Ask HN: How do you find freelance/contract gigs? - <AUTHOR> I am a full-time software developer looking for extra income. I spend a lot of time "cold-emailing" local businesses and messaging other companies who are actually looking for applicants. The result is always the same: "we are not looking for freelancers/contractors right now".
I have also used freelance sites before (unsuccessfully) like ODesk and Elance, and I have really hated how they work. It seems like all freelancing on those sites is a price war. I am confident about my skill-set and I'm not worried about not being able to deliver, but the way bidding is organized on these sites feels really demeaning.
So ultimately, my question for HN is how do YOU find or establish new freelance/sub-contracting/contracting gigs? Should I just deal with my annoyance at ODesk/Elance or are there methods I'm missing? Thanks! <comment><USER5> I have been on my own for 15 years. I bill around 150/hr give or take 20% depending on the situation. Most of the work is Microsoft stack web related but mobile apps and api building has been steadily increasing for a several years now to the point that probably 20% of my 2014 revenue was in that space.

50-60% of my revenue is sub-contracting. I have a few firms that often take on projects that they are not suited for or do not want to increase staff to cover and they often sub out all or parts of the project to me. These relationships were built through networking with other developers who worked for these companies - never the bosses per se. Meet other devs and when the company needs help, they remember and recommend. In my experience this kind of introduction is about 5x as fertile as a cold intro.

Roughly 30% of my revenue is from direct relationships between myself and another company. These tend to merit a higher rate but also increased risk.

Very few of my direct relationships start from cold calling/intro (not sure if any ever did actually); most came via word of mouth recommendations of other people. Networking at the right kinds of events can also increase your profile and help you meet the right people.

ProTip: Networking at _networking_ events is a terrible idea.

Lacking a sales force the best pseudo sales force you can create are acquaintances who understand your skill set and respect you as a person. They don't need to see your work, they don't need to have hired you before - <USER2> drop your name to someone who asks. They need to know your name, what you do and have a generally good feeling about you. If you pay them back for this, even with a simple thank you or lunch - they will continue to be an advocate for you.

Another tip which probably falls into the anecdotal evidence category - <USER3> off of ODesk and ELance. You are right about the price war. Your name and value to people also gets damaged because you seem to be just another guy among thousands who need to find work that way - it is a 'dime a dozen' mentality and they will always see you as that.

<comment><USER6> How exactly do you 'network' at these events. Do you just introduce yourself and sort of talk, have a business card that you give, or how's it go?

Just wondering from someone who's never been to any type of event, so I've never had to really do any networking

<comment><USER7> Instead of "networking" just try to make friends. It's basically the same thing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Pro tip: when people say "build a network," they really mean "make friends in your and related industries." Like, actual friends: people you go out for drinks with and enjoy talking to. The trust you build, as friends, will lead to work.

Normally you meet these people in unexpected ways. Just today I was offered a potential job from a girl I met while auditioning apartments. I've also gotten jobs from people I've met on dating websites, on the train at 2am coming home from a party, and on unrelated online forums.

Leave the house, keep an open mind, be friendly.

</comment><comment><USER9> Network, network, network. Referrals are the prime driver of business for many, if not most, freelancers. When you get a client and have done good work, ask them "what three other people do you know who could use my services?"...things like that. Don't be afraid to ask for it. Get out of the home office and attend events and conferences. Start meeting people and ASK for their business. Don't be shy about it.

Also, don't expect much from cold emails. It's way too impersonal. Telephone calls are only slightly better, but in-person events are by far the best. Your goal should be to MEET as many people in-person as possible.

</comment><comment><USER10> I do business pretty exclusively through referrals in my network. Every now and again someone will find me through my site, but I do 0 outbound marketing/sales. Caveat: if I were consulting full-time, I would be doing content marketing and have an autoresponder series.

Actionable tip #1: whenever you do work for someone, be sure to get a testimonial. If possible, do a full case-study on your engagement. Feature these prominently on your site. Then, just keep in touch with everyone you do business with. DON'T directly ask for referrals. Just ask how their business is doing. Make it about them. They'll remember this and like you for it, and you'll be at the front of their mind when the topic of consultants comes up.

Actionable tip #2: read this blog post by Patrick McKenzie, the man's advice is pure gold. [http://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/10/28/dont-call-yourself-a- pro...](http://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/10/28/dont-call-yourself-a-programmer/)

</comment><comment><USER11> Build your network and nurture it. Then, after a while it will come along nicely. I run my business in the field of chemical properties, fluid phase equilibria, so really a niche market, but every year, I send a card to all my contacts in the field (100+ cards) and I try to write a personal note for each person. I takes time, but it now a kind of tradition I do not want to break (started for 2008). On the back of the card, I have a link to a summary of my year and what is coming next. 80% of my contracts are coming after such card.

Front of my 2015 card:

[http://ceondo.com/media/files/img/2015-small.jpg](http://ceondo.com/media/files/img/2015-small.jpg)

I use Moo to print the cards, quality is great and service excellent. This is a referral link, just remove the /share... if you do not want to follow the referral.

[http://www.moo.com/share/28nw8g](http://www.moo.com/share/28nw8g)

<comment><USER12> Could you elaborate on the "summary of my year and what is coming next" please? How do you make it relevant and interesting to clients, eg if your contracts tend to involve disparate kinds of work? Or is this possible because you operate in such a niche area? Thanks. Will follow the referral.

<comment><USER11> In my case, I am really in a niche market, so it is pretty easy. But even if you are let say in general iOS App development you can find the commonalities in your work which can help others in the future.

Let say you created a nice messaging system for an App, you then explain that this expertise can be reused from messaging between people on a human disaster zone but also when people are meeting to run a "catch the flag" game in your area.

Here is for example my link at the back I sent this year: [http://ceondo.com/2015](http://ceondo.com/2015)

Nothing crazy, the real thing is really, you sent a letter, a real one, you tried to wrote a small note reminding the contact about a good time together or wishing success in the area he is working (be just specific enough so he knows it is not a "I write the same on all the cards" note) and simply try to be nice.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I've been contracting for 4 years. I have received 1 job via my website. The rest have been through contacts, primarily through people I previously worked for when I was a full time employee. I've got a few through people I know from cycling. Cycling is apparently the new golf. [http://www.economist.com/blogs/prospero/2013/04/business- net...](http://www.economist.com/blogs/prospero/2013/04/business-networking)

I find events and conferences to not be much use, unless they are very specific to your industry.

</comment><comment><USER14> There are a few services now that scour dozens of sites around the web for freelance dev jobs, haven't tried one yet but have considered: [https://freelanceinbox.com](https://freelanceinbox.com)

[http://letsworkshop.com/](http://letsworkshop.com/)

[http://freelancefunnel.com/](http://freelancefunnel.com/)

[https://freelancedevleads.com/](https://freelancedevleads.com/)

[http://www.flexjobs.com/](http://www.flexjobs.com/)

<comment><USER15> my concern with these services is finding clients online is tough and I think you are competing with other online and probably cheaper devs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I run a medium-sized digital agency that started as side work that my co- founder and I basically fell into. We ran our business on the side for about a year before going full-time. I would advocate stepping back and asking what you're really looking for out of the time you have and proceeding carefully.

Selling software development services as an individual is extremely risky, especially if you are selling services to buyers who are not tech-savvy. It takes patience and energy, and software developers have a finite amount of these resources.

Serious consulting generally requires daytime availability. It's a slippery slope from "side hustle" to "leading a double life." If extra income is what you're after, is it an option to change jobs for better pay, or to get more income from your day job?

One bit of advice if you stick with this plan: you can make the sideline nature of the contract work a benefit in your clients' eyes if you set your rates at a level where they feel like they're getting a good deal compared to what you'd be charging if you worked full-time as a consultant. You can also mitigate the cost to your performance at your day job if you consult on a different technology than you use at work.

But if your day job is in professional services, I strongly recommend against contracting on the side. If it's all you do, work-for-hire will slowly kill you.

</comment><comment><USER17> I get most of my leads from either:

* My website. I rank reasonably well in Google for search phrases such as "Freelance Developer in $mycity". Probably if I blogged I would get more traffic. But it doesn't hurt to get a website going, and see if you can get ranked in Google for a particular geographic area. I suppose it's only really useful if you live in a city large enough that businesses are trying to find developers in via Google.

Also I've found that the people who do search Google for developers in a geographic area, are generally doing this because they want someone local, and have often previously tried offshore developers and not liked the results.

* LinkedIn / Github / Stackoverflow - occasionally I get leads from these sites. LinkedIn is easily the best of the three. I don't think you even need many connections on LinkedIn (I've only got 60). I think I just show up in the search results. Usually LinkedIn you will get recruiters looking to fill a contract job. Github/Stackoverflow are usually other developers from a company looking for someone to help out on a project.

I'm a bit disappointed in Stackoveflow Careers - I've never had a lead from there, which is odd.

* Referrals. This is probably the best way to get work - it would be hard if you were young and just starting out I guess. I've found that now and then clients will mention you to other potential clients, and it does kind of snowball a bit once you've worked for enough people.

