World's largest Internet exchange sues Germany over mass surveillance - <AUTHOR> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/09/16/ixp_sues_german_govt_surveillance/ <comment><USER2> It's interesting to note that DE-CIX, before filing this lawsuit, hired the former President of the Federal Constitutional Court of Germany Hans-Jürgen Papier, who is very respected, to evaluate the legality of BND's practice at the DE-CIX. His findings were crushing. Now going into court against the foreign-intelligence agency with the assessment of such a highly respected judge is probably the best strategy you could come up with. I wish them best luck!

<comment><USER3> Wow. Good on DE-CIX.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Meanwhile in the U.S., AT&T executives have permitted mass governmental surveillance through their network for _decades_ , even before the Patriot Act, even before national security letters. AT&T never made a single public complaint about the surveillance, and for all we know, they were eager participants.

<comment><USER5> A minor detail: The name AT&T applies to three different companies:

* 1885-1983: Generally known today as the monopoly phone company for the United States. (I don't know when the monopoly began or its geographic extent.)

* 1983-2005: Long distance company, after the breakup of the monopoly. AFAIK, it had been one small part of the much larger former monopoly.

* 2005-present: The former Southwestern Bell Corp (SBC), which bought the above company and took on its name and branding.

<comment><USER4> You're right that the name AT&T has undergone big changes in what it refers to, esp. with the breakup of the Bell System in 1983/1984\. But the old AT&T set the culture for all of the present day phone companies in dealings with the government.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Has anyone more information on the german secret court referenced in the article? As a german this is my first time hearing about that.

<comment><USER7> It's said to be a new control/review committee, probably without the rule to be transparent, and hasn't been created yet. As the article says it's already deemed unconstitutional before it even started.

German source: "Die Kontrolle soll stattdessen nur noch nachlaufend durch ein neues Spezialgremium erfolgen." [https://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/NSA- Skandal-und-BND-...](https://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/NSA-Skandal-und- BND-Ueberwachung-Internet-Knoten-De-CIX-klagt-gegen-die- Bundesrepublik-3325186.html)

Update: the existing control committees for G10 (article 10 of Grundgesetz = German constitution) are staffed with members of the parliament and one has to be lawyer. I don't think that makes it a court, maybe it's just a matter of translation.

German source on G10 committees [https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artikel_10-Gesetz#Verfahren](https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artikel_10-Gesetz#Verfahren)

<comment><USER8> If the committee performs a judicial review which in this context I am understanding it does it is technically a "court".

<comment><USER9> It's not a judicial review, the PKG (parliamentary control committee) and the G10 Kommittee, which is a subset of the PKG, both consist of members of Parliament, and they do the same work (keeping an eye on the executive branch's work) - just for efforts whose information is considered too sensitive for wider distribution.

<comment><USER8> My german is a bit rusty but doesn't "gerichtlicher prüfung" translates into "court examination" or more precisely "judicial review"?

<comment><USER9> "Die anstelle gerichtlicher Prüfung des Sachverhalts vorgesehenen politischen Kontrollgremien haben sich in der Vergangenheit aber oft als unzulänglich erwiesen:"

translates to (while keeping the sentence structure the same as much as possible, even if that sounds a bit off in english):

"The, in place of judicial review of the factual matter, arranged political control committees have shown in the past to often be insufficient:"</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Quit My Job For Consulting: Two Months Later - <AUTHOR> http://www.stevekle.in/quit-my-job-for-consulting-two-months-later <comment><USER3> Another item to consider is what a fair rate is.

Let's suppose that a full-time developer is paid $120K/year. (There are developers who get more, a lot who get less, but this gives us a nice round number to work with.)

When you add up benefits, taxes, office space, etc, the average employee costs 2x their salary. So that developer probably costs $240K/year.

You tend to work about 50 weeks per year, so that's about $4,800/week.

You work 5 days/week so that's $960/week.

After you get rid of lunch, discussing the weather, HN, etc, you're probably only putting in 6 hours of actual work per day, so that's $160/hour.

Therefore an employee who makes $120k/year is likely costing the employer $160/hour. As a contractor you have to bear those costs that employees do not. Plus you have to bear costs such as not getting paid for the time it takes to find more work.

Most people who contract do not charge enough. Perhaps after running through these sample numbers, you'll do the calculation for yourself and ask for a more realistic rate for what it costs for _you_ to be a contractor.

<comment><USER4> You should not bill per hour but, at the minimum, per day.

Better yet, you should give quotes for the whole project, regardless of time spent. If you spend less time than anticipated, good for you; if you spend more time than anticipated, you bear the cost.

But here's the thing: most clients have NO IDEA how much work goes into a specific task. If you bill by the hour, they will want their money's worth of your time. If however your quotes are for the whole project, the only relevant metric becomes "is the project done?"

For this to work, the project has to be specified with a reasonable amount of precision that allows one to check at the end whether it's done or not; but this extra work of specification pays off big time -- even, I might add, if you have to do it yourself for free, as part of the sales process.

<comment><USER5> But aren't most interesting problems impossible to specify, in a detailed way, up front?

</comment></comment></comment><comment> k-mcgrady >> "Book Clients Playing With House Money"

This is good advice. I've found that this and working with solo people paying out-of-pocket works fine (providing you get some assurance of payment - <USER2> usually get 50% up front). The worst clients I've experienced tend to be people who run a business with 5-10 employees but still have enough time to work with you directly. I work with these types of businesses least but in 3 years of freelance work I've had 3 screw me over.

Here's why I think it happens.

People 'playing with house money' will pay whatever it takes to get the job done because they are removed from the money - it isn't theirs.

Solo people who want work done (usually a website or app idea) want a completed product after paying you half up front. They don't want to bail because they want something to show for their money. They probably can't afford to lose the 50% and get someone else.

The small businesses I mentioned can afford to lose the 50% they pay up front (unlike the solo people). So if what you are doing doesn't meet their exact (constantly evolving) standards they are happy to kill the project. I've found these people constantly make changes to what they want and add extra features (which of course, they say 'just add to the bill'). I try my best to avoid these clients now.

<comment> matthew-wegner Another reason to play with "house money" is how most corporate budgets work.

Yes, the money isn't "theirs"--they don't open up their own wallet to pay you --but they also NEED TO SPEND their budget. A budget that isn't spent at the end of the quarter/year/whatever simply vanishes, and it's actually _harder_ for that person to request a same-size budget next time (they will be asked why they need the money if they didn't even use it all the last time around).

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> If you have one, work at your local public library instead of a coffee shop. Even though they're usually nice about it, coffee shops don't really want you there, unless they're not doing a lot of business; they're driven by turnover. Your library, on the other hand, needs you there; your usage of the library justifies their budget. I found our Oak Park library to be a better work space than the coffee shop anyways.

<comment><USER7> Plus there are some truly amazing library interiors. The state library of NSW is one that springs to mind. A really uplifting setting.

[large-ish image, but doesn't do it justice] [http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/da/Mitchell_...](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/da/Mitchell_Library,_State_Library_of_NSW.jpg)

<comment><USER8> Definitely! When I still lived in NYC, I would make an effort to spend time working at the Rose Reading Room at the New York Public Library whenever I could.

[another larg-ish image, likewise you need to see for yourself] [http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/02/NYC_Publi...](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/02/NYC_Public_Library_Research_Room_Jan_2006.jpg)

<comment><USER7> Wow, awesome. How could you not write/create something beautiful working there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Some advice: Get some clients before you do this. I tried to go contractor after my last job and didn't make any money as I spent most of my first month getting a client, and the second month finalizing the details and working on the project. Two months for $2500 isn't much if it's your only client.

The trouble I encountered was working as a web dev at a marketing agency before. They were strict about working for "potential clients", which meant anybody with money...

My advice: Get at least 5 projects lined up for the foreseeable future (next 3 or 4 months) and also save up about six months of money for bills and your normal expenditures minus savings.

This will help you invest in a business for at least, 8 to 12 months, working with 5 or 6 projects and tiding your other 6 months with savings will be the worst case scenario. Best case you find more clients and don't even get to touching that money.

</comment><comment><USER10> Going on 7 years as an independent now doing only corp-to-corp contracts. Full-stack dev. is a necessity. I enjoy it b/c I tend to get bored, so I move project to project and pick up new tech, learn it, build it, and then move on to something different.

I worked from home for the longest time, and it can be a lonely endeavor. The best mix I've found is home 75% and 25% on site. You get to interact with real humans once in a while, but go back to no distractions.

Friendly tip: If you have small children, forget it. Get an office space.

Also: Get a good accountant -- pay yourself a reasonable wage and take the rest in distributions at the end of the year in a tax-deferred retirement account. I aim to retire at 55; so far, I am on target.

<comment><USER11> (offtopic) What do people mean by a 'Full-stack developer', surely, they don't mean a Full-(computer)stack developer: someone that knows a hardware specification language to machine language to assembler to C to a higher-level language, then SQL and Javascript, Ethernet, IP, TCP etc but I suspect they do. I'm not against the terminology, keep using it if you think that applies to you.

<comment><USER10> Yes -- in a sense, what people also term "generalizing specialist". Someone who may not necessarily be an expert in technology Y, but they can be very effective in it. If I don't know it: I learn it, and fast...and while I'm studying it, and reading every god-awful book / resource I can find on it, I don't charge the client.

This is necessary b/c unless you have a dedicated team of people -- each who is good at a respective thing, you -- as a consultant, will just be expected to get it done...quickly, and with high quality.

