since our experience has been that it's mostly a race to the bottom. Could you send me an email: andrew at getlambda dotcom

For the types of projects we work with, "exceptional developers" might be better described as "competent developers, great entrepreneurs". Of course, that wouldn't be ideal marketing copy :)

In general, raw technical ability isn't a huge factor in commanding higher rates. There's definitely a minimum threshold someone needs to pass, but you'd probably clear that easily if you've been freelancing for 5+ years.

Instead of learning to code faster, you'd be better served by learning to code less. Clients often have big ideas that would take 6+ months to build in their entirety, but which could be shipped in weeks by eliminating unnecessary features. Convincing them to cut those features is a skill in of itself, which is often what separates "freelancers" from "consultants".

<comment> k-mcgrady Cheers, sent you an email.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Just recently when Freelancer.com acquired vWorker I expected the overall quality improvement at Freelancer. However despite any logic it became worse.

I have the same expectations for this merger/acquisition. Elance won't become any better and Odesk will cease to exist very soon after transferring all users to Elance.

Sadly this merger is dictated by nothing else but increasing market share of Freelancer.com.

<comment><USER4> Hi Ulad

I'm the CEO of Freelancer.com. Since the vWorker acquisition actually all the quality metrics are up. The vWorker user base was also a very high quality workforce and today dominate highly our freelancer rankings and awarded projects. This is reflected in our financials- we are growing revenue at almost twice the rate of our competitors. We're also publicly listed (ASX: FLN) so our financials are transparent.

If you have any other questions, I'm happy to answer them or shoot me a note at firstname.lastname@example.com.

Regards Matt

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> "Error establishing connection to database"

Clearly they need to use their own services for a system admin & someone with aws+scaling experience

</comment><comment><USER26> Henrik, founder of Coworks here. From a shareholder's perspective the merger probably makes perfect sense. They should be able to consolidate investments, overhead, PPC etc. From a contractor view I can't see how it changes much really. From a client perspective it is usually bad news with mergers like this. I think it has been great to have a fight for the lead in the outsourcing industry. The sad thing is that the industry as a whole needs better client processes, more high quality talent, better UX, better vetting systems etc. and that is not likely to come from the market leader at this stage. They will most likely be occupied with merger milestones for a while. Even talented management teams like these have limited bandwidth. It does leave opportunities open for all others looking at building the next generation remote work platform.

</comment><comment><USER27> While this is huge news there's a lot to be done in this space, and it has only recently started to gain momentum.

For the past couple of years we've been busy building Socialance, sort of like a hybrid if oDesk & LinkedIn. A site where you can hire people recommended by your network.

I know building a marketplace is an extremely challenging task, but we've come this far, we're going to see it through.

It seems plenty of you are heavy users of either site, or have strong opinions about the sector. If you want to help out my email is firstname.lastname@example.com (we're bootstrapped, took part in Startup Chile and are based in London).

If it sounds like something might be interested in using, please drop your mail at [http://Socialance.com](http://Socialance.com)

</comment><comment><USER28> I run a curated freelancing platform for creatives called Coworks. Being part of the industry it's really interesting to read your thoughts on the merger. Even though I've followed them very closed for two years as a competitor I was really surprised by the move. My take on it is: 1. They can lower their acquisition costs by not competing with PPC and in their content marketing. 2. Their real competitors, who are still sleeping behind the wheel, are Manpower, Randstad etc. With the merger they get the muscles to battle them for the online staffing market. 3. Last but not least- they'll ditch one of the platforms (elance?) and save half the money on Tech.

</comment><comment><USER29> So, it seems like most people had a bad experience with Elance. I have to admit that I had pros and cons too.. but now that I've learned how to use it smartly it's so damn useful. I think you can find very smart people and if you build a respectful relationship with them, it becomes very handy if you're dealing with multiple projects like I do. I know how I can trust them to do a great work and they trust me back to have quality projects / quality specifications and well paid.

<comment><USER30> Yup, I believe what these sites provide is a platform for introductions and initial agreements, but both parties still need to do the relationship building themselves.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I opened an oDesk account to get some remote help on some software dev that was beyond my skills at the time. The contractor I hired was from India, I think I paid him $15/hour.

Then I opened a profile for myself as a contractor. I charge $100/hour. So far I've gotten about 10 hours worth of work from two different US companies. I'd like to increase my rates in 2014. This is purely for interesting work to me, I've already got a day job.

<comment><USER32> The hard part is to find a great contractor that is not only technically skilled but responsible. Very difficult

Can u refer me to ur contractor in India?