</comment><comment><USER18> Don't contract as a contractor to businesses that are programming themselves. Build things for businesses that will be the end user. Most of these types of businesses have less of a notion of how to go about getting tools that will help their business in the first place and it can be a hard sell unless they have an immediate need. Sometimes you have to really learn about the specifics of how the business functions and this can be a pain. But once you build a few small accounting apps that export to CSV or inventory management tools specific to the business...stuff of that nature, you have a good point to take off from and examples to show. You do have to deliver though... a finished product, not just code. But I stay pretty busy like this.

<comment><USER18> Just to expand a bit... here are a few things I have built over the past several years (part time now... I have a full time job)...

-A load builder, temporary placement scheme creator, and shipping router for a large cattle feedlot in the Midwest (my brother got me this job, while I was working on it a building maintenance man came by, asked about it, told his wife who did data entry for a crop harvesting company and I got the gig below)...

-A ticket management and payment system for a crop harvesting company. The original application was in Access, and was slow and clumsy and full of bugs leading to bad payments at times. I re-wrote it using SQL, python and web interface, and host it for the company. Now they can use the application when they are out doing remote harvests (they harvest grains etc. in 4 or 5 states). The owner was pleased and recommended me to a milk producing co-op (below).

-Milk production and payment calculation for a 15 dairy co-op. Working on this right now weekends and evenings (I have a full time job). This is a complicated application that takes a number of factors (amount of Butterfat, government fuel prices, amount of bacteria etc.) and calculates payment due to individual dairies. The original app is in Lotus Approach and it's been a struggle getting everything out and finding how it all fits together (the person who made the original application passed away). In fact, I should be working on it right now instead of playing on HN. But Lotus Approach is no fun. At all.

Not sexy.. but good side work that fills a real need. There are lots of companies that could use an update, or have very specific needs they can't fill with off the shelf software. And they generally don't have a clue about how to fill that need.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I did contracting for over 2 years. All my contracts were through a referral from my network.

I never had to do cold-emails.

I live in the Bay Area though where there are a lot of companies looking for somebody to build their Android app.

What's great with the network though is that I never had to negotiate rates since there's already some trust established.

Those who found me through LinkedIn though seem to negotiate a lot with rates which can be a pain.

<comment><USER20> So the question becomes, "How do you find a good network/agency?", which is what I'm thinking about currently. Maybe it's not very hard?

<comment><USER19> Years of work. I networked my ass off for years. Hackathons, developer meetups, etc.

I probably would have had trouble finding projects if I decided to do contracting when I moved to the Bay Area right away.

For my first few projects, my rate was really low. It was meant to help friends out and get to work on high-profile projects. Some of the companies I have worked for ended up doing YC or raising seed/VC money.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Not to hijack someone else's thread or anything, but if folks have a line on a site that pairs 'people who need *nix-based system administration/automation/devops-anything' with 'system administrators/automaters/devops engineers' and could post it, I would be deeply grateful.

<comment><USER22> If you mean for a short advice/discussion, then something like [https://www.airpair.com/](https://www.airpair.com/) might be worth looking at.

<comment><USER21> I mean everything from "our pre-existing Puppet manifest had its owner leave the company 6 months ago and no one here knows how to refactor it to work with Widget X" (a day or three's worth of work) to "we've given devs the keys to our AWS account six months ago, and our burn rate ballooned to $600k/mo. Please optimize our AWS environments to what we really need, lock down the Wild West our development team created, and maybe spiff up our automation a bit so it's more hands-off and/or make it so we don't have to memorize IP addresses for everything" (N months to a year of work, depending). I will definitely check out AirPair though, thanks for the link!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I have been moonlighting/contracting on the side for a couple years now: [http://www.featlabs.com](http://www.featlabs.com)

I drum up work by:

* Posting myself on the Monthly HN Whois hiring Freelancers thread (1st of month)

* [http://www.authenticjobs.com/](http://www.authenticjobs.com/)

* Attending and doing talks at meetups - got a recent retainer from doing this.

* Old contacts pinging me about projects (rare)

Odesk and Elance, IMHO, are not worth my time. It is a race to the bottom honestly.

I get at least 3 hits a month from my HN posting of which one is solid enough to move forward with in some fashion. Since its part time I dont need more than two clients at a time.

</comment><comment><USER24> I've had some success on elance. The trick is to be _extremely_ selective about who you will talk to. Also, refuse to compete on price. The good clients will see the difference; if they're comparing you against a large firm, you will be competitive on price even if you're making a reasonable hourly rate.

Lately I'm starting to think that both of these points apply to freelancing/contracting whether it's online or through some other channel.

Also, build a decent portfolio of your work.

</comment><comment><USER25> I run workshop (a service mentioned already: [http://letsworkshop.com](http://letsworkshop.com) that delivers freelance consulting opportunities)

I've seen this question come up a lot and its part of the reason I started workshop. For me emailing companies who specifically said they were looking was great because I was able to control it directly.

Since starting workshop I've helped hundred of freelancers make a lot of money, but some continue to make nothing. It mostly has to do with the emails they send and a few big common mistakes:

\-- emails too long \-- blab on about themselves \-- obviously scripted \-- don't propose a next step

It's easy to focus on the wrong things. "What's the Best job board?" "There's not my exact perfect match" "there's not enough opportunities"

But if you focus on emailing one person everyday that needs help, and write an email focused on their problem and not you, you CAN and WILL make a lot of money.

I've seen it with hundreds in your position

<comment><USER26> I have mailed atleast a dozen people with visible PHP errors on their website and a convincing reason that I am capable of helping them out but never got a response. Is there anything else you suggest that might work?

<comment><USER25> The PHP errors may not be enough on their own to convince them that there's a problem worth fixing.

You need to tie those errors to business problems/benefits. A client may not know / care what a php error does to their site unless they know that it's losing them money, conversions, visitors, etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I almost entirely use my network to get jobs - if you possibly can, build a personal network, because that network will start referring you to people as an expert. This will allow you to rapidly increase the price of your services. I know this is difficult to get started - but whatever you do to get your first few jobs, make those people into contacts and over deliver.

As a side note: anyone doing freelancing that is struggling with the tax part of it, would love to get your feedback on [http://painless1099.com](http://painless1099.com) \- a smart bank account for your 1099 income that does automatic withholding and helps make your tax situation more like that of a W2's. Product is deep in development by some awesome folks (I'm advising) and they still need more sophisticated eyes on it to get the alpha right.

<comment><USER28> This is very interesting! I work for Hired (Hired.com - check it out) here in SF and am leading our efforts in launching our Contract Category. I'd be more than happy to help with painless1099.com, great idea! I would also love to get your perspective on several things. Let me know if you are up for chatting sometime?

<comment><USER27> What's your email? Let's connect man.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Some companies (in the Netherlands) don't want to deal directly with freelancers, for legal reasons. Also, they don't want to bother looking for developers themselves, while at the same time they are not interested in providing developers with any permanent positions. Usually they use a middle man to find appropriate developers for a fixed fee. Such a middle man might be able to provide you with several clients you'd not be able to contact yourself directly.

Some headhunters don't mind dealing with freelancers either. Currently I'm freelancing through Computer Futures.

</comment><comment><USER30> I am in a similar situation to the OP and I'd like to thank you for all your valuable sharings.

For me, it seems obvious that referals are the best way to attract new clients, but there are times when you just don't have them. I agree with most of the comments about freelance sites not being worth the effort, but I want to contribute with my perpective on cold-emailing or cold-anything.

Although I don't have much experience, I found very usefull an advice from the blog of inboundsales.net: the people you contact when you do cold-something are regarded as "suspects" (everyone in your target market). As such, they will not be receptive to invasive sales messages, but they will value your knowledge and will appreciate any great content you are able to share with them, like infographics, non-demo videos, interesting articles about their problems, etc. Then, if they take action, they become "prospects", and so on. It is a kind of science, not easy for us computer geeks. I am starting with this in mind and hope it yields good results.

</comment><comment><USER31> Referrals, and some gigs found me after I wrote some technical articles. I have not done any cold calling and I have not used any freelancer sites. If you're good then it's a bad idea to participate in a lemons market. It's much better to start from a position where you don't have to convince your client that you are capable of delivering value.

</comment><comment><USER32> When I consulted I also offered training on different technologies, languages, etc. Training itself is not very lucrative, but it's great for lead generation.

Also, I'm surprised that no one has mentioned this yet, post in the HN Freelance thread on the first of every month. I've hired a number of freelancers from there.

</comment><comment><USER33> I've been a 'Contractor' since 2012 and I haven't gotten thrown out of my hose for non-payment of rent so I guess I am doing good.

First off:

There really is no good 'job' site for Contracts. There are a lot of 'Work From Home/Work Remotely' sites; but there is not one for contracting exactly.

What I do:

I network through people I know; cold calling can work if you see the company has a problem and you tailor yourself as the fix. But often those are short term gigs unless they love you.

Other than that.

Don't be afraid to post yourself on the monthly who's hiring and who wants to get hired. Making yourself visible will net a few responses that maybe gold.

Lastly, Stackoverflow Careers job has bene helpful.

Really last comment: [http://thenubbyadmin.com/2014/01/20/best-list-of-remote- sysa...](http://thenubbyadmin.com/2014/01/20/best-list-of-remote-sysadmin-job- sites/)

</comment><comment><USER34> Networking and being known as the go-to guy for something many people need. For me it's been social media and apps, I've worked with startups and interactive agencies and seen it all. It often helps to give a free consultation and send in your own proposal to be paid corp-to-corp, then hire people to help you. It helps even more to have a small shop with a portfolio and be listed prominently for that particular technology.