You _can_ do consulting in your own comfort niche. I choose not to do that.

<comment><USER11> While I believe you could use all of these technologies when they have been abstracted away into APIs / programming languages etc, I have a hard time believing anybody could understand these technologies to the point of _creating abstractions_ which is what is meant when one says they 'develop in assembly': you expect them to know stuff that, C, for example, abstracts away.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> One of my suggestions: sub-contract with one or more web development "house". I've been consulting for 15 years -- and it is one of my favorite ways to work. They do all the work of collecting requirements, billing the client, etc. -- and I get a checklist of items that I sit down and work against, often with a distributed team. Do good work and these places will keep you busy, especially when they are overloaded with work for their in-house teams.

<comment><USER13> How do you find these web development "houses"? Seems like a really sweet gig, all the fun stuff without the chasing dead beats for money hassle.

<comment><USER14> Try contacting your local development agencies just making yourself known. They usually need freelancers on hand for when things get too busy, and they are great pay. Agencies tend to stick to local freelancers when they can, plus you get the advantage of possibly being able to go and work in their office occasionally.

<comment><USER15> You added no additional information; saying agencies instead of houses is not helpful information.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think his answer was more or less in the "contact local agencies part".

To add some color, it's likely there are already design/development shops in your city if you live somewhere with any kind of technology presence. If you don't know of any, go to local meetups in the web space and ask around about which ones are local to you.

As was previously mentioned, many development shops subcontract out work to local developers. Talking to them at meetups or sending an email letting them know you're interested in working with them is a great way to kick off a conversation that could lead to you working with them.

<comment><USER15> I know what his answers was, it was exactly the same as the statement that prompted that guy to ask the question in the first place. It was useless. As is this thread now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Nice post! I've been thinking about this a lot and glad you wrote about it. I appreciate you sharing your experiences.

I completely agree with breaking up your time into blocks. I try to keep my schedule to 4 hours in the morning of heads down coding (9a - 1p), 4 hours in the afternoon of heads down coding (130p - 530p) and 3 or so again at night (8-11/12).

The other time is for me to do tasks which are relevant to coding but not actually coding, significant other time, or whatever I need to get done so I can think straight during those coding sessions.

I don't answer email while coding, or give in to other distractions. The reason being that I have scheduled time for that and its coming up soon. Anyways, back 2 work ;)

<comment><USER17> Are you saying that you actually do 11 hours of coding per day plus a few more hours of other work?

It sounds insane to me. Do you work on week-ends too?

<comment><USER16> I code about 8hrs / day.

Weekends are mine.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I've found that if you charge a day rate and deliver the things you promise, clients will never worry about time. You still need to have the discipline to get things done, but it takes the pressure off making sure you are billable for a certain number of hours.

<comment><USER6> This! I consider it a professional obligation to yell at people who default to hourly billing. Other good things come from day and week rates besides not having to track time; for instance, it incentivizes you to find faster ways to deliver the same work, and makes it easier for you to negotiate scope/price without taking a rate hit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I'm interested in doing something similar myself. If the HN hivemind could help out, I have a few questions:

1 - How important is it to have some sort of public profile (eg, High ranking StackOverflow account, Github account, well trafficked blog) or public portfolio? I've done lots of good work as an employee but almost all of it is on internal corporate networks.

2 - Where do you find the all important first few customers? Should I be going to every local users group I can find and handing out business cards? Or hitting up sites like <http://www.guru.com/> ? What worked for people?

3 - What size jobs are feasible? I would like to start this on a part time basis while still working my day job. Is it possible to find jobs small enough to keep me working 1 or 2 days a week?

<comment><USER20> 1 - Nobody has ever asked if I have a GitHub or StackOverflow account. This might be different for high-priced jobs, but for everything I've done it's never come up. Normally a quick email exchange or phone call has been enough.

2 - I found my first client on oDesk, and they referred me to just about everyone else. I haven't used it since, and it's thoroughly depressing to look at how low pay the jobs are. Posting in the HN freelancer topic, and posting an ad on /r/forhire is another good way to get clients.

3 - Whatever you want - there are tonnes of people that need software building (and plenty that don't even realise it). Just remember that a few hours of time can quickly get eaten by emails, phone calls, "can you just check this", bathroom breaks, leg stretching, quick drinks etc. It takes a while to get in a good rhythm.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> This is all in fact why I went back to working at (smallish) companies after trying solo gigs out. Other bennies:

1) Coworkers to chat tech with/enjoyable rapport/shared nerd-citement

2) Far clearer separation between workspace and playspace, which is really just a catalyst to get your brain in the right place (similar to one popular argument for wearing suits), but whatever works

3) Better bennies (U.S. healthcare scheme, I hate you, even if I also like not paying 50% of my income to tax)

4) People available to fill your gaps in knowledge or weaknesses

5) The fun of mentoring/helping others

6) More likely to travel for work now and then, which is kind of fun

7) Being at home day-in and day-out got me depressed. In my region on earth we have changing weather and it is not always feasible to get outside.

In short, people work for companies for a reason and that reason is not always "i live paycheck to paycheck and have no other option"

<comment><USER22> I agree, freelance development is a lot of overhead. Plus, once your freelance business really gets moving, you end up with 1 or 2 primary clients for all of your work. Eventually, you ditch the other client to focus on the bigger paying one, and what do you end up with? Working projects for a single client, which is the same as an employee, but minus the benefits. And this seems to be the end-goal for most freelance developers, a single stable client, providing enough work to take up 100% of their 9-5 time.

<comment><USER23>
      >> end up with 1 or 2 primary clients for all of your work

This can work out much better than being an employee, particularly if you have a spouse that gets health benefits.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> The series of posts is great stuff so far. I've long been curious about freelancing, both in considering it for myself during certain phases of my career and in wanting to hire independent folks in the near future.

I've so many questions I'd love to ask an experienced freelancer:

\- Who actually writes the contracts, you or the buyer?

\- What does a sample contract look like?

\- Do you use a résumé or something more like a sell sheet when approaching buyers?

\- In what city are you working?

\- Big biz vs. startups?

\- What is your on-site vs. remote work ratio?

<comment><USER6> (1) You should have a standard contracting agreement (your MSA or "master") and a template statement of work (SOW). You'll tend to negotiate the master and you'll tend to keep technical details out of it; the SOW will be very simple and will list the work you're doing, the price, and (if you're a developer) the acceptance criteria for your project. You'll pay a lawyer to eyeball these at some point, but lots of people use boilerplate contracts they pull off the Internet. Each client will have one master and potentially many SOWs.

(1a) With that said, when the the client pushes back on using your MSA (2 out of 3 bigcos will), bite the bullet and use theirs, because you will rarely win that fight. You need a lawyer to review these.

(1b) You're not negotiating or reviewing contracts until you have the "verbal" commit that you won the gig. It's called a "verbal" because the "written" is the contract negotiation, which you wouldn't waste the money on unless you won the gig, so you need a verbal.

(2) Grab one off the Internet. Generally, for your benefit, the master will specify a term, a venue (disputes resolved in your state), compensation terms (net-30, etc) though note that the master will usually refer to a SOW for the actual price, and limits to your liability. For the benefit of the client, the contract will make it crystal clear that you are 1000% a contractor and not not not a full time employee I say it again not, assign all intellectual property generated during the engagement to the client, and possibly require you to maintain professional liability insurance.

(3) You write a proposal. The proposal usually has bios at the end of it. A bio is like a less formal version of a resume.

(4) Chicago, NYC, and San Francisco, plus all over the country.

(5) Wide mix 'o both.

(6) Something in the neighborhood of 40/60?

<comment><USER25> _(2) Grab one off the Internet._

I just want to emphasize, for the benefit of anyone new to contract work, that even a reasonably well drafted contract you find on-line is probably only worth starting with if it was designed with your particular jurisdiction in mind. The rules on tax, employment status, liability, intellectual property and many other factors vary _widely_ from place to place.

For example, Thomas mentioned being clear that you are not a full-time employee. That's a very important point, but here in the UK, merely saying "I am a freelance contractor and not an employee" in your contract will be worth about the paper it's printed on if HMRC start investigating whether you are caught by IR35. There are all kinds of rules and precedents that will override such a statement, and paying for 15 minutes with an accountant or lawyer who knows them could save you thousands of pounds and avoid the stress and inconvenience of a lengthy tax investigation.

<comment><USER24> (Mildly offtopic, but replying to my own thread, so TIOLI.)

Just reading this makes me wonder how any person on this planet ever manages to successfully exchange work for pay. How did we get to a place where governments go on and on about "creating jobs" but it takes a double major in law and finance to legally work anywhere anymore?

</rant>

<comment><USER25> That's a totally fair point. As soon as you're operating as a business and not an employee, you're typically subject to most/all of the same regulations and lack of personal/employee safeguards as any other business, even if you're just a one-man operation. You can risk setting out without knowing the number of a good lawyer and a good accountant, but personally I'd never advise anyone to do that.

The one positive thing I will say on this point is that once you've been through the major formalities the first time (setting up a legal company entity, getting your first contract written and signed, filing a year's worth of whatever tax records you need in your area, any other annual paperwork like the Companies House filing in the UK), it's usually not as bad as it sounds. The first year or so is quite a learning curve, but as long as you're reasonably organised, habitually keep accurate records, and are willing to pay for a modest amount of professional help from people whose job is to stay up- to-date on technicalities and recent changes so you don't have to, the overheads are rarely more than a half-day a month, at least here in the UK. It requires diligence, but not a PhD in rocket science.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Good stuff Steve. My last day at microsoft is october 19th and i'll being doing similar. Splitting my time between my existing projects that currently bring in some revenue, working part time as the software architect for greatnonprofits.org and spending the rest of the time consulting.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good luck!