<comment><USER33> <shameless self promotion> We are one. Give us a shot. Email in my profile. </shameless self promotion>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I'm pretty happy with Elance. Currently Elance charge a 8.75% fee and oDesk charge 10%. Hopefully they won't jack up the price now that they own the market.

<comment><USER35> Umm...I would expect the price to be jacked up big time now that they own the market.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Outsourcing is very much in vogue. People hire through trusted freelancer sites like Elance and oDesk. Unfortunately what I feel, many of the Freelance sites on the web can't simply help you when you need a complex, abstract project done in those domains. However, they are good in tangible services like web development, logo development etc. In my humble opinion, Statlance can be a good option for projects needing abstract thinking.

</comment><comment> dj-wonk I like to warn people about my experience with Elance and their flawed approach to contractor accountability: [http://djwonk.tumblr.com/post/50365605390/elance-reviews- don...](http://djwonk.tumblr.com/post/50365605390/elance-reviews-dont-show- when-contractors-bail)

I am not holding my breath for the merger to improve this dynamic.

</comment><comment><USER37> Really wish oDesk had carried on by itself.

</comment><comment><USER38> As long as there was competition, they were forced to maintain standards as well as individuality to retain separate policies. From a contractor's perspective only on one site, it would be positive in the sense that you can use the same credibility to bid for projects from other side ONCE they unite.

</comment><comment><USER39> Two dying competitors merging together to get the hold of a wonderful market that both of these and their likes, scammed and destroyed ... lets see how long you can survive together and lets see how many more will be phished with this corporate scam.

</comment><comment><USER40> The only problem with odesk is the ridiculous fees for a contract to hire scenario . Their rules is something like 10% of their salary for 2yrs iirc. Head hunter industry standard is something like 10% for 6mos ?

<comment><USER41> How does that work? The client specifically notifies odesk that they're making a hire, and they charge the freelancer 10%? When does he have to pay?

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Also, I don´t think they will jack up the prices. Everything is moving towards 0% on all global transactions. Rather the opposite: They will offer enterprise solution with 0% commission pretty soon.

</comment><comment><USER42> That's surprising. I feel bad for talented freelancers =/.

<comment><USER43> Talented freelancers do themselves a disservice by using either of these "services". The only reason for a talented freelancer to use them is out of a desperate need for even abysmal compensation. This merger will likely make things worse for them (freelancers), not better.

Yes, I know there are some freelancers working on these sites who earn a "decent" living. They're anomalies. The vast majority of workers earn really horrible wages. The well paid oDesk or Elance freelancer is as common as a rags-to-riches startup billionaire in the software industry as a whole.

<comment><USER44> So where would you go to find a talented freelancer then? (Assuming you don't have any good word of mouth recommendations.) Not sarcasm - I'm generally interested if you have a better way of finding them that's more reliable that google searches or trolling stackoverflow.

<comment><USER45> There are a number of second-generation sites/agencies out there now that focus on ensuring a quality of both freelancer and client (e.g. toptal.com for devs), or that simply provide matchmaking services (e.g. folyo.me for designers).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> oDesk has a lot of rock solid freelancers but Elance, the frontend looks like spam site to me and you get tens of applications and half just charge you $2. I am not saying $2 means cheap labor but after deal with a couple on Elance I find the quality is so low. there was one or two on oDesk doing horrible jobs but the rest are just terrific job. oDesk is also more modern and more active and friendly reaching out to the oDesk community - they do a lot facebook advertising.

</comment><comment><USER47> Both are great to find freelancers but the UI of both of them needs work. You have to search to find the most important stuff (eg. paying, hiring etc.).

</comment><comment><USER48> It would be nice if there was a US only odesk clone that popped up and became popular. I'd give it a shot...

</comment><comment><USER49> I'm on the fence about this. I hope that oDesk doesn't go downhill as a result of this.

</comment><comment><USER50> so ... oLance then?

<comment> dj-wonk I'd suggest "LanceIT" \-- e.g. freelancing for IT. Plus, not a bad way to get rid of boils.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> It's fine with me as long as oDesk remains the same..</comment>


How to use Stripe when running a Canadian Company - <AUTHOR> http://blog.reemer.com/using-stripe-account-while-in-canada

<comment><USER2> _There's one caveat though: you need a Social Security Number. So if you haven't worked in the US, I think you're out of luck._

I'm not an expert, but I think you can get an EIN using an ITIN instead of an SSN. ITIN's are specifically designed for this process, so you shouldn't be out of luck.

I'd prefer to see Stripe move to supporting Canada though instead of jumping through hoops to be their customer.</comment>


Live photos from New York using node.js and websockets - <AUTHOR> http://newyorklens.herokuapp.com/

<comment><USER2> This looks great! How does it work? Is it open source?</comment>