If you want to go to the next level, create an open source project or start a blog, to get a reputation. The more people hear about you the more some of them will convert to potential customers, increasing ambient demand.

Look at Yehuda Katz with Ember for instance, or the guy Bob who wrote nvd3. Having a niche that can help businesses improve their bottom line pays very well.

</comment><comment><USER35> I've found that other programmers are one of the best places to get your first few gigs from. The best programmers are too swamped to take on extra work, and many are eager to refer rejected clients on to someone they can make a solid recommendation for.

So I would personally try to network with some well-known, talented folks in your own community and let them know you're looking. If they trust you and are good, you'll likely get referrals.

From there, if you treat your clients well and do good work, freelance will find you. You'll quickly find yourself having to say "no" to too much work. Word of mouth is a very powerful referral source when it comes to contract work. It can also work against you very powerfully if you don't do a good job or screw anyone over.

</comment><comment><USER36> I've used Peopleperhour.com to build my career. It has a good community and isn't a "php-farm" like the other freelance sites (though it has been going downhill a bit lately). I still would highly recommend it but you will need a good profile before you start getting jobs. Though, once I did have a good profile, potential clients kept inviting me to bid to all sorts of jobs, so it's not hard to get good income out of it once you get started.

I don't use it much anymore since I found a full-time job, but it kept me in great shape for almost four years.

Below is an affiliate link if you're OK with it.

[https://www.peopleperhour.com/site/register?rfrd=145291.1](https://www.peopleperhour.com/site/register?rfrd=145291.1)

</comment><comment><USER37> No doubt, the best freelance gigs are the result of close, pre-existing relationships. Easier said than done tho if you're just getting your start.

Try using the sites mentioned within the thread - pickcrew, gun.io, etc. - these sites generally have higher-priced contracts and more interesting work than the classic variants. Use these sites at first to discover what work you like and build long-terms relationships with a few key clients.

1\. Remember that the comms overhead with freelance work can be really lumpy and unpredictable. Programming is the fun part - the phone calls and emails can get painful really quickly

2\. Avoid hourly pricing whenever possible. Do value-based pricing. Just trust me on this one.

<comment><USER28> Hey tejay!

My name is Matt Pierce and I work for Hired here in SF. (Check out hired.com) I am leading our efforts in building out our Contract Category. I would love to chat with you if you are available over the next couple of weeks? I specifically have questions about the value based pricing vs. hourly, etc. I know the guys over at gun.io and we actually just chatted about the same topic. Would love to get your perspective. Let me know if/when you are free?

Cheers,

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> I became a freelancer shortly after graduating college. Though sites like Elance/Odesk/Freelancer.com(GetAFreelancer back then) provided me a platform to start with, it didn't take long before the cutthroat prices made it unsustainable.

The answer, which has been mentioned already by other commenters, is network. You need a great network and a great reputation. The real question is how do you build a great network? And how do you build a great reputation? As an introvert geek with only a drop of marketing prowess in my DNA, I struggled about the same questions.

One way I built my network is through Open Source Communities. Joomla! was just forked out of Mambo back then and there was an opportunity to participate in the then small community. So I joined the community, made friends with the right people, and I made a living out of building Joomla! Extensions. I also participated in other OS communities like Django, Kohana, and many others. The more I participated, the more my connection and reputation grows. The flow of projects from the connections I got from those communities allowed me to survive, and also thrive, which enabled be to build my own web development company ([https://www.wizmedia.net](https://www.wizmedia.net)).

I think that marketplace sites like oDesk/Elance/99designs/TaskRabbit etc are horrible place to be in for creative people particularly programmers and designers. I've been looking for alternative places to go to but didn't find any that is fair for both Clients and Freelancers. So it became an idea for my Startup that I'm building right now. That is Creatizens - [http://www.creatizens.com](http://www.creatizens.com). It's still under development, but you can read more about it here [https://angel.co/creatizens](https://angel.co/creatizens). The idea is based on the fact that the most profitable freelancers get their projects from their professional network - mostly from colleagues who has overflow projects, or ex-coworker whose company needs contractors. I don't want to talk too much about it since I'm bordering on spammy so I leave it at that.

Cheers!

</comment><comment> pablo-massa [https://angel.co/jobs](https://angel.co/jobs) has given me results. You can filter by "Remote OK" and the job position, also subscribe to email notifications for that filter.

</comment><comment><USER39> Mostly my gigs tend to find me. A recruiter calls me, and if I'm available (rarely), I discuss details and rate, go talk with the client, and sign a contract. This does make me very dependent on recruiters, and some recruiters are absolute scum, but there are also some good ones. My CV is out there on Linkedin, Monster, etc, and people apparently know how to find me. It's the lazy way to freelancing, I guess, it works for me. At €70/hr I'm apparently a bit cheaper than some other people here, but it's still better than what a lot of my salaried friends make.

</comment><comment><USER40> Avoid eLance and oDesk. You're positioning yourself on the low-end of the market just by being on the site. Network locally and get to know entrepreneurs in your area. Reaching out to other dev shops can also be a great way to get consistent contract work. Don't underestimate the value of remote clients either. Services like letsworkshop.com send out quality remote web development opportunities. They're not perfect, but they can be well worth the cost. iOSLeads.com and AndroidLeads.net are a couple of services I started for mobile devs. Happy to answer any questions.

</comment><comment><USER41> I've been contracting for about 3 years now, one I found via StackOverflow Careers, and the other was via a co-working space.

I think the general consensus here is right. Avoid finding jobs on contractor bidding sites like Elance/Odesk (they're devaluing your work/skills). Put yourself in positions where you can tell people about your skills/services, and where people might be looking for said skills. I'd start with tech meetups, co-working spaces, other places where people you might want to work with are. Good luck!

</comment><comment><USER42> I'm late to the game here, but I'll chime in. There is a general consensus here that networking is the fastest path to that first dollar, and I agree.

The freelance marketplace is a big reason I created 3cosystem[1] - the biggest and most comprehensive tech and startup event calendar.

See if your metro area is listed. There are certainly a number of events popping up around you. Show up early and talk to the organizers. They might mention you in their pre-game presentations.

[1] - [http://www.3cosystem.com](http://www.3cosystem.com)

<comment><USER43> Thanks this is super useful :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> in my experience, if you can grab a couple of not-too-underpriced gigs on a freelancing website (my preference is PeoplePerHour as it's less price-war-y) and can get a few regular clients from that, they'll be more happy to pay a reasonable fee for a reliable and familiar developer. Bear in mind that there are a LOT of unreliable and flaky developers on these sites so once you've proven your value to someone they'll be more likely to pay higher rates to retain you.

</comment><comment><USER45> This has been asked a few times over the years. Look over the HN search results for some ideas. [https://hn.algolia.com/?q=how+do+you+find+freelance#!/story/...](https://hn.algolia.com/?q=how+do+you+find+freelance#!/story/forever/prefix/0/how%20freelance%20find)

(This is not to say it's not a question worth asking again! I look forward to today's responses.)

<comment><USER46> You can look over the HN search results too: [http://hnpaper.forge.partlab.io/search?q=how+freelance+find](http://hnpaper.forge.partlab.io/search?q=how+freelance+find)

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> What kind of software do you build? How much do you charge? Are you willing to work on legacy code bases?

As a hiring manager, I currently have an availability to hire a freelancer. I just need someone responsible, mature and professional who's willing to roll up their sleeves and go from "receiving requirements" to shipping and thoroughly testing.

<comment><USER48> What are the details of your project? What language/frameworks are used? how legacy is legacy? Does the code base have any tests already? Remote work acceptable? Length of contract? Scope of work?

<comment><USER47> Adult content site. PHP5.2 and JavaScript. Un-shelving code from 2012. There are a few test classes. Remote work is acceptable. Work is ongoing. Work involves building features, bug fixing and interaction with vendor APIs. Work requires familiarity with Apache.

<comment><USER49> Among other things, I have experience maintaining and improving "older" PHP; contact me at email@example.com if you're looking for a developer.

<comment><USER47> Delivery to the following recipient failed permanently:

         firstname.lastname@example.com

Technical details of permanent failure: The email account that you tried to reach does not exist. Please try double-checking the recipient's email address for typos or unnecessary spaces. Learn more at [http://support.google.com/mail/bin/answer.py?answer=6596](http://support.google.com/mail/bin/answer.py?answer=6596)

<comment><USER50> He typo'd media, looks like.

<comment><USER49> Yeesh, probably shouldn't work with that guy :(

That's what I get for posting while distracted. Thank you for the correction.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> What level of skill did you have in Web Dev before you started freelancing(to freelancers in general)?

<comment><USER52> Depends on what type of company you're working for and what type of work you do. In general, the bar for journeyman programmer is "Given a rough description of a system that the client wants to have, you're capable of reducing two pages of text and a few sketches into a system which actually exists in computer code, is successfully deployed into the target organization, and more-or-less meets their needs as expressed to you." You do not get tripped up by junior engineer foibles like "I don't know how to deploy this", "Those requirements are ambiguous", "I need cooperation from X and I'm not getting it so I have accomplished nothing since being blocked on that", etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> [http://www.topcoder.com](http://www.topcoder.com) \- apart from the algorithm competitions that it is known for, it also has "challenges" where you compete with other participants and work on building applications.