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> 8 billable hours a day? Jesus, that's lawyer hours.

Try for 5.5-6.5.

<comment><USER28> Yeah, 8 hours is only possible for short stretches on long term secure contracts. And usually that means lower fees. You need a certain amount of time for admin, marketing and maintenance work.

From previous experience, 80% productive time is considered high-acceptable and 60% is getting to the low end. Depends on your role as well.

Also as a general rule, cost multipliers are important. Standard multiplier of 2.3x of costs (then margin on top) seems to work out about right - longer term / safe / secure projects can go a little lower if you know we can bill consistently, a higher multiplier if the work is less certain / short term.

<comment><USER6> Again, you can avoid this whole unproductive discussion by simply charging a day rate.

<comment><USER29> I love the idea of day rate, it means so much less stress as consultant. But what if, the client can afford only lets say 20 hours per week of time?

I am having somewhat of hard time working with clients who do not want fulltime though because:

a. Even though they pay only 20 hours of my time, they assume 100% availability. b. It gets awkward with them when they suddenly want to increase the hours but I have already committed my remaining hours elsewhere.

<comment><USER27> >a. Even though they pay only 20 hours of my time, they assume 100% availability. b. It gets awkward with them when they suddenly want to increase the hours but I have already committed my remaining hours elsewhere.

You need what's called a retainer agreement. It will specify an exact amount of time they have to pay you for every X, as well as specify availability and charge for it. It will literally specify what availability you have to give them, and how much they are paying, specifically for that availability, and that you are working for other clients and will not necessarily be able to change the terms of the agreement without several weeks/months notice.

(Additionally, retainers are often paid in advance, not arrears :oD, and charged wether they have work for you to do or not)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> As Thomas and Patrick frequently say, and I wholeheartedly support, do your work in increments of weeks, not hours. Things will go much better.

</comment><comment><USER31> You'll only have trouble with unbillable hours if you, well, bill by the hour.

<comment><USER32> I imagine it takes some time to learn to properly estimate how much to charge for a project. Until then, billing by the hour is a way to build heuristics.

<comment><USER6> No it doesn't. You simply say "I charge in 1 day increments", and the hourly- billing problem goes away. When you come to the day at the end of the project where you only use 4 hours, you have a very complicated logistical conundrum that after careful analysis and financial modeling you solve by billing the full day because you charge in 1 day increments.

<comment><USER33> So Thomas, you always bill like that?

I guess I will have to try it. The Southern African market may not respond to it so I will have to think of the upsell.

<comment><USER6> We tend towards fixed-price contracts. We don't bill hourly ever.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Good advice. How have you been identifying and marketing yourself to the clients paying with "House Money"?

<comment><USER35> Funded startups and Ad agencies are often looking for freelancers and a cold email can go a long way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> _Getting out of the house and going to a coffee shop helps make sure you don't get distracted by things around the house._

Not only this, but separating your work environment from your living environment can help you (a) focus more while working, and (b) not think about work when not (from my own anecdotal evidence). After a few years working from my bedroom, I decided to rent an office a short walk away from my home. It reduced 12 hour work days with 5-6 hours of actual work to ~8 hour work days with ~7 hours of actual work done.

YMMV - local Starbucks, coworking space, or a separate room in a house could work equally well, but IMHO, having a dedicated work space definitely helps.

(EDIT: corrected typo, "20" -> "12" hour work days).

</comment><comment><USER37> I can feel a lot of the same sentiment about working at home. I think its psychologically important to separate your work and personal life. Maybe consider creating room which you only go to work or joining shared office. it really works for me.

</comment><comment><USER38> As someone who works from home a lot, his advice about working in blocks of time is the most useful to me, as I've started exactly the same thing to keep productivity up. Being able to take breaks and tackle some life chores during the day is an awesome perk of working from home, but you can easily get carried away and miss out on doing any actual paying work.

</comment><comment><USER39> I've just left a company to do the same-ish thing in marketing strategy. These are some helpful learnings, thank you!

<comment><AUTHOR> Good luck!

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Good stuff. Also, HN is a great source of clients, but you have to be willing to advertise yourself correctly. Many freelancers here write me-too ads that fail to get them noticed. I do attention grabbing ads and them alone have made my practice grow about 500%.

<comment><AUTHOR> I would be interested in reading a blog post on what things work and what don't if you have the time to write it.

<comment><USER40> Well, to start you can do the following:

1\. Search my comment history. You will see all of the ads I've posted. From the ultra conservative to the crazy "code with me maybe" fiasco that got me more hate mail than Hitler, but also got me a lot of work (a _lot_ ). I'm not afraid of being different and of standing out. Though this requires a flame suit.

2\. Talk about what potential clients want to read about. I always talk about how my focus is on shipping. It really is. I dont stop working until the damn thing is done and out the door. Turns out, that is not very common with programmers these days. They are too busy dreaming of perfect code and arguing with each other about how Go deals with errors. Like I said, talk about what they want to read about (most of them just want to make sure you can and will deliver).

3.Do write a good headline. My best one so far reads "I ship software." Simple. To the point. And will make them read the rest of the ad.

4\. Talk rates right there in the ad. Disqualify people right from the start. You dont want to waste time with people looking to under pay you. Plus you will chase away any dreamer who will gladly give you 5% of his made up company in exchange of "just some code." The higher the rates, the less shit you have to deal with. Honestly. I currently charge $100/hour with a minimum of one week of work. Thats $4000 a week if you want to hire me. But you do get someone who delivers. I have no problem getting paid that amount.

5\. Make yourself available. Skype, email, phone. Just answer and take time to talk with clients. Let them know you will listen right there on the ad, and then follow through by listening.

6\. Offer them a free 30 minute consultation. This helps both sides because it will give you a good chance to feel the client out, and same for them. Chemistry is very important when doing consulting and a free consultation is a great tool to use for that.

Good luck, and get in touch with me through email (in profile) we can always bounce ideas off each other.

<comment><USER19> Do you have any other sources of clients apart from HN? What percentage of work comes via HN vs Other sources?

Also, I took a quick look through your comment history. Perhaps you are being to subtle for me, or perhaps you just post to many comments, but I don't see to many ads for your services there

<comment><USER41> Since I am also looking around for (more) clients these days, I checked out orangethirty's comment history. I guess by ads he meant these posts on the monthly 'Seeking Freelancer' threads:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4463748>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4323813>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4184829>

<comment><USER42> Here are my take aways:

(1) Say that you can do everything

(2) Be cheap (he starts at $200/day)

(3) Offer something for free

(4) Talk about "shipping" a lot

I'm not sure I would want to attract the sort of clients he gets.

<comment><USER40> :)

1\. I can't do everything. But I can deliver 99% of the work needed out there.

2\. I started out cheap. Current rates are at $100/hour with a set minimum.

3\. Offer them a chance to get to know you for free.

4\. Talk about what they want to hear.

 _I'm not sure I would want to attract the sort of clients he gets._

You mean you don't want to work with great people? People like Mark, who is focusing on disrupting the online payment industry. Or maybe even Robert, who is getting amazing growth through a simple Facebook statregy. I mean, of course I want to work with them. They are just amazing.

Maybe you just want to sit in your office all day, writing yet another interface class. Not me. I want to be where the action is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> I have not started consulting yet, but I have a question. In software development we often have to learn new APIs and learn some tools. Can we charge hours for jobs that require some learning or is learning considered personal time ?

<comment><USER44> As long as you did not misrepresent your experience with said APIs or tools, I think it's perfectly reasonable to bill for time you spend educating yourself in the pursuit of someone else's project.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> As a fellow consultant with a (somewhat) similar structure, I wonder if you have a boilerplate consulting contract you use? I kinda wanted to get a reality check and what templates others have.

<comment><USER10> Nolo Press has a book with some standard boilerplate contracts in them. [http://www.nolo.com/products/consultant-and-independent- cont...](http://www.nolo.com/products/consultant-and-independent-contractor- agreements-CICA.html) They are a decent starting point. Sometimes a client will take my boilerplate, or sometimes they will have their own. I'm ok using theirs after I have a lawyer read it.

Whoever wrote the contract will have the advantage. Even the Nolo book provides each contract written from the perspective of the client vs. consultant -- keep that in mind.

<comment><USER45> Just used it on a client instead of my nonlegalese word doc -- thanks, great advice!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> BTW, if anyone is looking for 1-2 months of HTML/CSS/JS work hit me up, my email is in the profile. Thanks.

</comment><comment><USER47> whats the CMS of this page called? thanks!

</comment><comment><USER48> This place really needs a downvote feature to quickly call BS on the ficticious salary information that occasionally pops up.</comment>


Prototyping tool for ReactJS. launch today - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/ReactPrimer/ReactPrimer <comment><AUTHOR> Hey guys and gals! Me and some friends just launched this prototyping tool for ReactJS. You can drag and drop boxes to build your component tree and export this component folder straight into your project! Check us out and let us know what you think</comment>


CPUs Outperform GPUs in Financial Markets Benchmark - <AUTHOR> http://www.hpcwire.com/2014/09/22/cpus-outperform-gpus-financial-markets-benchmark/

<comment><USER2> > Sponsored Content by Intel

<comment><USER3> This is too shady.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Calculating greeks is not very difficult and bandwidth is going to be the bottleneck due to the high number of inputs necessary to calculate them. So no wonder that CPUs outperforms GPUs. Also, real time calculation of greeks is very easily achievable for the simple products (e.g. listed derivatives), banks are struggling to get real time performance for their more complex OTC products.

