Groundbreaking Study Shows Shielding EMF Improves Autoimmune Disease in 90% - <AUTHOR> https://www.greenmedinfo.health/blog/groundbreaking-study-shows-shielding-emf-improves-autoimmune-disease <comment><USER2> Very mixed bag of the sources, several that look less than scientifically viable at a first glance (not judging whether they may have value along other dimensions). Others look more thorough/mainstream, like the very first one [0]. It would be interesting if someone who knows something about the field could evaluate how much this is worth paying attention to.

[0] [https://mpkb.org/home/publications/heil_immunologic_2016](https://mpkb.org/home/publications/heil_immunologic_2016)

EDIT: Wait, is this a trolling/hoax paper? 'A case series of 64 patient- reported outcomes subsequent to use of a silver-threaded cap designed to protect the brain and brain stem from microwave Electrosmog resulted in 90 % reporting "definite" or "strong" changes in their disease symptoms.'

I should have checked first, this is posted on the author's own page. Here's someone assessing his ideas:

[https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/the-marshal- protocol/](https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/the-marshal-protocol/)

</comment><comment><USER3> This article looks like nonsense. The idea that the silver-threaded garments seemed so credible that use of a control group was deemed unethical, for example, is silly. This appears to be pseudoscientific blather.</comment>


5 reasons why hourly rate is better than fixed price - <AUTHOR> http://blog.netguru.co/post/55074277381/why-hourly-rate-is-better-than-fixed-price <comment><USER3> Good article but it fails to address two huge issues with hourly pricing and why I don't price by the hour.

1) Something that use to take me 10 hours to design may now take me 2 hours. Should I discount the knowledge and skill it took to learn that? I'd be earning a fraction of what someone else gets because I'm more efficient.

Raise my hourly rate you may say? You can really only go so high with your hourly rate until clients will look at you funny. $100, $125, $150, $200 - anything above that as a freelancer and you'll have problems landing clients.

2) Hourly rates also limit how much you can bill - there are only so many hours and days in the year. I prefer fixed pricing as well as calculating in variables to increase the price. So if I can tell a client takes long to respond or give feedback, I add on 10%. If there are 3 or 4 people who are giving feedback, I add 5% - etc.

<comment><USER4> This is exactly why you might want to consider moving to weekly billing. Bill for a weeks work, as long as the deliverables come in does it matter if the week was only a few hours long?

You can either charge a lot per week, or less per week _and still fit in more clients_

However there is still a lot or marketing to do

<comment><USER3> So are you essentially telling the client that you are billing them for the week - which means you are dedicated to their project for the week?

<comment><USER4> no, you are saying that next week I will work on the deliverables we agreed for the week. And I will deliver them. And they will bring you this much benefit.

If I need to go and hire two guys and work nights to do it, I lose. But I only lose a limited amount.

SO, I guess I _really_ am saying work fixed bids of one week projects.

<comment><USER3> So if you finish them in one day - you don't send them to the client until Friday?

I imagine if you did them in a day or two the client would be asking why they paid for a week of work and if they can use the rest of the time somewhere else

<comment><USER4> Why not keep them till the scheduled Friday meeting?

The client is expecting it Friday, probably does not have time to talk to you on Tuesday afternoon.

Its not lying, its not cheating, its saying I will build X and doing it in a professional manner.

<comment><USER5> Are you sure?

> Bill for a weeks work, as long as the deliverables come in does it matter if > the week was only a few hours long?

"Hello Mr Client, this job will take a week to do, so I need to bill you for a week of my time". 4 hours + 1 meeting on Friday, job done.

That sounds like lying and cheating to me. Which is a nuisance, as I'd like to do it.

<comment><USER6> It is lying and cheating, and it is illegal.

Generally 'standard weeks' are done under the assumption that you will work at least 40 hours on the project (often more, I average 44). The concept is that the project is significantly more than 40 hours, and accounting for every moment is overhead that doesn't serve anyone. Client doesn't care and it simply wastes your time to do it.

<comment><USER7> As he said, he's selling a fixed bid project that is scheduled for a week.

The client he's looking to work with is looking for results, not how long he spends sitting in front of an IDE.