</comment><comment><USER54> One way to network is to go to job interviews. Be open about the fact that you're mostly interested in contracting and maybe you'll consider joining after a time (which is true in my case - there's a lot of overhead in contracting).

</comment><comment><USER55> Simply have a blog, post cool stuff, and clients find you not the other way around.

<comment><USER56> Easy to say that when you can post things like "This is how I hacked Github".

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> Talk to small recruitment/staffing companies in your area to drum up some clients. Best part is they do the collections and handle the sales. You just set the rate.

</comment><comment><USER58> Normally via recruitment agency's they quite often have perm and contract teams.

</comment><comment><USER59> Are you near any major cities you can attend conferences of major industries?

</comment><comment><USER60> A great place to start is posting something on the find a freelancer thread here on HN every first of the month. I get a fair number of inquiries from that.

As others have mentioned, meeting people and letting them know what you do. Most of these will not be direct clients. Rather they will either know of someone who is seeking help, or will remember your name.

It can take some time to get your name out and get the ball rolling. When I started up again, it took about two months. When you talk to someone, you never know how long it will take to turn into something. I have had conversations with clients that took 6 months to come to fruition. Others in just a week. The moral of that story is to always be looking, not just when you need work. Get in the habit of always saying yes, and then just manage your availability.

There is a spectrum of the kind of work you can do. I don't mean which language/platform. I mean straight staff augmentation to managing projects. It is easier to find the staff augmentation gigs. These are easier since someone will just be telling you what to work on, and you do it. You will make less for these and this sort of work doesn't scale as well. I would only ever do this for straight a straight hourly rate.

Managing projects doesn't mean you will (necessarily) be managing people, just managing the project. With this, someone needs something built, but may not know how. It requires an additional skill set of knowing a bit of sales, knowing how to set/re-set expectations and how to negotiate. You can get a much higher rate for this, and it is possible to scale this a bit better because you can sub out some of the work.

Another thing you will run into very quickly is how to structure the relationship. There are people out there who are incompetent and others who are nefarious. It is important to know how to protect yourself legally and practically for both. For the legal aspect, find a local attorney who can look over contracts and help you craft a reusable template. __Always __have an attorney look over contracts before you sign. Most of the time someone gives you a contract to sign, it will be written to be in their best interests. Other times, they will just be poorly written.

For the practical aspect, understand there is a difference between working with someone in-state, out-of-state and out of country. You have the most legal recourse with someone in-state. If they are out-of-state, you may have to go there to pursue any legal action. (which is a massive pain) If they are out of country you may not have any legal recourse. So you will want to structure the business relationship to protect yourself, which might be as simple as half of the estimate up-front. The remainder on completion, and they get no code until it is complete.

A lot of times I structure it by milestone or iteration, with time limits, requiring permission to continue, but all billed hourly. Each iteration or milestone delivers something tangible. They get code on payment. This way I get paid for the work I do, and they won't get unexpected costs and they always have a pretty good idea where things are. Risk is mitigated in both directions. At any point, they can decide to pull the plug and they still have something for what they've paid so far.

It is not uncommon for potential clients to ask for fixed-bids. My advice is to steer away from them. They require you to be able to make good estimates then inflate them to cover your risk. That risk is all on you. They also require you to have tight definitions and manage scope changes mercilessly. If you don't, then you eat it. That said, some people like them because they're really easy.

Some other pieces of advice:

* You're not dedicated to a particular project until either they've given you a deposit, or something is set up legally so that if you start working, you'll get paid.

* Generally ask for a deposit from new clients.

* It is ok to drop bad clients. Sometimes they're not worth the trouble.

* Think about it in terms of collecting/building long term relationships rather than "work". Once you get an established base of good clients, the work will tend to come to you.

* Remember, you're not their friend and not their employee. You are in it because it is a business relationship that has mutual benefit.

* Keep good records of time, expenses and income.

Email me at curtis [at] saltydogtechnology [dot] com if you have more questions. What sort of work are you looking for?

<comment><USER61> curtis makes some excellent points about the whole concept of freelancing and how to make real long term work by bringing real value to your customers. These will generally not argue on price since they understand and see the value that the price is getting them (either increased income or decrease cost). With that said, I personally would not think recommend the paid hourly work even with the structure of milestones. I have experimented with both hourly and fixed bid (as well as spent a couple of years working in business to understand their view point) and here is what I have found out from my own experiences (which should not be generalized of course):

* sometimes (read quite often in my experience) a high value solution to a client takes you a very little amount of time if you bill hourly you sell yourself short against the only measure that matters for your clients and that is how much value did this project bring me

* Hourly billing tends to make clients cut projects before the actual objective of the project is achieved so that they can save cost and what this means to you is that for this client (and anyone they talk to) the project was a- a failure and b- not completed by you

* Hourly billing allows you to choose to be lazy. What this means is that you will not take the time to assess the project and its scope because heck your are being paid by the hour and if you are lazy you get in trouble

* Clients need to assess risk to reward ratio of any project they take (just like you should) an open ended project is not a good thing for them. Without a cost it is difficult to assess whether a project ROI is useful.

Now with the above said there are times when billing by the hour is the only course of action. In my experience these are as follows: * Old clients that have learned that you bring high value who want to grow their business strategically and want you to add iterations to them. These you can bill by the hour because there will be alot of time set aside discussing strategy and building for future and changing things. The key here is that they know you are worth it. * New clients where are referred to you who do not know what they want. This is when a client can not tell you really why they want the project or what is its success metric. I usually stay clear of this unless I am sold on what the vision is since it is difficult to define success.

Warning however must be said you have to stand your ground when it comes to fixed bids scope. You can change scope a bit if a new change takes out an old one but you have to be firm. In my experience a fixed bid project without a defined metric of success is doomed to cost you more then its worth.

<comment><USER60> Thanks for your reply. I hear what you're saying about hourly, and completely agree with your points -- if it is hourly without structure.

The difference is I treat each milestone/iteration as a small project, requiring assesment, scoping and client buy-off (A change order to the contract, along with an estimate). If they want time limits before continuing past x number hours, I'm fine with that too.

I see the advantages are:

* Lower risk to me because the price is not fixed

* Lower customer risk because they see progress and can adjust as the project unfolds.

* Lower cost to them -- they don't pay extra to cover my risk.

* The client has more control since they can make course corrections along the way.

* Regular client touch-points are built in - they get more visibility, I can adjust expectations

* Scope changes just mean more billable hours

The feedback I've gotten is they like the flexibility, and are often more willing to say yes because of reduced risk.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> Gun.io is pretty good, IMO. I'd stay away from odesk and elance.

<comment><USER37> Much love :)

<comment><USER63> I tried atleast 10 times via Gun.io but was unable to find any work through it. I might not be a suitable for the job but I never received any update on my submission. I also tried sending emails to Gun.io team but got no response from them

<comment><USER37> really really sorry about that - can you email me at email@example.com when you get a chance?

<comment><USER63> Thanks. Just sent you an email.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> I might be able to hire you. Email me your stack, u/n @ gmail.

</comment><comment><USER65> Check your local contracting agencies

</comment><comment><USER66> check out [http://pickcrew.com](http://pickcrew.com)

</comment><comment><USER67> Craigslist (Yes!)

</comment><comment><USER68> MY STRATEGY works somewhat? but is old and dusty. old and dusty warning and YMWV - mileage will vary.

-1.) It has nothing to do with your willpower or even your skillsets.

0.) the key strategy is rule out - some big companies, even stingy and the case of CIO chef info officer is clueless - AVOID THEM like the plague. U get a great job. affter change of bosses - once every 9 months for 3 years; you get 'fired' and put on the blacklist.

IT IS A DEAD END.

1.) it's all about MBA work, screening and positioning. get to know the rankings of the S&P 500 rank listing well. this is ONLY a template and guide. oh by the way, over 51 + 7 years of experience; various fields, and some odd experiences.

4.) before I get to the GOOD SEXY FREE MILLIONAIRE STUFF, figure out how to crash the local conferences/convensions. Yes, pay off the low part time work who moved goods. I am a substitute.

get the business card. say NADADADA! research the hell out of them. then it is mano a mano. eyeball to eyeball. i know u need this. this is what your competitors know here a ANONYMOUS QUOTE.

oh, no i am not a journalist. media, lawyer, stranger, etc etc. U R DOING THEM A FAVOR.

5.) ask reasonable questions. no i dont need the money but i really love programming / s?redacted? x, etc etc

6.) remember the obscure system engineer who does unix or the assoc vp does not want a referral free. Grass is always greener on the other side.

7.) it's just me but five dimensional programming code on an origama (YES I AM ASIAN) ORIGAMA ball /can be be fun. and a nice prop. wave it around like a big CIGAR.

8.) most of the workplace have the 'hacks'; unix engineers like i former trying to become a database engineer consult etc. cold mail and cold call - <USER4> fine, but the wall street method rule applies - 250 dials a day. 4 days a wekk on various times. wt ???? 250??? is a lot. note - this is dials and yes i have done freelance 'boiler room similar looking like work' \- i am not a stock broker film db BOILER ROOM !! yeahhhh baaaabbyy

9.) the MEAT the millionaire the sexy the GOOD STUFF. please delete this comment. or the censors may take it out. ok with me.

here it is...... the Rotary Club works on a non-compete, diversified P2P network. ROTARY CLUB. non-compete since only one real estate agent in any one circle.