</comment><comment><USER5> I can't tell if they did use CUDA or not to test the nVidia GPUs. If not, since they used Intel TBB on the Xeon Phi's, the benchmark would be obviously flawed.

Also, perhaps the part where they used newer, more powerful CPUs when testing the Phi's had something to do with the performance jump.

<comment><AUTHOR> Digging a little got me to this test configuration: [https://stacresearch.com/asset/stac-a2-nvidia-cuda-55ibm- x-i...](https://stacresearch.com/asset/stac-a2-nvidia-cuda-55ibm-x-idataplex- dx360-m4-2-x-nvidia-k20xm-co-processors)

Stack under test:

\- NVIDIA CUDA 5.5

\- NVIDIA cuRand and cuBLAS

\- CUB library

\- Eigen 3 library

\- GNU OpenMP (libgomp)

\- 2 x NVIDIA K20X @ 2600MHz, 784MHz (with ECC enabled)

\- IBM System X iDataPlex dx360 M4 Server

\- 2 x Intel Xeon E5-2660 @ 2.20GHz (SandyBridge)

\- CentOS Linux 6.4

\- 96GB DDR3 RAM</comment></comment>


The Ethos Operating System - <AUTHOR> https://www.ethos-os.org/ <comment><USER2> It would be nice if people did not reuse operating systems names:

Insight ETHOS: On Object-Orientation in Operating Systems (1992)

[http://e-collection.library.ethz.ch/eserv/eth:38713/eth-3871...](http://e-collection.library.ethz.ch/eserv/eth:38713/eth-38713-02.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER3> I love this. These kinds of large, moonshot projects are exactly what university research labs need to work on to move us forward.

<comment><USER4> I love this. These projects almost certainly ultimately fail, get laughed at, and then end up educating us anyway, whether for what to do or what _not_ to do. I expect I'll probably see some hilarious things from it early on, laugh at it's idealism and mistakes, and in 10 years I'll be using tech designed by it's apostles.

<comment><USER5> reminds me of Plan9.

We all talk about how silly it is and has been for years, while simultaneously extolling the values behind the development ideas that Plan 9 follows, and the good practices it teaches in regards to OS development.

<comment> chao- No one I know, who knows enough about systems to know what Plan9 is, looked so little into the details such that they find it "silly".

<comment><USER6> I call it silly too. While also admiring many of its ideals.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Ok, surely, after 5 hours and 37 comments I cannot be the only one who wondered if this was a commercialization of LosethOS. Right?

<comment><USER8> The naming is rather coincidental, as is the fact that it appears to be based on principles that are the _exact opposite_ of LoseThos.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> "The need which will drive new OS adoption is security."

Regardless as to wether or not Ethos is the next widespread OS, that line rings very true.

<comment><USER10> It's actually very false.

"Security" is an invisible quality, by which I mean it cannot be easily observed and because of that it cannot be easily compared and because of that is not going to drive adoption.

This is in contrast to visible qualities: price, performance, availability of the source code and its licensing terms, size of the ecosystem (number of applications for the OS, number of books, articles, conferences, programmers who know how to program for it) etc.

How exactly will you demonstrate that Ethos is more secure than, say, OpenBSD?

<comment><USER11> I think it's more about the possibility of guarantees.

OpenBSD has un-typed IO. Typed IO gives you guarantees that un-typed IO can never give you. For starters, a number that doesn't validate properly as an Int, for instance, will simply not be able to pass through, potentially stopping if not Heartbleed then bugs like Heartbleed.

Don't you think companies and other interests would like stronger guarantees, especially when they're running applications that protect information that hackers and foreign governments and other companies would love to see?

<comment><USER12> Until it becomes difficult to work with and is perceived by someone as slowing them down, at which point someone will come up with the bright idea of typing the io channel to a suitable type for layering an untyped stream over.

<comment><USER13> This is the reason why we believe the Tao--the way--is essential to an OS. It is the programming paradigms and use, combined with OS semantics, which is the genius of UNIX.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> jude- So, I read a few of the papers. I'm hoping the Ethos OS folks are on this forum, since I have a couple questions and concerns.

First, my current understanding of the OS:

Networking TL;DR: Their protocol is called MinimaLT, and it effectively replaces TCP/IP. Traffic sent through a MinmaLT channel is encrypted and MAC'ed by the OS. Each user has a public key, which gets submitted to the remote host for each MinimaLT channel. The public key identifies processes belonging to that user on both endpoints. The user can generate a new public/private key as often as once per connection to allow for anonymity. The OS maintains one channel per host-to-host tunnel, and multiplexes it across applications.

Key management TL;DR: There exists an organization-wide key directory service and ephemeral key upload service. Servers register and re-distribute their ephemeral keys to their local key upload service, which synchronizes them with the directory service. Clients connect to their local directory service to get the ephemeral keys for other servers. The system scales up by piggybacking on DNSSEC--the directory service delivers its local servers' ephemeral keys to other directory services outside the organization by embedding them in short- lived DNS records (which then get cached).

Questions:

* It's not clear to me how a server comes to trust a user's public key. Is it trust-on-first-use? If so, how does a user revoke the public key? For example, if Mal stole Alice's key, now Bob's server thinks Mal's actions are from Alice. What do Bob and Alice do then?

* It's not clear to me how the directory service and key upload service come to trust a local server. Is looks like this is something the local admin has to do manually?

Concerns:

* I'm not sure if this is more secure; in fact, I think it's less secure than SSL. The authenticity and integrity of ephemeral server public keys are backed by DNSSEC's security. So, this scheme effectively replaces a bunch of (presumably) independent TLS CAs with just one: the DNS root. You can bet the NSA has the private key.

* I don't like how the network architecture couples key distribution to name resolution, which I view as orthogonal concerns. This design puts both under the control of the same administative entity, which makes it easy for that administrative entity to trick clients into communicating with the wrong servers.

* MinimaLT isn't amenable to content caching. How does a CDN know that two ciphertexts are really e.g. the same image file? If it can tell, then the CDN can break your end-to-end encryption. If it can't tell, then the origin server can't scale.

<comment><USER14> _The system scales up by piggybacking on DNSSEC_

You're missing the major point: MinimaLT will initially use X.509 (since it's already deployed). A future protocol upgrade will support, if I'm not mistaken, sayI.

DNS Security (e.g. DNSCurve, DNSCrypt, or even DNSSEC) adds a second layer of security: keys are transmitted in DNS records, and server auth is done via X.509.

This means an attacker would have to break both X.509 _and_ DNS.

 _I 'm not sure if this is more secure; in fact, I think it's less secure than SSL_

I believe the above point addresses your concern. In addition, MinimaLT's Curve25519 + Salsa20-Poly1305 is superior to any ciphersuite found in TLS.

<comment> jude- Okay, that was not immediately clear. Thanks! :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Anytime something restricts contributions based on academics I feel a little sad.

This should be completely open, not just to college researchers and PhDs.

<comment><USER16> Former lead kernel developer for Ethos has released source for OpenXCI:

[http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.comp.emulators.xen.user/8208...](http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.comp.emulators.xen.user/82080) [http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.emulators.xen.user/81902...](http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.emulators.xen.user/81902/match=)

Related OSS projects are [http://qubes-os.org](http://qubes-os.org) and [http://genode.org/](http://genode.org/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> > We need a well-designed API

Nobody can agree on what that is.

> as simple as possible

Turn an incredibly complex operation into a simple one? Assuming we could make it sufficiently simple, what do you do when someone needs a new simple feature _like pinging?_

> we need multiple independent quality implementations of that API

Where are all the experienced cryptographers waiting in the wings to reinvent your wheel five times?

> if one turns out to be crap, people can switch to a better one in a matter > of hours

 _After_ the exploit has been found, _after two years_ , to switch to something which _might also have the same flaw?_

Somehow this doesn't seem like a good solution.

</comment><comment><USER18> Today's software requires constant patches to "stay" secure. If you stop patching your OpenSSL or your Windows XP, its security will degrade -- but the software is the same; all that's changed is some hacker was able to construct an MS Paint file that executes arbitrary code, or some other ridiculous nonsense.

Large software systems will always have bugs and be difficult to understand in their entirety, but they could be made orders of magnitude easier to secure by not giving every line of code the potential to compromise the system.

</comment><comment><USER19> I looked around a bit, but I couldn't find a good introduction to the design principals and such. Is there a good overview in one of the papers?

<comment><USER13> Writing up the design principals of Ethos is one of my goals this summer. The short description is:

(1) Strong security services (authentication, authorization, encryption, isolation) (2) Higher level, less error prone semantics for all OS interaction. (3) Security guarantees derived from system layering (4) Highly composable semantics

Note that only (1) deals with security-specific code. The rest deals with overall code quality.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I guess the ethos OS will not support any windows less than 1280 px wide.

<comment><USER21> I'm sure there's something I'm not getting here. Can you explain?

<comment><USER22> He/she is complaining about the webpage being too wide.</comment></comment></comment>


Why can't we use cool Apps like this at work/university? - <AUTHOR> https://conceptboard.com/board/o1nr-sp88-r4t1-89ob-br4x

<comment><USER2> This sentence no verb.</comment>


Ask HN: Why is MacOS so popular among developers? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Because it's UNIX but without most of the shortcomings of other UNIX distributions.