<comment><USER5> Brennan, I respectfully disagree. He said:

"This is exactly why you might want to consider moving to weekly billing. Bill for a weeks work, as long as the deliverables come in does it matter if the week was only a few hours long?"

What you sond to be advocating is fixed-price bidding/value-added pricing; but that's not the same as the OP.

If he'd said: "This is exactly why you might want to consider moving to billing on value. Bill based on what it's worth to them, as long as the deliverables come in does it matter if it only took a few hours?" I'd have had no qualms.

<comment><USER4> I reserve the right to mis-speak. Especially if I clarify in later posts ;-)

<comment><USER5> Mis-speak accepted :)

<comment><USER4> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EkqrI3IibYI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EkqrI3IibYI)

I took my inspiration from this man.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> And here's one reason that overrules all 5: because the customer doesn't like surprise pricing.

Their business is knowing how much something is going to cost. This isn't exclusive to the project I'm working on with them. This extends to every aspect of running their business. Whenever I see a business owner angry about a new government policy being considered that would impact their business, they're rarely upset about the policy itself and more upset about the vagaries that come with being affected by the enigmatic legislation process. Small businesses and even medium sized businesses flourish under consistent understanding of their costs.

Even if I'm not as big a shop or even as talented a shop as the next guy, I know almost any company is going to go with me because I will give them a number and I won't deviate from it unless they, themselves, have deviated so far from the scope that I have to forewarn them that the project needs to be re-estimated. At which point they understand because they're a business owner too.

Moreover, it just _feels_ sheisty. It feels like a bait-and-switch. If I severely underestimate my costs on a project, I shouldn't be passing that mistake along to the customer. It's not their fault. It's mine. I'm the expert here. I'm the professional in this field they hired me to be the professional in. How can I go back to them and ask for more money because I didn't prove myself to be professional? It's not their concern how I run my business, nor should it be.

<comment><AUTHOR> Our "response" to this is radical transparency. Client should be able to track the progress in almost realtime.

The problem is that usually the business is not sure what it wants then the project starts - the scope is not well defined. And it's ok. This is something that all stakeholders learn along the way.

<comment><USER8> And my response to this is that if you don't have a scope clear enough to accurately figure out your project's pricing, that's your fault. The second part of this is a mutual understanding that scope is gospel. This means the client has a clear understanding of the end product and what problem it's going to solve, and you're going to have the same understanding. Changes to the gospel mean changes to everything else.

Obviously running a business is part philosophy. If you don't mind a customer looking over your shoulder throughout an entire project, second guessing your time usage, then sure, I can see how an hourly situation might work. I despise that, and so I've found fixed pricing to be my preferred approach (which has the apparent added benefit of being very appealing to most clients).

<comment><USER5> > And my response to this is that if you don't have a scope clear enough to > accurately figure out your project's pricing, that's your fault.

How do you get around companies wanting a fixed price without knowing entirely what they want? As a freelancer I can't spend 2-3 days of meetings and spec writing only to lose the project because they preferred an agency/another supplier.

If I had clients who would pay for a 'Consulting' phase of producing a spec (which they could then send to other agencies/freelancers) then I could see this working, but those are like unicorns.

<comment><USER9> Adjust the way you think of the word "scope."

To people who build websites, scope means technical scope--the features, functionality, design, backend etc. A precise technical scope makes it easy to calculate a price.

But to people who buy websites, scope means financial scope--a "$100,000 project" vs. a "$20,000 project." They don't know precisely what they want...because they don't know what is possible. That's why they are hiring you!

So you learn as much as you can in the RFP process and propose your fixed price based on that. Unless the client or RFP is a terrible lie, you should be able to get it in the ballpark.

From there, closing the sale depends on your ability to convey that your expertise will help the client get the best possible product for this "scope" (i.e. price). If you want to cover a few more bases, you can provide some optional levels of effort for the riskiest items, or "nice to haves."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The problem with this post is the word "hourly"; the author means "time & materials". It's fine to bill based on your time, but unless you're a furniture mover, you shouldn't be doing it in hour increments.