THE SCENARIO: my good 'friend' and associate REAL ESTATE AGENT or fill in blank spends a lot of time in the WOMAN CLUB. So, the wife of the VP of the data center mentions how ASTOUNDING is this person.

the VP, is a man married and will give you at least a courtesy interview. Provide value, turn down 20% of the jobs.. shadddde the truth???? but

i have read at least 20 of the top books. compiled linux kernel,blah blah learn a new language Haskell with succky books so the problems are NEVER technical or delivery.

it has only to do with some clueless CIOsss who barely passed certification Micosoft exams. sorry, no person offense meant. IT HAS ONLY at least in USA, to do with some system engineer who WANTS U DESPERATELY but has a outsource contract with a guy who cannot understand code comments in ENGLISH or deal with HR where talent TALENT talent is a priority.

and of course, U are DOOMED. sorry to say. the extra income and part time jobs / health benefits / DESTRUCTION OF THE USA MIDDLE CLASS continues!

PS. full time -?? been there, done tthat kinda. i always allocate at least 10% to make boss look good; frills and bells; make the code look pretty and beautiful; and othher WORTHLESS GARBAGE. this is called the hidden tax.

also, 20% for learning and at least finding HOLES IN THE COMPANY SOFTWARE. logic flaws, security flaws, bad code, bad process, bad procedures, bad SQL, bad db architecture,

warninggg! this can be dangerous. doing the job of the cluelesss CIO chief inof officer can lead to BLACKLIST.

does tthzyat help?</comment>


The end of an era: Saying goodbye to search.cpan.org - <AUTHOR> https://log.perl.org/2018/05/goodbye-search-dot-cpan-dot-org.html <comment><USER2> Now _this_ is you how EOL a beloved product. By working with an OSS replacement such that the transition is transparent.

Super thanks to the team for the CPAN search (it was a lifesaver many times for me in the past!) as well as for their awesome transition plan.

<comment> X-Istence Same way that PyPI.org (Warehouse) replaced the old pypi.python.org codebase?

Mostly transparently?

<comment><USER3> Didn't that transition not go very smoothly? I seem to remember having nowhere to download packages stuff at work when they turned the old system off (I think due to the new system not being able to handle the load, but I could be wrong)

<comment><USER4> There were issues with the CDN and redirects[0] for a couple of hours when they flicked the switch. Still, I think it was a very successful transition.

[0] [https://status.python.org/incidents/1y1f44q6srh2](https://status.python.org/incidents/1y1f44q6srh2)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> From the article:

> In recent years maintenance has become a burden. Most of the site is running > 2005 era Perl code. Luckily, there is now a viable alternative: > MetaCPAN.org. The MetaCPAN team has been getting ready for the transition > and is nearly ready to take over. Shortly, a link will be added to all pages > on search.cpan.org to inform users of the upcoming change. After about a > month, all traffic will be redirected to the equivalent MetaCPAN page.

Existing search.cpan.org links will continue to work after the transition.

<comment><USER6> >Existing search.cpan.org links will continue to work after the transition.

They should get a lot more credit for this. Linkrot sucks, and I'm sure the effort that was required to pull off maintaining those links is going to pay off greatly for many for years to come.

<comment><USER7> They actually have had the existing URLs working via `search.mcpan.org` for several years now, this is really just a matter of dropping the `m`.

<comment><USER3> I'm not very familiar with the Perl ecosystem, but that would be an entirely different domain; was the server behind it maintained by the the MetaCPAN people, or the cpan.org people?

<comment><USER8> It has been maintained by MetaCPAN people. Since this transition has been planned, extra work has been put it to make the redirects more comprehensive.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is truly a down moment, to be sure, but it's pretty telling that the site became too hard to maintain because it's written in old Perl.

I'm not a Perl hater. I like Perl! I got my start in Perl and spoke at a YAPC::NA a few years ago. It's telling, is all I'm saying. It tells us something.

<comment><USER10> It tells us that a solo maintainer of a large project - with no assistance from the community possible, because closed source - trying to do it in his spare time, will eventually result in a massive accretion of technical debt.

It's a testament to Graham's productivity that he was able to keep maintaining it for so long in spite of those disadvantages, and says very little about perl.

<comment><USER11> Does it necessarily follow that a solo dev, working on a project in their spare time, will accrue massive technical debt? I'm honestly asking, as a solo dev that works on projects in my spare time. If it is the natural progression, how can it be avoided?

<comment><USER12> I don't think so.

Personally, I'm prone to taking on technical debt when under time pressure or feature pressure. I think of it like my house: if I'm too busy, I get sloppy and leave messes. If I stay busy for too long, the messes stack up.

One complicating factor, though, is the age of the code base is a factor, too. Keeping up with new runtimes, new frameworks, and new ways of doing thing takes time. This is especially a problem with things built in the new hotness, because there the culture is one of rapid iteration. So if we really want side projects to last, I think we have to choose boring technology: [http://mcfunley.com/choose-boring-technology](http://mcfunley.com/choose- boring-technology)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13>
        > Luckily, there is now a viable
        > alternative: MetaCPAN.org[...]

This is somewhat of a revisionist history. MetaCPAN has been around in a form where it's been a good search.cpan.org replacement since 2012 at least, but for some reason that whatever set of people that run perl.org haven't wanted to switch serch.cpan.org over.

I'm very grateful to the effort of Graham Barr in creating serch.cpan.org, and fully understand that he may have his own reasons for never open sourcing it, and I respect that.

But at the same time it's really odd that the Perl project has been willing to run proprietary code on one of its main landing pages for almost a decade when a viable open source alternative has been available.

<comment><USER14> From what I have been able to gather, MetaCPAN was the planned replacement for search.cpan.org and the reason it took forever to transition was to guarantee a perfect handover and minimal to no issues(linkrot, API problems, etc) upon the shutdown of the search.cpan.org servers.

They spent a good deal of time making a perfect drag and drop replacement and I think it went very well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Many thanks to Graham!

search.cpan.org was invaluable during my college senior projects in 2002 and much more so in my first gig. Back then I couldn't imagine being a Perl dev without it.

FWIW I can't imagine a better way to transition a project. Kudos to the MetaCPAN team!

</comment><comment><USER16> It's paradoxical that Perl still runs so much of the Internet, but rarely gets any credit.

</comment><comment><USER17> Thanks Graham. Perl was the first language I worked with professionally. It got me my start into software development all those years ago. Cpan was my first look at what dependency management might look like.

</comment><comment><USER18> Graham Barr did the world a huge service by creating and running search.cpan.org. I used it for many years, across many projects. Thank you Graham!

And it's nice that there exists a great replacement in metacpan.org

</comment><comment><USER19> This was the granddaddy package manager. Before gem or npm or maven or pip. It was the gold standard for sharing open source libraries and was the best reason for using Perl for a long time.

<comment><USER7> To be fair this was just _a_ search engine for the package archive. The archive, it's several clients, and alternative search engine, are still doing fine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Finally Google search results will point to the better site. It was always so frustrating to google anything Perl related and get search.cpan.org over metacpan.

<comment><USER21> One of the only pure _usability_ [1] wins from switching to DDG a few months back is that metacpan was always considered a better better/higher placed result. Of course, that only makes sense... [2]

1: It's nearly impossible to compete with Google when you aren't collecting every bit of data. That said, the reasons to switch remain compelling even months later.

2: [https://metacpan.org/release/DDG](https://metacpan.org/release/DDG)

<comment><USER7> It wasn't always. Kind words were said and `!cpan` was switched early on.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Sorry to see search.cpan.org go, I don't write much perl nowadays so only just discovered metacpan, which seems like a big step forward. It is appropriate that there would be more than one way to do it.

Still, I pored over search.cpan.org for many long hours as a kid building summer projects. The ability to browse the package source was invaluable to me on a dial up link. Here's to all those that worked on it.

</comment><comment><USER23> TIL it was originally hosted at WashU, my alma mater.

I guess it was probably in the same server room as wuarchive, which at its peak in the 90s was rumored to represent 10% of the traffic on the internet. Was cool to look through the glass into the server room in the engineering school, and see the lights blinking like crazy on the RAID array attached to wuarchive's server.

</comment><comment><USER24> Countless hours saved. Countless discoveries made. Goodbye search.cpan.org.. It was a fun run.

</comment><comment><USER25> Wow.

I'm still thankful to that site for helping me find the incredibly useful SSH::Batch library. Whether you're using Perl or not, it's an incredibly helpful command line tool for simple operations on multiple machines.

Never would have found it without search.cpan.org.

</comment><comment><USER26> Since metacpan.org has been around, I've always hated search.cpan.org.

Case in point, at a previous employer, a contractor was tasked with integrating Jira with an existing hacked together monitoring system in order to 'automatically' create trouble tickets. Not hard to do, but the problem is he just googled 'perl soap' (since the jira api was SOAP). Which lead to a soap package on cpan.org, and it (the google index) didn't even show the latest version but a tarball version from 2001 (this was in 2012) which he installed manually.