Also with the OS and the hardware made by the same entity, there is no finger pointing when stuff goes wrong. You don't have the card/board/device maker blaming the driver/OS/software authors and vice versa, so instead of a hopeless feeling, you have a system that works. Yes sometimes Apple is said not to own up to their own problems (keyboard-gate, etc.) but often there exists a PBKAC and there are a lot of haters out there who love to post exaggerated horror stories, so take all that with a grain of salt.

It also has a bug reporting system that, while it could be better and doesn't give you much feedback, at least you know it is being paid attention to, and updates are improvements.

Also you know the creators aren't out to harvest all your data, and they seem a lot less likely to be in bed with three letter agencies that would love to backdoor anything you write. Not thinking of Linux with those two points, but other players. Linux systems have their own problems (see finger pointing above).

</comment><comment><USER3> My preference is for Unix and its ecosystem. I was a long time user of Gentoo, then Debian, then Ubuntu. On Gentoo I was more than happy to install everything from source and to optimize to my hardware where possible. I moved eventually to more user-friendly solutions (hence Ubuntu) as my work obligations grew because I couldn't afford anymore to waste half a day just fixing up an update in xorg/pulseaudio/whatever.

MacOS is pretty much the ultimate Unix environment where everything just works. You may not get as good package managers like Portage, but MacOS usually has a good enough solution like MacPorts back then or Homebrew now.

OS Updates while sometimes may have hiccups here and there (like the migration from GCC to Clang) it's usually painless with me only having to tweak a couple of settings here and there in my day to day tooling, like tmux. In Linux I expected it to break something major and actually scheduled at least a day to fix it.

In summary, I like Unix and I just want to focus on work.

</comment><comment><USER4> Until recently, MacOS was the only OS with all of the following available natively: a Unix shell, Microsoft Office, Adobe Creative Suite. The fact that they made great hardware also helped.

I guess at this point it's just inertia, but if there were a comparable alternative I'd love to move.

<comment><USER5> For me, it's adobe creative suite, Unix shell, compileable ruby stuffs, attention to privacy and security.

With windows I presume my machine compromised and a keylogger installed.

<comment><USER6> While this might be an exaggeration, I feel a similar way. If I'm on a windows computer I am just a lot more careful with what websites I visit.

I must note though, if I had my own windows machine I would probably feel better about it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> When I was learning Rails on a windows laptop I was running in to all sorts of problems and issues when following tutorials. Something wouldn't work and you would go off in to a two hour rabbit hole googling around trying to find the solution. Eventually I would get it working on windows. Most tutorials are for the mac but I would be following them on windows. One night I ran into another issue following a tutorial and I decided I was going to try to same tutorial on my wife's macbook. Tutorial went super smooth and I completed it in less time than I had been spending trying to trouble shoot each issue that came up doing the same thing on windows.

OSX just works. It will save you enough time to pay for the hardware and give you piece of mind make your life way easier.

Sure you could develop on windows but OSX is way easier at least in my experience (Rails and Laravel Development).

A macbook air is more than powerful enough for web development and you can get them on sale for less than the price of an upper end windows laptop.

</comment><comment><USER8> I think about a decade ago or so MacBooks covered a nice sweet spot in terms of programming work. My bet is that this coincided with the growing world of web development too. It was a commercially-supported Unix laptop with decent hardware and a sturdy unibody shell. They came in a variety of sizes and a good number of ports for peripherals. A Linux or BSD laptop in the same capacity can require a little more work to source or configure.

I use Windows at work and both macOS and Linux at home for making games. I don't think I'll buy another MacBook in its current state, but I do think a lot of the Apple environment has been nice for programming, personally.

<comment><USER9> I'm a long time windows user, but have been on Linux full time at work for over two years (not by choice), and have been using a Mac at home for one year in the hopes of being won over. That hasn't happened though as the key- bindings on Mac are two different from what I am used to, so I'm switching back to Windows at home now that the Windows Subsystem for Linux is a thing.

<comment><USER8> The key bindings are definitely a thing to deal with when switching between keyboards. My brain had gotten used to the differences between an Apple keyboard and my ThinkPad, but I recently Lubuntu on an old MacBook and that was a mental fiasco to get things right. I'm looking to either configure or find keybindings to get around this personally.

I think the WSL has been a great boon for developing on Windows machines, and I hope it gains more traction among developers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> 1\. MacBooks are really, really nice pieces of hardware. Windows laptops tend to run the gamut in quality (even Surfaces), and getting support for them isn't as easy as heading to the Apple Store. (Surfaces can be serviced and replaced at Microsoft Stores, but there are less of them around.)

1b. MacBooks have the best displays on the market. Surface displays are a close second. Everything else is a mixed bag. Some represent colors poorly; most have terrible viewing angles.

2\. The terminal feels like home for Linux and UNIX devs (which there are a lot of).

3\. Cargo cult factor. Linux devs hated all things Microsoft for a long time because of the whole embrace, extend, extinguish thing, but there weren't many "portable" Linux options out there, so many settled on Windows machines. OS X, being a UNIX, was an easy sell, and because devs tend to make a lot of money on the average, buying one (or getting one from work) wasn't hard. Microsoft has done a lot to change their image, and I think many folks are catching on, but the inertia is real.

4\. People still think that Windows is crash-prone or easy to hack and that OS X is immune from all of that. (See Google's latest Chromebook commercial.) That hasn't been true since Windows 7, but, again, the inertia is real.

</comment><comment><USER11> A UNIX environment with common *nix tools (via brew) and a solid desktop experience with access to commercial applications should I need them.

<comment><USER12> Right. Linux would be an OK alternative for me if the Adobe Suite worked out of the vox.

<comment><USER13> You too can have the fun experience of Adobe's garbage locking up your machine because one of their "helper" applications is inexplicably using 20GB of memory!

<comment><USER5> Adobe photoshop does not have a competitor for photography.

The benefits still outweighs Adobe's hostile approach to software renting, distribution and updates.

<comment><USER14> DSLR Photography? Sure it does, CaptureOne is superior in most regards, especially in the commercial landscape. Although on the Linux side Darktable just isn't there yet

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Why Mac? Like many, many devs: (1) acceptable font rendering, unlike Windows, (2) compatible with Adobe CS unlike Linux, and (3) it's a *nix, allowing me to develop stuff that will run on linux cloud instances.

<comment><USER16> Last time I used linux, it didn't do font rendering that well either.

Mac also lets you choose arbitrary resolution scaling. And it's damn near perfect.

<comment><USER17> Font rendering is really good on all of the various distros now, including sub-pixel smoothing.

I remember the late 90s though. Ugh. Staircase aliasing and horrible stroke widths.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I have spent many (>100) hours with Windows 10 over the past three years. Everything I want to do is a special-case silo; after three simultaneous installs of Git, VS Code still complains that it needs yet another alternative stack.

Cywin, Chocolatey, GitHub Desktop App, Windows Subsystem for Linux...

I feel like Dr. Evil's son Scott. Everything is so damn complex!

So many features.

Microsoft Dev Team blog posts announcing stuff are pages and pages of great documentation. Linux dev posts are shorter, people write simple examples, expect you to engage with code samples of your own. Apple devs post nothing at all.

MacOS provides a most effective desktop environment that has careful graphic design, hosts some damn fine applications, and a Bash command-line interface to the actual system.

Solaris would have grown into this, they were very close.

<comment><USER19> I feel Windows is a second-class citizen for developers that work with open source software...

For instance if you're on Windows and your home directory has non-ascii characters _a lot_ of software will fail. Not just open source, but all kind of modules, libraries, etc that are supposed to be cross-platform but in reality only support utf8 inside filenames and directories.

Thus isn't a problem with Windows, but lack of testing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Unix shell and the friendly, no fuss UI. It's that simple really.

</comment><comment><USER21> I developed for a long time exclusively on the Mac because I wanted a unix backend with a good user interface and hardware that "just worked".

Recently though I've moved away from OS X and back to Linux on the desktop. The experience is much rockier in general and requires _much_ more setup/customization but in the end I feel that the developer experience is better. There's a broader selection of tools and better native support for things like Docker.

High Sierra was the straw that broke the camel's back for me. I was having a lot of weird issues and general slowness.

</comment><comment><USER22> They make several of the very few laptops with buying, IMHO.

OSX enjoys a lot of network effects these days.. all the devs use it, so all the sexy apps tend to be first class citizens on it.

Despite all that, I still prefer a Linux machine for development though. I think even gnome 3 is a step up from osx when it comes to usability. Luckily, Macs are so widy used among devs, you can generally be sure their laptops will end up being supported pretty well by some flavor of Linux, eventually.

</comment><comment><USER23> If anyone reads this and is curious about market share like I was, here's some (imperfect) data: [https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2018/#technology-d...](https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2018/#technology- developers-primary-operating-systems)

Windows is 50%. Mac and Linux each have about 25%.

That makes OS X about 2x more popular with devs than desktops as a whole.

<comment><USER24> > than desktops as a whole

I'm confused with your comparison with desktops in particular. What does desktop vs. laptop have to do with it?

<comment><USER23> "desktop" is shorthand for "desktop OS," which includes laptops.

That's how people commonly distinguish between Windows/Mac/etc. (desktop) vs. iOS/Android (mobile).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> "Which developers?" is a relevant question.

In my experience in the games industry the PC has long been the most favoured platform amongst game developers. It was the standard for games development up until very recently when Unity appeared and game development on the Mac became viable.