This is a hobby horse of mine, so I'll spare you the retread:

[https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=tptacek+hourly...](https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=tptacek+hourly+day&sortby=points+desc&start=0)

<comment><AUTHOR> good point. Weekly & daily rates are probably better as few commenters suggested.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Down side to hourly rates:

1\. Clients hate them. Very rarely do you they understand the difference between paying for your time and paying for the finish product they are asking for (and it's correlation to your effort/time).

2\. I much prefer day rates over hourly rates. If something can be done in a few hours, then it should be free.

3\. If you are a good developer and can develop quicker than most than doing a fixed price has a huge upside to it.

4\. The number one reason for hours/days going longer than expected isn't based on developer/designer competency, but rather project management and lack of clear requirements (or changing requirements). Pinning commercials against the root cause of most delays can cause really messy situations.

If you're working with startups specifically, I typically do the following:

1\. Give a rough estimation of what their project will cost.

2\. Tell them that with this estimation they get X number of designer/developer days to build their project. They get to see an update of the project every 1-2 weeks and can decide how they want to use their budget accordingly.

TL;DR - I tell my clients that they are paying for my team's time and not for a web project. Otherwise, I do a fixed price and massively buffer it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Very good points. One thing I don't really get though: "2\. [...] If something can be done in a few hours, then it should be free."

Why so?

<comment><USER10> Because a client who is reliably paying you for days of work is worth a free hour or two now and then, and because the precedent that you will work for hours instead of days will come around to bite you in the ass later on.

<comment><USER12> This approach is great - giving small things for free, but isn't working for every clients. It's horrible for you when your customer is't paying a lot (small projects, low prices etc.). They are overdemanding, don't like your work, put a lot of changes and thinking that you should't do it for free.

<comment><USER13> The idea behind this is that you bill in weeks and deliver real business value so you don't have clients doing 'small projects' or low prices.

The approach is self selecting and self correcting.

<comment><USER11> Exactly. No _real_ projects are small. Anything less (IMO) is a favor and should be considered a marketing/sales event.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I agree with everything in the article. However, my experience as a coder has been more positive on fixed-price contracts than on hourly contracts. On hourly contracts, which I started with and have done more of, I tend to feel like I'm bleeding the client with every hour I spend, so I rush. The quality goes down and my stress levels go up. I don't spend time figuring out the best reasonable way to structure my code, and I don't play with interesting corner cases for my own amusement. With fixed-price contracts, I know the client isn't paying for my desire to write the nicest code I can come up with on that day, nor for flights of fancy onto tangents that may be more about my own enlightenment than about delivering value for them.

I realize that I should be able to fix my issues with hourly billing by separating my work into "value for client" and "my own enlightenment" for timekeeping purposes and only billing for the former. In reality though, the effort required to be constantly making this kind of judgement about everything I'm thinking about seriously disrupts my flow, and seems to be just as much effort as estimating a project ahead of time.

When I have a good relationship with a client, I can try to get the best of both worlds by giving them fixed-price-style estimates, and then asking for more money if the project ends up being more effort than I thought.

</comment><comment><USER15> As a counter point, i would argue that if you're billing on an hourly rate, you're limiting your earning potential as there's only so many hours in the day and a client will compare you to others in your industry if you charge by the hour. I'll continue to beat the drum of value based pricing as patio11 does too. Deliver a project that brings the client £10,000 worth of value and charge £1,000 for it and they wont give a shit if it takes you 1 hour or 1 week.

<comment><USER16> When you are developing the project further how would you like to value adding new functionalities to the project using the value based pricing model?

<comment><USER4> How much value does the new feature bring to the client ?

Easy one: increase their conversion rate for google searches of keyword "blue widget" (ie google -> landing page -> credit card charged) by 5%. YOu just made them 5% of their annual turnover. Charge them a lot

Harder one: (Anything away from sales is always going to be harder to measure) Implement a simple custoemr support online chat featuire (you know the kind) - allows their support to deal with >1 person at a time, and reduces the "waiting" queue on the phone system to zero. Value? Dunno. Feel around by talking to the VP of customer service or make a judgement call like "not having to hire another five custoemr service people"

<comment><AUTHOR> This makes sense when you have a well established business that's tweaking it's processes. Impossible when building an MVP and/or experimenting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> At least in the web world (which is the only one I have a whole lot of experience working in), there seems to be an interesting progression that developers go through if/when they leave the corporate world and try things on their own. Recognizing that fixed price development is very often a nasty trap is where many developers and organizations start to actually wonder about how their business model could change.