Fast forward a few months and randomly the tickets that this perl script was creating in Jira were sometimes only have filled out and full of gibberish. It was quite the head scratcher to figure out, but in the process I noticed the super old SOAP package installed, I updated it via cpanm and all the problems went away. Apparently the old soap version didn't even have support for UTF8 and that was the issue (the script actually copied comments from employees in the other monitoring system and some new employees were given new laptops with Win8 that for what ever reason was sometimes using the UTF8 version of non breaking space chars...)

<comment><USER27> This doesn't sound like a reason to hate search.cpan.org.

To me, it sounds like your contractor was awfully lazy or underinformed. They didn't do the basic level of due diligence to determine if they had the most recent version of software -- nor were they even aware of the module installers. I don't use Python or Node.js all that much, but at least I'm aware of pip and npm.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Not a knock against the people who created metacpan, but it is interesting how much faster search.cpan.org is than metacpan.org when displaying basically identical information on module pages. The page load time is consistently about 5 to 10 times faster on search.cpan.org on the first load of a page, though subsequent loads are faster on metacpan, so they must have some caching in front.

<comment><USER29> The new site's search results are noticeably slower. On search.cpan.org, searching for "cgi" took 90 milliseconds, whereas the new site takes 1.25 seconds. I tried several times.

<comment><USER21> They likely don't search the entirely same set of data (that is, cpan's search is likely a subset of metacpan's search). Also, metacpan groups results by package, which cpan returns individual modules (that is, you might have multiple results, one for each module in a package that matches in some manner). Page load speed isn't everything, and the the very quick search suggestions from the metacpan search that on a regular basis get me exactly what I want without a full search page load more than make up for it for me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> 2005 era Perl is still Perl 5. It might not be using the more modern extensions, but it's not like it was written in Perl 3 or something.

I wonder if they were building the pages in the CGI module directly? That was pretty common back then but has been depreciated for a few years now, although it still works for now.

<comment><AUTHOR> In 2005 mod_perl was a pretty popular way to build a perl site. It's almost certainly using mod_perl under the hood.

<comment><USER31> I still have the Mason book, can see it in my shelf in front of me!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I was wondering: given that

\- Perl6 is quite a different language from Perl5

\- I am aware that there is an enormous amount of code written in Perl 5

Has anyone of you started transitioning to Perl6 ? If so, what's your experience/opinion ?

<comment><USER33> I've written a blog post about that: [https://www.perl.com/article/an-open- letter-to-the-perl-comm...](https://www.perl.com/article/an-open-letter-to- the-perl-community/)

The modules implemented so far: [http://modules.perl6.org/t/CPAN5](http://modules.perl6.org/t/CPAN5)

I'll also be giving a keynote on this subject at The Perl Conference 2018: [https://perlconference.us/tpc-2018-slc/session/the-state- of-...](https://perlconference.us/tpc-2018-slc/session/the-state-of-the-cpan- butterfly-plan-2/)

If you want to keep up to date on happenings in the Perl 6 world, please checkout the Perl 6 Weekly: [https://p6weekly.wordpress.com](https://p6weekly.wordpress.com)

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> I originally thought they meant it was going to be retired on the May 25 instead of June. I was like wut? How can GDPR do this?

</comment><comment><USER35> cpan.org is great! it will be missed!

a couple days ago searching for some tool, i wanted to check some source at npmjs and to my surprise npmjs does not have a "download any-module.tar.gz" and neither has an option to "view the source" code like old cpan does.

i went to #nodejs to ask for help and guys there told me to install "npm" to download the source from npmjs module i wanted to see. NOOOO... i dont want to install npm, i just want to see how it was done. Cant i just click "download source" at the npm page ? NO. Cant i just click "view source" at the npm page ? NO. Just install npm and install the module so you can see the code... COME ON....

cpan.org so old and still so up-to-date!

perl so old and still so up-to-date!

</comment><comment><USER36> Metacpan is great, why continue with a double effort that needs a rewrite. It has served the community well for many years.

</comment><comment><USER37> I misread the headline. I was really worried I wouldn't be able to search C-SPAN archives anymore. I'm glad I can still find old clips of bonehead senators trying to grandstand at hearings.

</comment><comment><USER38> Sad news. Hopefully a replacement will fill its place and provide comprehensive public access to our government broadcasting network's archives.

<comment><USER39> > Hopefully a replacement will fill its place and provide comprehensive public > access to our government broadcasting network's archives.

Is this a joke? That's not what CPAN is about. For what CPAN is for, there already _is_ a replacement, MetaCPAN.

<comment><USER40> Dude half read the headline and nothing else. He saw CSPAN.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> For people under 40: "Perl" refers to a script interpreter that used to be popular in the 90's.

<comment><USER42> You might be surprised at how many folks under 30, such as yours truly, use Perl day in and out. I know about twenty others through my work and there are folks who float in and out of YAPCs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Also goodbye illguts then.

Illustrated guts is the description of the perl5 internals, in html and images. Metacpan still does not allow displaying it and I won't pay for hosting services.

Static GitHub pages maybe, but how stable will that be, and it's another link away from the primary content. They knew of this problem for years.

<comment><USER36> Maybe get it into (perldoc?) perl.org if possible?

<comment><USER43> I told them 5 years ago already. Didn't happen. So far all my suggestions were declined. And recent maintainerships made it much worse.

This move off search.cpan.org was cooking up for the last decade, explained in the post.</comment></comment></comment>


OpenBSD 6.2 and CDE - <AUTHOR> http://jamesdeagle.blogspot.com/2017/12/openbsd-62-cde.html <comment><USER2> Many years ago (around '96), a bunch of us used to spend way too much time at the public terminals in university computing centre (SRCE) in Zagreb, Croatia. They had about 10 compatible terminals (VT-220's and IBM-3151's) - and two Sun Sparc workstations that were set up as graphical terminals using CDE.

We had to wait for an hour or two to have one of the text terminals free up (damn MUD players hogged them up all the time, and we IRCers just wanted to chat online!). Getting access to the graphical terminals was nigh impossible unless you were there from the early morning or if you stayed through the night (the place was open 24/7 if you can believe it).

Ah the wonders of graphical Unix! Multiple workplaces! I fondly remember the doplhin wallpaper - my fave. And you could use Mosaic to browse the web (Netscape was running pretty sluggish)! Nevermind one of the workstation had a b/w monitor, it was still an amazing experience.

Fond memories.

<comment><USER3> They were VT320s with beautiful amber color! A few years prior to that I hang out there as well. I remember a bunch of (older) students were taking precious time on one of the Suns (Jagor) and all I wanted to do was to run rendering algorithms I wrote in C on it (I was a highschool kid). So, I devised a devious scheme. I wrote a C program that malloced memory like there's no tomorrow. I figured out that SunOS didn't have a memory quota for users. What happened then was that I got a PID for my program and waited patiently until the whole OS crawled to a halt (usually fast enough it started trashing the hard drives due to lack of memory). Students, out of frustration, would leave the terminals one by one as their IRC sessions and whatnots would stop working. It was a rule to never leave your terminal without logging out, so I had a clean system. Once they all left for a break, I killed my PID, got back the memory and resumed my snowflake rend.. er, work. Fun times!

<comment><USER4> Are there any hardware options connecting old monochrome screens (such as MDA or Hercules) via modern technologies like USB?

<comment><USER5> Yes, there's a multitude of USB-to-RS/232 adapters and Linux can easily be configured to echo a terminal to the serial port from boot onwards. Once you've got a serial console you can do whatever you want.

Depending on the terminal, you'll need to fiddle with baud rates, parity, and obviously hardware issues such as male/female connectors and number of pins. It took me quite a while to get my VT100-compatible terminal talking to my RaspberryPi3, but now it does, and it's great fun (particularly since I set up SIMH and have an ancient period-appropriate version of Unix V emulated).

Brings me back to when Greybeards reigned the Earth (or rather the machine room).

<comment><USER4> Thanks! I am looking to attach just an older monochrome monitor to a current- day PC rather than a full-blown terminal. I was unable to find any obvious solutions with a quick search.

I believe the constraints of the older technology may offer some advantages like reducing eye strain, nostalgia (as you mentioned), and maybe even making the interface obtuse enough to reduce my interest in staying online. Your suggestion sounds doable today and would accomplish my intended goal.

<comment><USER5> I fully support using older (simpler) interfaces to avoid _distraction_ but I am afraid I have to inform you that green phosphor screens are quite a strain on the eyesight.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I completely skipped that CDE is GPL now [1]!? Wow! I want this to run on Linux! Digging, deeper, it apparently is already working on Ubuntu [2].

[1] from [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Desktop_Environment](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Desktop_Environment):

"After a long history as proprietary software, CDE was released as free software on 6 August 2012, under the GNU Lesser General Public License, version 2 or later.[3] Since its release as free software, CDE has been ported to Linux and BSD derivatives."

[2] [https://sourceforge.net/p/cdesktopenv/wiki/SupportedPlatform...](https://sourceforge.net/p/cdesktopenv/wiki/SupportedPlatforms/)

</comment><comment><USER7> During my training I had the opportunity to work at a Sun workstation running Solaris and CDE. I did not find it to be a very comfortable working environment, but I _loved_ the look. Even though I am too young to have been around when CDE was _the_ desktop for Unix systems, I was infected with instant nostalgia.