For your typical console or PC game studio it's likely to be all PCs with the coders themselves favouring PCs at home.

<comment><USER26> Never had a problem with adjusting to new keyboards. When I moved to France it took me all of a week to adapt to azerty keyboards. I wish Linux had better trackpad options,m; that's one of 3 or so big things that keeps me on Mac.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> It's easy to have both though. For a long time, my development environment has been a Linux VM (now OpenSUSE Leap 15) that I've moved from host to host. My MacBook has development tools but they're rarely used, as it's easier to just fire up VMware Fusion and the VM. I can easily snapshot or fully clone my development VM too.

<comment><USER2> How is the snapshot support on VMware Fusion these days? Can you chain snapshots together in a hierarchy like in Linux? I used to love that feature on Linux and was really disappointed to find out they didn't have it on Mac.. but that was a few years ago, maybe it's been added.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> 1- a unix system without the hurdles of managing a unix system. Even if Apple provides regular updates to macOS, the unix layer is more stable than on Linux distributions.

2- it's the only platform that lets you develop easily for macOS, MS-Windows, Linux, iOS, Android, and others.

That said, I still prefer Linux; but it is more work using Linux than macos.

</comment><comment><USER29> No focus stealing when compared with Windows.

Exception here is IntelliJ - best and worst IDE at the same time...

</comment><comment><USER30> iTerm2 for me. With command + tab and command + ` I can code without a mouse. Terminator is ok, and windows, well... Nothing is as usable as iTerm2, at least for me. Plus, it just works, no need to remove old kernels or Windows update bloat.

I even rsync all my local changes from Mac to Ubuntu for development that requires a gpu.

When fuacia or magenta or whatever it's called now, becomes a thing, I'll see if I can switch :)

</comment><comment><USER31> Windows isn't great for coding - I tried and ended up using Vagrant for almost everything (I still have no idea how to get Rails working on Windows, and only set up Python to run a desktop app I wrote for myself on Linux), but sandboxing programming into a VM that takes time to start up, having to configure port forwarding, etc. gets annoying quickly. And Linux can be a little cranky sometimes.

<comment><USER13> Windows is great for coding if you can live almost entirely within Visual Studio or things like Unreal or Unity.

Windows has an utterly useless command-line environment. PowerShell is an attempt to remedy this, but honestly it's both a little too much, and far too little at the same time. Ubuntu on Windows is another attempt that falls short of its goals, it's a second-class environment strapped on top of the legacy mess that is Windows.

The only thing I've found that makes Windows even habitable is that the Node.js experience is actually pretty good. With NPM, git, and a good text editor you can get a lot done, but even then you'll hit bare dirt now and then. Want to make a quick shell script to automate something? Hah! No. You need to commit to making a quick Node script instead.

<comment><USER32> Really haven't had any issues with Node, Git, VSCode and Git Bash on Windows... at least not any that you would fault Windows for. Cygwin/mingw works just fine. The ubuntu subsystem is about as 1st class as you can get, you don't see Apple providing anything like that (or a windows subsystem for that matter)

<comment><USER13> Why would Apple provide Ubuntu when it already has a complete BSD environment and things like Homebrew to add even more tools should you need them?

It's ridiculous that grandma's MacBook Air has better command-line tools than a typical developer's high-end Windows Professional workstation.

<comment><USER32> BSD isn't the same as linux. Command line tools are just software, there is nothing preventing you from using bash, sh, zsh or ksh or powershell on Windows through either the linux subsystem, cygwin or ubuntu for windows. Your second statement is more ridiculous.

<comment><USER13> Oh, you can "use" those, but the experience is absolutely atrocious because the Windows directory structure is complete chaos and it also has drive letters because in 1981 that's how CPM rolled.

<comment><USER32> BFD if you have to do 'cd /c/users/yourusername', of course 'cd ~' will take you there just like linux...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> iPhone app development can be done on non-apple machines, but it is harder, so I assume that adds some reason to getting a mac, at least it did for me. Even though I don't primarily do app dev, having a mac, and not having to mess with a hackintosh, was worth the extra money.</comment>


Show HN: HN Pop Quiz – Useless Trivia Quiz about Hacker News - <AUTHOR> https://www.hnpopquiz.com <comment><USER2> Hilarious loading text

</comment><comment><USER3> is it opensource?

<comment><USER4> Yes, there is a link at the bottom of the last page.</comment></comment>


How to come up with a product idea - <AUTHOR> http://cezarfloroiu.com/post/85661388516/how-to-come-up-with-a-product-idea

<comment><USER2> The problem with pains and solving them is that if you know how to solve them, then you do so and they're no longer pains. This happens quite often and we likely forget that they were pains to begin with and thus don't value the solution as a potentially commercial product. If you don't know how to solve them, then you have no product either.

I guess the real advice would be to pay attention to the pains you have solved.</comment>


The Importance of not Thinking too Much - <AUTHOR> http://www.nationalreview.com/derbyshire/derbyshire080103.asp <comment><USER2> And while writing this article, the author took his own advice.

</comment><comment><USER3> "Recall learning to drive a car, when you actually did have to think through what you were doing: "Depress clutch... OK, bring up slowly while releasing handbrake and depressing gas pedal slightly... look in mirror..."

What is a clutch?

<comment><USER4> The one thing that separates the men from the boys.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> _My point is that a field of knowledge can endure a "crisis of foundations," in which the most fundamental issues are opened up for inquiry and deconstruction, without causing any permanent harm to the field._

I would push even further and assert that any field of knowledge which doesn't regularly experience such crises is stagnant.</comment>


New evidence for grain specific C4 photosynthesis in wheat - <AUTHOR> http://www.nature.com/articles/srep31721 <comment><USER2> I don't understand why this is in Nature Scientific Reports - a relatively new, small journal that has published some bad things in the past. If this is true and well-supported it would belong into the 'main' Nature or Science journal!

<comment><USER3> When you submit to Nature and they reject the paper, they suggest you try again at Scientific Reports. Resubmitting there saves you some steps if you had reviews for your Nature submission.

<comment> semi-extrinsic Actually, they first bump you down to Nature Communications, which is still relatively prestigious. If it's rejected also there, you get bumped down to Scientific Reports (where they've dropped "Nature" from the name). It's not very prestigious and, like e.g. PLOS One, does not require a paper to be particularly novel or groundbreaking. Unless your paper is truly bad, it will get accepted at Scientific Reports if you can afford the publishing fee. Since there have been several reports of essentially nonexistent peer review from the journal, many people are a bit skeptical.

Since it's not very prestigious and kind of a last resort for authors, people also tend to be a bit skeptical when papers published there are featured in the mainstream press.

However, all scientists will readily acknowledge that the peer review process can often be flawed, so "a bit skeptical" should not be taken as "outright dismissal".

<comment><USER4> > Since there have been several reports of essentially nonexistent peer review > from the journal, many people are a bit skeptical.

Speaking from personal experience (from our own group and also from a colleague), their peer review is no better or worse than any of the other big- name publishers.

And, in regards to the OP's comments, I wouldn't consider where a paper is published to be a particularly good indicator of its quality, provided it's at least a well-known/well-established journal (e.g. in the top-20 on Google's rankings for a given field[1]).

I've been accepted and rejected by both prestigious and lesser-well-known journals, and experienced peer review by both, and it's always been very variable in quality. There also seems to be very little correlation between how interesting/ground-breaking/mundane/boring the research is and which journal it gets accepted into, and this mirrors the experience of a lot of my colleagues.

The simple fact is that the big journals just get far too many submissions and the research is usually too specialised to guarantee consistently-good peer review, or even consistently good selection of what papers should even be accepted.

[1] [https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=top_venues&hl=e...](https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=top_venues&hl=en&vq=en)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> That's interesting: "C3 angiosperms evolved more than 50 times independently into C4 plants (Muhaidat et al., 2007" [http://www.plantphysiol.org/content/155/1/56](http://www.plantphysiol.org/content/155/1/56)

</comment><comment><USER6> Fascinating that they take the 'bred in' approach as opposed to suggesting GM, as an article would have done 15-20 years ago - the scaremongers have won

<comment><USER7> If "genetically modified" doesn't apply to this then it appears meaningless as a useful term to me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> So what I take from this is that C4 photosynthesis could be arrived at through marker assisted selection, i.e. traditional breeding, rather than through GMO.</comment>


The Online Books Page - <AUTHOR> http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/archives.html <comment><USER2> A great resource.</comment>


[Invalid] Markup Validation of Apple.com - <AUTHOR> http://blog.archit.in/2011/03/invalid-markup-validation-of-apple-com/

<comment><USER2> A whole lot of FUD here.

1\. Check out the CSS validation link; mostly there are rules included for CSS3 properties that are not yet standardized and Apple has provided vendor specific rules for many browsers that don't validate. So you're really nailing them here for adding cross-platform compatibility to their home page? Kinda weak "evidence."

2\. One of the HTML5 validation errors is adding the X-UA-Compatible flag for IE. Again, Apple goes outside the spec (as TONS of sites do) to be cross platform.

3\. You end your article by stating that, "For Apple, the showcase isn't really about web standards; It's about their own version of web standards." At the same time, the Apple website works diligently through the CSS3 and HTML5 markup to bring the best possible experience to a very wide range of browsers. Moreover, you state that the demos work in Chrome if you spoof the user agent. If that's the case, isn't that showing that Apple's using _real_ web standards and not "their own version?"

4\. You claim that, "Not only is user-agent detection the wrong way to determine the HTML5 capabilities of the current browser, one could easily spoof the browser's user-agent to fool the websites." There is no defined specification for how a website should determine what browser a visitor is using EXCEPT to use the User Agent String. There are many who advocate using feature detection (and this is, in many cases, a better approach)--but your statement that using the user agent is "wrong" is categorically incorrect.

5\. Those demos are being used as a marketing tool by Apple for the Safari browser--I'm not going to fault a company for building a marketing tool and then leveraging that tool.

Honestly, I'm kinda surprised I found the motivation to write this much about your poorly crafted article. You're basically taking a shot at Apple who's doing what basically everyone else is doing on their main site to ensure cross-platform compatibility (in fact, by the looks of that CSS validator output--they're doing MORE than most). Then you bash them for restricting their demos to their own browser which, while maybe not the most "open" thing in the world, certainly doesn't imply that they've somehow created their own "subset" of the standards.

<comment><USER3> Agree with everything here except point 4. Think what he was saying is sites should use feature detection and not browser sniffing to determine whether to serve content. Apart from that though, spot on. Apple have done just as much as Google, if not more, to push newer web standards onwards.

<comment><USER2> The problem is that he said using UA sniffing is wrong. Not only is it not "wrong"--it's damn useful in certain cases and can be a valuable part of a feature detection solution.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> A paragraph and a half in, this rant turns away from "This page doesn't validate" to "Apple is doing it wrong." It sounds a bit like you're being anti-Apple for the sake of having something to rant about.

Pretty much every one of the errors is either "This doesn't always exist in some browser" or parse errors. Aren't these properties either A. ignored or B. actually parsed correctly by the browser they're intended for?

And so what? Google.com doesn't validate, nor does Microsoft.com.

</comment><comment><USER5> The W3C validator is not up to date and does not understand vendor prefixes. Until they make the validator consider real-world web apps, and not just academic markup, I won't take them seriously.</comment>


Red Lion: Archaeologists 'find London's earliest theatre' - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-52983008 <comment><USER2> In what possible sense could a building from 1567 be 'London's earliest theatre'? Has the journalist misunderstood something about it being the earliest of the Elizabethan era?

<comment><USER3> I just finished The Great Courses course The History of London and they spend quite a bit of time talking about theatre in London and it was pretty much banned/heavily controlled for most of London's history. As a result London just didn't have purpose built theatres very early compared to a lot of other cities.

<comment><USER4> That's fascinating. I assume it was banned/controlled for religious reasons? But then the religion doesn't fork until 1534 (Church of England), so why would it have been banned earlier, and why the difference with other countries?

<comment><USER3> I relistened to snippets from the course and I think my previous comment about banning for most of history was wrong though the title still right.

I was thinking of the formation of the Kings Company and Dukes Company but they were after not before this. From what I've gathered from relistening to snippets from the course and a bit of Googling the actual answer is lack of demand. London was abandoned for hundreds of years after the Romans left, then there wasn't a big interest in the arts for a long time because of other priorities like being regularly sacked/plagues/etc. I do know theatres were still kept out of the city proper once they started popping up but I can't find why other than again fear of plague.

<comment><USER5> See this comment: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23499672](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23499672)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Understanding How Graal Works – A Java JIT Compiler Written in Java - <AUTHOR> http://chrisseaton.com/rubytruffle/jokerconf17/ <comment><USER2> Graal, Truffle, SubstrateVM, Sulong etc are really fantastic projects and I've been following them for some time. This talk is also very good, so thanks to Chris for uploading his notes.

I've done a few experiments with manipulating Graal graphs myself.

I do get a sense of slight confusion in this talk over whether Graal is easy to understand or not. It's clearly easier than C2 but this is not a high bar to reach and is not really related to what language it's written in. I'd say Graal is still harder to understand than LLVM, despite LLVM being written in C++, mostly because the LLVM guys really do believe in documentation and building an open source community. The documentation for Graal is sadly near non-existent. There are academic papers, usually undated of course as is normal for such papers, so it can be hard to know how fresh the information is. There are talks and blog posts, which are helpful but are often kind of repetitive if you've seen earlier talks.

What there _isn 't_ is anything like this:

[http://llvm.org/docs/](http://llvm.org/docs/)

LLVM has detailed tutorials, design overviews, descriptions of each pass and so on. This is one reason why LLVM tends to attract a lot of compiler research and has such a thriving community. Graal is good, but it's mostly done by Oracle and researchers from JKU Linz. I wouldn't say it has much of a community (check out the traffic levels on graal-dev for example). It doesn't even have a website or even a public issue tracker, which is a _downgrade_ in understandability from existing Hotspot compilers!

Graal could give LLVM serious competition as a testbed for compiler research, but in its current state trying to work with it is just painfully slow. Even very basic questions like "how do I swap out this node in the graph" or "how do I insert a node in between two others" or "how do I enable assertions that will check if I mess up the graph" require you to learn by reading the existing code, which is hardly commented (most classes have no javadocs).

I used to think that Graal was like this because it came out of university research, so the developers were judged by metrics like how many papers they published. But LLVM has the same origins, so I guess it's really just a matter of project culture. That may prove hard to change.

<comment><USER3> > Graal, Truffle, SubstrateVM, Sulong

Is there a succinct explanation as to what those four projects are and how they would be combined in the hypothetical implementation you mention?

The idea is to replace all of the JDK with a construction of those four, right? Would it still need a traditional JVM to execute the resulting toolchain or replace it fully?

<comment><USER4> Graal is a native-code compiler for Java, implemented in Java. It can be used as a JIT or an AOT compiler.

Truffle is a framework for implementing languages in Java, implemented in Java. Truffle can use Graal to automatically produce a JIT for languages implemented in it.

SubstrateVM is a JVM and AOT compiler using Graal, implemented in Java. With SubstrateVM you can take a Java program and produce a single, statically- linked executable with no dependency on the JVM.

Sulong is an interpreter for LLVM bitcode (so C, Fortran, Rust, etc programs) using Truffle, implemented in Java.

So together you can start to see how it's a system for 'one VM to rule them all' \- all languages running with high performance in a single system.

It would be possible to write a Java bytecode interpreter, in Java, using Truffle, which would be JIT compiled using Graal, and to AOT compile that interpreter to a binary using SubstrateVM, which would give you a complete high-performance JVM implemented only in Java, yes.

Today enough of these components are available to produce a standalone high- performance Ruby or JavaScript VM, written entirely in Java, that has no dependency on the JVM.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> That was an interesting skim-read, good stuff!

Let's not forget though that this isn't the first Java JIT written in Java. I believe the Jikes RVM has that honour.

<comment><USER6> JavaInJava (Sun) and Jalapeño (IBM) are both from around 1997. You'd have to dig up some bodies to know which was first.

[https://www.researchgate.net/publication/2781745_Implementin...](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/2781745_Implementing_a_Java_Virtual_Machine_in_the_Java_Programming_Language/amp)

[http://research.ibm.com/people/j/jdchoi/jalapeno.pdf](http://research.ibm.com/people/j/jdchoi/jalapeno.pdf)

Actually, reading through the papers, JavaInJava didn't implement a JIT and Jalapeño did.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I think the end goal is to implement the jvm as a bytecode interpreter on top of truffle/graal and export it as a standalone executable via svm.

This also means that it will be easier to make vms with performance comparable to java.

One could, for example, design a functional bytecode and an svm based bytecode interpreter for it and write a language that compiles down to it to get a compiled language with a jitting (functional) vm!

<comment><USER7> You could just write a svm-based interpreter directly too.

I wonder what difference these 2 approaches would make.

I'm guesing writing an interpreter directly would be better.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> How does the JVMCI handle function inlining?

<comment><USER4> As well as being given a method to compile you can then also request the bytecode and metadata of any other method, for example to inline it.

<comment><USER8> Okay, then how are stack traces and de-opt events handled?

These are the _really_ hard problems with JIT compilers. Tracking the IP location in a block of ASM may result in a 3+ Java "methods" being executed at once.

<comment><USER4> When you install code you need to provide a frame map and metadata that maps registers, stack locations and IPs to locals, objects and bytecode.

Consider following the advice I put in the document. Open it up in Eclipse and explore using standard Java tools and discover for yourself. That was the whole point.

<comment><USER4> Now I'm at a desk, I can say start looking at the FrameState class.

[https://github.com/graalvm/graal/blob/cd655e1df4f388c78364f0...](https://github.com/graalvm/graal/blob/cd655e1df4f388c78364f00017f0299833f03669/compiler/src/org.graalvm.compiler.nodes/src/org/graalvm/compiler/nodes/FrameState.java)

And that's the beauty of it! If you were interested in frame states, typing _FrameState_ into Eclipse will have found this, and then start looking at what calls these methods.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It's nice to see java gaining compiler macros.

<comment><USER10> Take a look at bytebuddy [0] and Janino [1]

[0] [http://bytebuddy.net/#/](http://bytebuddy.net/#/)

[1] [http://janino-compiler.github.io/janino/](http://janino- compiler.github.io/janino/)</comment></comment>


US admits 'failing' on testing, says Fauci - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-51860529 <comment><USER2> Sounds like he's being too honest. Expect him to be replaced imminently.

Seriously, how are we so bad at this? We knew it was coming and South Korea has been testing 10k/day since Feb, so it's clearly doable. We've done <10k total! What in the world is going on with the tests?

<comment><USER3> >What in the world is going on with the tests?

It appears the main driver has been lack of chemicals and in the beginning, the cdc required tests to be sent to them. The states can now test on their own.