I have been trying to build CDE myself a few times, but it always failed, and I never bothered to investigate. But I think I know what I will be doing over Christmas on my ancient OpenBSD laptop. ;-)

</comment><comment><USER8> Had never heard of CDE before. I guess this is what my nephew feels when he sees a floppy disk and connects it to the save icon on PCs :-)

As an aside, it would be a treat to have a GUI environment that is started from scratch with the Unix philosophy at core. GNOME is not it, for it is so heavily packaged with stuff I don't need, and is slow and heavy.

<comment><AUTHOR> I doubt that "the Unix philosophy" \- do one thing well - is applicable to the increasingly more complicated world of GUIs, except the basic window managers like cwm.

<comment><USER9> Most things really don't need a GUI unless you're actually viewing or manipulating graphical data.

Even then it's often nicer to have a text format that describes it.

<comment><USER10> For some reason find myself reaching for TUIs again and again. Especially ones that mimic the Borland behavior.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> What a treat! OpenBSD was my daily driver years and years ago—version 2.something I think?—and I set up my desktop environment to mimic CDE as much as I could. It was obviously a pale imitation, but I totally get the "gravitational pull" the author mentions. Sounds like I have something fun to do while my partner is visiting family!

</comment><comment><USER12> As someone who only knows these interfaces from movies (i think "Eraser" with Arnold Schwarzenegger had a terminal like this), what were the main advantages of CDE compared to other DEs at the time? Or to WfW/Windows9x/OS2/System7?

<comment><USER6> From the article [1] linked in the post:

"CDE has achieved something that no other desktop environment has ever given me: a complete and total dedication to expected behaviour - or, put differently, a complete absence of unexpected behaviour."

"Another important aspect of CDE is the magical word "consistency". CDE is highly consistent (as long as you avoid the slow Java-based applications Sun ships with Solaris 9); it uses only only one theme with only a few colours (grey, greyer, and 'Solaris purple'), and buttons are re-used in different places only there where they do exactly the same thing. The dash and dot buttons on the dock do exactly the same thing to the dock as they do to windows (yes, you can actually iconify the dock). This consistency also stems from the fact that CDE is so spartan: it has few GUI elements that could actually be inconsistent."

I think when CDE would have been open-source, there might not have been KDE or Gnome (which was developped, because of QT's license at the time of the KDE inception. At this time there was a need to have a desktop environment for Linux - and the existing Unix desktop environment, CDE was proprietary.

[1] [http://www.osnews.com/story/18969/pt_VII_CDE/page2/](http://www.osnews.com/story/18969/pt_VII_CDE/page2/)

<comment><USER13> It sadly does feel like the pursuit of ideological/political purity, while admirable and good, has left us in a place with no practical ways forward towards actually converging into a single "best" system.

<comment><USER14> At least in Linux's case, there isn't really much desire to converge into a single "best" system. Partly because "best" is somewhat subjective, but also because the kind of person who cares enough about open source to put that kind of effort into it is already pretty far on one side of the ideology/practicality divide. And that's before the parties interested in monetization get involved.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I think the decision to host the source on Sourceforge is the most humorous touch...

</comment><comment><USER16> One nice thing I liked about Motif desktops back in the days was that different applications were easily "themable" to have a different base background, which made differentiating windows very easy.

</comment><comment><USER17> I honestly don't see why anyone would want to use this DE today.

Rewind 15 years and I had a laptop with 256M RAM and would use a very bare bones tiling window manager to keep resource use down.

But today my Linux system is much more close to a replacement of a Windows or Mac OS system. I'm quite happy with the resources available and the advances made in Gnome/KDE.

I would never go back to using bare bones DE's or OpenMotif.

<comment><AUTHOR> Why wouldn't you still want to keep resource use down?

<comment><USER17> I don't need to. I haven't had a need to save resources for over 5 years. I can't remember exactly when that need went away but likely it was earlier than 5 years ago.

I'm just measuring the time I've had Lenovo Thinkpads which is at least 5 years.

And those two thinkpads have been running Fedora with a full Gnome 3 suite without issue.

In the beginning I even had local VMs but now I use my home lab for that.

<comment><USER18> This line of thinking is why we have ridiculous bloat. I use to run servers that will have 50+ simultaneous users and these servers will have 256mb of ram. Today 256mb of ram is probably not enough for most simple apps. As a matter of fact, I was shopping for 128gb-256gb ram server yesternight. :-(

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I used to like using CDE on Solaris. There was something very quiet about the ui. I mainly used it for running x-terms though. The only gui app I used frequently was Nedit (still my favourite text editor of all time - light, fast and good looking!)

</comment><comment><USER20> OpenVMS shipped with CDE for a long time. I wonder if it still does?

<comment><AUTHOR> Wasn't that DECwindows?

<comment><USER21> DECWindows was a variant of CDE I believe. I spent the first few years of my career as a sysadmin for a large VAX-Cluster and had daily access to some DECStations running it.

<comment><USER20> Nice. I never had a DECstation. I started on Alpha clusters. They were cool. I'm kind of excited about the x64 port. The hobby license will hopefully still exist and I can setup some VM's.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I've got a brand new X270 coming that's getting OpenBSD, and while I'm a 99% terminal guy, I can't wait to install this for the occasional times I need a DE.

</comment><comment><USER10> Didn't XFCE start out as an attempt at emulating this UI?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, but they sadly diverged towards GNOME rather soon.

<comment><USER23> Huh? Apart from Gtk+, what does Xfce have to do with GNOME?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Some of my first professional web development work back in the late 90s was writing perl using emacs on a CDE desktop.

(I don't remember exactly _why_ we were using this setup, but locally I was running Linux, but was running a X session from a shared Solaris box.)

</comment><comment><USER25> Lovely to see this. I used CDE when I was on work experience at Rover and they had a tonne of Sun pizza boxes connecting to their SunOS mainframes.

I remember using early KDE (KDE 2) with a CDE colour scheme to emulate the look.

</comment><comment><USER26> and we make uis in html that look worse than this.

<comment><AUTHOR> And infect your machine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Doesn't look very sexy

<comment><USER9> I personally think motif/lesstif is _way_ sexier than most of the default GTK themes.

<comment><USER10> Reminds me that i should really sit down and bang out a FVWM config i can be comfortable with.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FVWM](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FVWM)

<comment><USER9> YES! I've been running FVWM since I was a kid! I want to switch to vtwm though because it cross compiles more nicely.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Tech news for people who hate tech news? - <AUTHOR>

Is there any daily newsletter that curates only the most important things in the startup/tech world? <comment><USER2> Try [http://tech.snapzu.com](http://tech.snapzu.com) or [http://business.snapzu.com](http://business.snapzu.com)

</comment><comment><USER3> I would recommend the New York Times technology section

[http://www.nytimes.com/pages/technology/index.html](http://www.nytimes.com/pages/technology/index.html)

and the MIT Technology Review, which even has a "You may have missed" section of important tech news [http://www.technologyreview.com/](http://www.technologyreview.com/)</comment>


Federal Judge Orders Shutdown of Innovative DVD-Streaming Service Zediva - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2011/08/zediva-preliminary-injunction/

<comment><USER2> You can rent a DVD.

You can rent a DVD player and cables.

You can't rent a DVD, a DVD player, and a TCP/IP connection.

It seems irrational to me that the length of the cables involved determines the legality of the thing.

<comment><USER3> Nah, it's just the conversion of the video signal to digital packets and back again that's not allowed...because. Perfectly rational!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> So this is a preliminary injunction... what exactly does that mean and what are the steps from here? At this point is it highly likely that it will be upheld and become permanent, or is there a pretty good chance the further litigation will change the ruling? Or is there no way to tell from here?

<comment><USER2> There's not really any way to tell from here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Already on front page today <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2837181></comment>


Africa's Food Security Relies on Adoption of New Technologies - tefo-mohapi http://www.iafrikan.com/2015/10/14/africas-food-security-relies-on-adoption-of-new-technologies/ <comment><AUTHOR> Food security or nutrition should always be a top priority because food goes into our bodies.

<comment> tefo-mohapi I agree but it seems politicians on our continent are too busy poliicking to pay attention to food security</comment></comment>


A day at sea - <AUTHOR> http://sortieenmer.com/?lang=en

<comment><USER2> That was very original. I lasted 4 mins and 40 seconds.

If you ever find yourself adrift at sea wearing pants and a long-sleeve shirt (like the person here), you can inflate your clothes to help yourself float. Here's how:

1\. Make sure your shirt is buttoned up all the way and tucked into your pants.

2\. Pull your arms slightly into your shirt sleeves and tie the ends of the sleeves together.

3\. Pull one or both arms into the body of your shirt.

4\. Put your face into the shirt collar (the way you would if something smelled really bad).

5\. Exhale inside the shirt to start filling it up.

6\. Repeat steps 4 and 5 until the shirt is inflated. Then rest, and repeat again because it will slowly deflate.