[https://www.vox.com/science-and- health/2020/3/12/21175034/co...](https://www.vox.com/science-and- health/2020/3/12/21175034/coronavirus-covid-19-testing-usa)

<comment><USER4> There was a technical issue, and a policy issue.

<comment><USER5> There was literally a policy not to allow states to use testing from other countries. And also to restrict testing a lot, early on. Even India started aggressively testing many travelers long before.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I have a hard time faulting the CDC for the response overall, but I just don't understand why they decided to make their own test at the beginning. Was it bravado? Did they think the 70% accuracy of the WHO test wasn't good enough?

If they didn't make their own test, they wouldn't have fubarred the manufacturing, which would have given us more tests.

One of the CDC's main goals, if not the main goal in this, is to spread out the panic. Given this goal, the fact that we're in flu season, _and_ the lack of test kits, I can understand the stringent testing criteria. They choose the best option in a bad situation, and I think they've done a pretty good job. However, it seems like a lot of problems could have been avoided if they just used the WHO tests.

<comment><USER7> The test accuracy of the WHO test as far as I understood it was good if someone was already experiencing symptoms once viral load was high enough. The bigger issue was false negatives, people would get released from quarantine measures, then spread it (like the cruise ship). They recommended anyone within contact to self quarantine until symptoms had reached a point they could get a definitive test. At this point testing early and coming up negative doesn't mean anything, you should still stay quarantined and continuously get retested, since a lot of people who tested negative were found to have had it the whole time when symptoms present and were given the all clear before.

In summary, the testing early doesn't change the decision tree, which is stay quarantined for 14 days, until symptoms present or not, so little point was seen to testing until then.

Problem is now, we can't track it, so everyone ideally should self quarantine or limit as much as possible social interaction and get tested if they have good reason to believe they've been exposed. Early testing will catch a lot of people but not all, so it will slow the spread, so at this point the decision tree changes and we need to start testing more, if nothing else to get a sample to extrapolate the true spread of this thing.

<comment><USER6> > In summary, the testing early doesn't change the decision tree, which is > stay quarantined for 14 days, until symptoms present or not, so little point > was seen to testing until then.

That makes a ton of sense. Thank you!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Admitting and identifying the problem is the first step.

The Cleveland Clinic just came out with an 8 hour test and hopefully this will help the situation if they share the process.

[https://www.vox.com/science-and- health/2020/3/12/21175034/co...](https://www.vox.com/science-and- health/2020/3/12/21175034/coronavirus-covid-19-testing-usa)

<comment><USER8> There is nothing secret about RNA testing. Any decent lab can synthetise its own markers from a file downloaded from internet. It is like genetic research is illegal in US or what.

<comment><USER9> Offering a diagnostic test without FDA approval is illegal, for good reason (there would be companies far worse than Theranos) but clearly in an emergency regulators need to adapt.

<comment><USER10> That's not true for tests developed in the lab they are used in.

<comment><USER11> In Arizona, Mayo Clinic, Sonora Quest Laboratories, and the Translational Genomics Research Institute in Flagstaff are rolling out their own tests. Official test kits from the CDC are in woefully short supply, under 200 right now, and only being used for people showing significant symptoms. According to a news article the new tests will use a technique similar to the CDC test known as reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction, otherwise shortened to RT-PCR

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> What is the true/false negative/positive rate for these tests? I can't find that online and I have tried.

If FPR is 10% and we test 100,000,000 people in the US but only 100,000 have the disease right now, then assuming a TPR of 100% (and a FNR of 0%) we will have 10,100,000 positive results = 101 x the number of people with COVID? How is that useful?

Disclaimer: I am maybe an idiot.

</comment><comment><USER13> I thought this polymerase chain reaction test was something you could do at any university hospital?

<comment><USER14> From a technical perspective, it is a simple test. Hard part is chain of custody and sample integrity - controls, etc.

<comment><USER15> Are there any differences for Covid-19 samples versus any of the other samples such labs would be routinely testing though?

<comment><USER16> Yes, it is RNA virus so it is an extra step that is not necessary in many other PCR based clinical tests.

<comment><USER15> Sure, I meant for the non-technical aspects that the previous poster mentioned - chain of custody, sample integrity.

<comment><USER14> So the process used in this testing is so common that research labs and any biochemistry lab in any college or high-school can run the test. But they probably shouldn't because they have no practice nor experience providing a diagnosis to a human - much less the strict statistical controls to interpret their results reliably.

A clinical lab that is used to running these kinds of (very common) protocols will see no difference in this protocol from others they commonly run (from a chain of custody, sample integrity, etc. perspective), just with a slight change to their reagents to specifically test for COVID. Their handling should be no different.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Austria alone (8 Mio people) made to date more than 5000 tests, the US 11000....

<comment><USER18> Norway (5-ish million) did more than 10000.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Realistically there is no "US" any more. Fauci is speaking for the NIAID, and arguably for the scientific community within the CDC/NIH/HHS. The white house certainly wouldn't be on board with this message, but as we saw last night even the white house is inconsistent with its own policies in important ways.

But yes: we messed up. We weren't prepared to begin with, we rolled back a bunch of existing preparedness work, when the disease arrived we turtled instead of testing, and then we refused to scale the testing capability for critical weeks. At this point it's too late. Better testing is still needed to inform the hard public health decisions that will have to be made, but it's no longer able to contain outbreaks that have grown orders of magnitude too large.

<comment><USER20> Absolutely. Was talking with a friend who was confused about why schools in remote areas are being shut down - testing needs to be done just so people realize that it's not just Washington or New York, this is pretty much everywhere or imminently about to be everywhere in the United States.

<comment><USER21> Anyone want guess at how difficult it is to ramp up testing to a population of 320 million for a disease that didn't exist 4 months ago?

<comment><USER22> Italy and South Korea managed to scale up widespread testing and their economies are proportionately much smaller than the USA for their population.

<comment><USER23> Italy is geographically half the size of Texas and South Korea is 1/7 the size of Texas. It's considerably easier to do widespread testing when everyone practically lives next to everyone else.

<comment><USER24> This is the weirdest "US is special" argument. You can pack a hundred samples (blood/swab/whatever) in a box and send it to whatever lab in a major US city, in a matter of hours.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> He can do the mea culpa later. Lets fix this asap!</comment>


What project management / issue / ticket managent tool do you use? - <AUTHOR> I am researching some alternatives to trac for my team. What project / ticket / issue apps do you use and why do you like or dislike it.<p>We are a team of 15 looking for something which is easy to use and track work loads. <comment><USER2> Asana - Easy for non-technical folks to grok, all the features I need for non- coding projects (like a marketing project for example)

Pivotal Tracker - More technical features specifically for software development, steeper learning curve, good bug tracking.

Slack - Good for office-wide communication. Easy to use for everbody.

Bugherd - Bug tracking system which integrates into the user-facing components of your web-app. Makes gathering feedback/bug-reports from the public very easy.

</comment><comment><USER3> Do you use a special methodology (agile/scrum/timeblock) and need something to fit that or are you running your project ad-hoc?

If it's a case of the latter then I would advise to look into adopting a methodology and a systemized way of working before locking yourself into a tool.

In my experience there is a big correlation between using a methodology and having a solid foundation to build a solid business.

</comment><comment><USER4> It is really worth looking at github if you have not seen it lately. There are some big project running on it. There also newer product that are tightly integrated, like [https://www.blossom.co/kanban-with- github](https://www.blossom.co/kanban-with-github)

</comment><comment><USER5> Trello - Color coding on priority, fast notifications and easy to use.

Slack - Quick communication and easy integration to other apps/tools

</comment><comment><USER6> Like: Fogbugz (small-ish team), Trello (small team)

Don't like: Jira, Whiteboard (like.. literally a whiteboard)

Want to try: Zenhub

<comment><USER7> what don't you like about jira?

<comment><USER8> We use JIRA at work, and there are good and bad aspects.

My biggest peeve is that management always want to configure it to do time- tracking. This makes engineers hate the tool and lie to it, making it useless for bug tracking.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> hiTask.com - manage tasks, projects in a team, your way.

</comment><comment><USER10> Basecamp

<comment><USER11> I'm not a big fan of Basecamp. I find lack of support for code snippets and specific issue tracking make it inferior to GH Issues and Trello.</comment></comment>


Sales Data for Effective Modern C++ - <AUTHOR> https://scottmeyers.blogspot.com/2017/07/sales-data-for-emc-print-books-digital.html <comment><AUTHOR> I was surprised to see the print editions dominate Meyers royalties; I would have expected the reverse. Anyone have more insight into the digital vs traditional book publishing world?</comment>


Tell HN: Business Bootstrappers Discussion Group - <AUTHOR> Inspired by a couple of things I saw recently, I have decided to start a Google Group called Business Bootstrappers. https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/business-bootstrappers I also grabbed the BlogSpot domain for it and embedded the group there: http://businessbootstrappers.blogspot.com/p/forum.html
Anyone interested can send me a join request or suggestions for content they would like to see on the blog or whatever.
Thanks. <comment><AUTHOR> To be clear, the idea is that this would welcome bootstrappers, people with a side project they are interested in developing, etc. I considered calling it "Biz Light" or "Business Light" and possibly a few other variations, but this was where the Ouija board ultimately landed. (shrug)

The couple of things I saw that inspired this:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13223458](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13223458)

[http://ask.metafilter.com/304260/Serious-work-working- less-t...](http://ask.metafilter.com/304260/Serious-work-working-less-than- full-time-Examples-Resources#4406255)</comment>