</comment><comment><USER3> First gen iPad mini, heard water sounds, white line went across bottom, no further response to tapping etc. I suppose I'm missing something?</comment>


How to price your iPhone app out of existence - <AUTHOR> http://www.losingfight.com/blog/2008/11/15/how-to-price-your-iphone-app-out-of-existence/

<comment><USER2> His comments on undercutting Sega are exactly incorrect. You, a random developer, have little expenses and can stand to make $50k off of an app. Sega, on the other hand, has a ton of expenses, spends probably millions just to make a Super Monkey Ball, and can't afford that.

</comment><comment><USER3> He may be right but I would have liked to see a deeper understanding of price elasticity of demand, as well as some data to back up some of his claims.

<comment><USER4> right, i'm not sure why the author feels like he has a god-given right to make $50,000/year no matter what kind of iphone app he/she develops.

go ask any of the top 10 iphone application developers -- i don't think any of them are having trouble with the 50k/year barrier. the marketplace will be the same as the web: the majority of attention goes to a small number of sites. just because i put out a website of marginal value and charge $9.99 doesn't automatically mean i'll be making $50k/year -- the issue is a lot more difficult than that.

<comment><USER5> He didn't say that he has a right to make $50,000 year no matter what. He said that if you are not going to make $50,000 a year then your company is not going to survive, so you need to find a way to make at least that much money.

How much money the top 10 developers make is inconsequential to all the other developers that aren't in the top 10. The top 10 will always be filled mass- market applications. Most developers aren't developing applications with mass- market appeal.

<comment><USER6> He's still assuming that maintaining one app will consume a person's entire capacity for the lifetime of the app.

One app does not have to be your sole source of income.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> What the appstore needs is not higher prices, it needs fewer developers: if there are 20 apps doing X then each only makes enough money to get by, but if there were 2 apps doing X they both could invest into making new features. What we need is a serious recession with a healthy round of bakrupcies and mergers.

<comment><USER5> More people losing their jobs means more people with free time to build an iPhone app while they look for a new new job. Plus, a poor economy lowers the market for these unnecessary goods. So it is likely the result of a serious recession is more competition for fewer customers.

Apple could reduce the number of iPhone developers by charging more for the SDK, or by charging a larger transaction fee. I wouldn't be surprised if Apple did increase the costs substantially sometime soon. In particular, I wouldn't be surprised to see the standard transaction fee increase substantially, with tiered percentages based on price and/or volume (e.g. start $1 flat transaction fee + 30% of the price for the first 1,000 copies, then reduce the percentage gradually for each 10^nth copy).

<comment><USER7>
      More people losing their jobs means more people with free
      time to build an iPhone app while they look for a new new job

It could swing either way, I agree.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The other post by the same author is a lot better: [http://www.losingfight.com/blog/2008/11/07/can-you-make-a- li...](http://www.losingfight.com/blog/2008/11/07/can-you-make-a-living-off- an-iphone-app/)

</comment><comment><USER8> I don't think its possible to raise the prices. I mean sure you are supposed to compete on things other than price...but most iPhone apps aren't rocket science. Anything you can come up with, can get copied very quickly. So why would someone pay $9.99 for your app, when they can pay $.99 for an app that has all your features, on top of whatever else they come up with

<comment><USER5> If you build a good app for $20.00 then somebody might clone it for $2.00. But, will they survive on their clone? Probably not, if they are living in a rich country. You just need to outlast these cheap knock-offs until their developers get bored and move onto something else. It might be a constant stream of knock-offs, but the longer you last, the better the reputation you build. Reputation is worth a _lot_ , especially with people whose lives don't revolve around software development.

A good developer in SW Asia, SE Asia, Africa, or Eastern Europe will always have an advantage over you regarding price. $10,000 or $20,000 a year goes a long way in those places (I lived in Thailand for $1K a month without even trying to be cheap). But, that is the case with other parts of the software market and somehow Asian, African, and Eastern European companies haven't taken over the while software development market yet. Probably in the long term they will, but that is years off.

<comment><USER9> Right, but the same could be said about the USA. My monthly burn is _much_ higher than $1000 :-( BUT, living in rural Minnesota as I do, it really isn't hard to lower your living cost below $1000 if you want to and are single (When I lived in the city of Minneapolis, my monthly bills including mortgage totalled probably around $1,500). Being American and living here in the US gives me a huge advantage on understanding our culture and being able to design a UI that appeals to Americans and to be able to support them that a smart Thai doesn't have.

I am seriously thinking of getting into iPhone development even though I've only seen one once :-) Why? Because I already design & build mobile Bluetooth hardware and I can see many apps where the mobility of an iPhone would result in a great product. I don't care about consumer apps, but there are tons of small business applications that have been waiting for this kind of connectivity in your pocket!

<comment><USER5> While you _could_ get by making $1000 a month in Minnesota, that isn't sustainable for the long term since you could just go get a programming job where you earn over $1000 a week. If you aren't making $100,000 a year developing your application then you are losing a lot of money once you factor in opportunity cost.

Regarding competition from our foreign friends: I think we are both thinking the same way here. Right now, we don't really have to worry about ultra-cheap competition too much. Eventually, I think we will--the cultural advantages you speak of are a short-term advantage, not a long-term one. My Thai friends already know a lot about Western culture because they deal with us all day long in Thailand. Whatever they don't know, they can learn. But, almost none of my Thai friends could afford to buy an iPhone right now; even if they could, they work 80 hours a week at their job so they wouldn't have time to develop anything for it. But, slowly, all of that is changing.

<comment><USER9> Yup. The $1,000/month comment is only to show that it can be done, not that I'd want to only have that level of income. But it provides flexibility by letting you start small. I need to keep my day job for a while because it will be a long hard slog before my side business can come remotely close to providing me the income I need :-(

The stuff I build is industrial monitoring devices, so I purchase off the shelf Bluetooth-serial interfaces and incorporate them into my products. Google the Sena (Parani) and Roving Networks products. They are easy to use and reliable. Being able to monitor a process without needing to run cable to it is a killer app waiting to happen!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This post seems to gloss over the point about VALUE.

Sure, sell your app for $9.99 if you want. But it'd better be worth it.

And almost all of the apps ON the app store are little quick pieces of fluff, barely even worth 99 cents.

Even the better pieces of software are mostly timesavers or memory aids, games notwithstanding.

The problem seems to stem from the fact that there is this expection to spend a few weeks and crank out an app, then live on it for a year, when I just don't think this could be the case.

iPhone apps just aren't as big or useful as desktop apps. I'm not saying there aren't useful apps, but come on, you're not gonna see Photoshop or Visual Studio or.. World or Warcraft for the iPhone any time soon.

And this doesn't even get into the fact that a lot of apps I could use can be replicated just by opening the browser and going to a website. And that one app I WOULD buy, I can't, without jailbreaking. (Ah, Podcaster. C'est la vie. And that app is only 4.99 too.)

<comment><USER11> What do you all think of our graphing calculator app, Grafly (<http://grafly.com>)? Is it worth $9.99? We think it is, in that there's nothing like it on any other platform at any price.

Like all the "please rate my web site" posts, I'm interested in what HN denizens think.

Thanks.

<comment><USER12> I'm sorry to say, but I don't perceive it to be useful at all. I'm probably in your target demographic - college student in engineering, and I have to tell you that anyone who's going to be doing any sort of work with graphing calculators would prefer to buy one than use their iPhone. Here's why:

\- Physical buttons: when you're chewing through problems you absolutely MUST have physical buttons with tactile feedback. Like the calculator app on the iPhone (the default one) the buttons are way too small to even begin operating quickly.

\- Battery life. My exams are often 3-4 hours long, and an iPhone would not be allowed as a legal calculator. Even if it were, the iPhone would have trouble holding a charge through the entire exam.

I just don't see much of a market for it. At a lower price point maybe - I see this app as being useful for possibly one-off equations, but nobody who needs this sort of software will use this app as their primary graphing calculator.

Now, what I _would_ gladly pay for is a graphing calculator software that comes with a USB keypad. I have my graphing calculator with me always, but sometimes it's slow and the screen sucks. It would be wonderful to have the friendly physical user interface of the calculator and the power of the PC.

<comment><USER11> Thanks for that feedback!

The physical buttons argument is a good one.

I don't think the battery life issue is a real one--when you're not actively calculating a new graph, the app is doing very little. I suppose we should actually benchmark using it for 3-4 hours at a time. Can't argue about legal calculators.

Though saying "friendly [physical] UI" seems like an oxymoron to me--physical graphing calculators have some of the worst graphics I've ever seen.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I don't think I have a ceiling on the price I would pay for an iPhone business/productivity app. I would pay hundreds of £/$/€ if the app made me that much in return.

<comment><USER14> Target market comes into play in this case. Businesses make decisions this way, individuals don't.

<comment><USER15> smart ones do.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> i bought beejiveIM for $16, it kicks ass and is worth every penny</comment>


Is Google Cornering the Market on Deep Learning? - <AUTHOR> http://www.technologyreview.com/news/524026/is-google-cornering-the-market-on-deep-learning/

<comment><USER2> There's a great Google Tech Talk by Geoff Hinton that serves as a slightly technical introduction to Deep Learning if anyone's interested: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VdIURAu1-aU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VdIURAu1-aU)

</comment><comment><USER3> ok; so I read the DeepMind paper and am totally not-impressed. But perhaps I'm confused. Does experience replay not a priori require a known system function? And if you already have a known system function what is the value of an algorithm to deduce what you already know?</comment>