1\. Fixed bid projects. Attempting to offer custom development as a package deal seems like a great way to undercut the competition; in reality it's anything but, and (among other things, including those mentioned in the article) reduces the perceived value of your work, which hurts in the long run.

2\. Hourly consulting. Better, and works well for quite a while, allowing you more flexibility in your engagements and with your rate. This might even be a good long-term strategy for individuals; however, it requires very good planning and workload management, which are more difficult than many people think. It also does limit your earning potential, but this is much more of a factor if you expand into a consultancy, in which case your expenses will drop your margin.

3\. Product/subscription service development. Often the subject of HN discussion (and rightly so), the prospect of recurring revenue is obviously a powerful one. However, even more than when selling development services, this requires a solid understanding of your target audience(s) _and the ability to market to them effectively_ , in addition to understanding end-user customer support.

Where do we go from there? I personally have no clue; I've been slowly climbing this ladder myself.

<comment><USER7> This is pretty much the exact path I took. It becomes _really_ interesting when it finally dawns on you that there's very little difference between building and selling a 3 to 4 figure / mo SaaS and offering a value-oriented consulting retainer to a few clients. (See [http://draft.nu/revise/](http://draft.nu/revise/))

While retainers aren't exactly turnkey (they'll generally require human effort per account per month), the same positioning, marketing, and pricing rules you'll encounter selling software apply.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> My experience has been the opposite, and I think fixed price benefits both sides. Of course, it depends on the circumstance. Fixed price and hourly each have their place. I will say that a fixed price contracts can be tricky.

My primary point of reference is a medium sized fixed price project that was delivered early, and the customer loved the solution and came back for more business. I've also worked countless hourly contracts from both the customer and consultancy side.

1\. Assuming a fixed price project requires a big up front spec is wrong. Follow lean/agile principles, iterate and refine. The contract should specify high level basic functionality and the problem being solved.

2\. Hard to quantify, but hourly is plenty risky having worked both sides of the relationship. I've seen hours and hours burned building things that are not at all necessary. A fixed price helps everyone focus on building precisely what is needed.

3\. Hourly rates put customer and consultant's priorities in line? From a short term view, if I'm paid hourly I'm going to milk the deal. If the consultancy is taking a long term view, everyones priorities are in line. Consultancy delivers fantastic product on time, it's a win by bringing the customer back, and word of mouth.

4\. Again, it's how you structure the contract. If a giant spec is written up as part of a contract, you're doomed before you begin.

5\. I'd argue the fixed price is a risk balance between the customer and consultancy. If the consultants finish early, they're rewarded. If they are late, they are penalized. This is in contrast to hourly, where it's win-win for the consultant.

</comment><comment><USER19> If you don't know the contractor well, you don't know how hours worked translates into productivity. The programmer could be a 10x programmer or string you along saying things took longer than expected and suddenly your budget is bloated. I like a happy medium of fixed price with variable scope or a budget range with variable scope and finer details discussed in the contract.

</comment><comment><USER20> The model that works best for me is a fixed price based on initial scope with additional fixed or hourly billing for 1) tech support and 2) additions to scope or changes that occur after sign-offs.

Hourly billing is great until it comes time for final payment, which is when the client comes back and says "ok, why did x take you 3.267 hours and y took you 4.535 hours. Can we shave off some of this and that, oh, and this, too?" "Ok, this total is a little more workable, but I'll tell you right now that our billing department won't pay a dime more than $z, so you better adjust your rate or take off some more time."

Then you end up getting screwed out of money. This happens even when you do an estimated cost and have clients pay you 50% of the estimate up front. Fixed billing sets the expectations of how much work will be done and what the client should expect ahead of time, so it's a much easier pill for them to swallow when it comes time to pay up.

<comment><USER4> 1\. Weekly sprints, weekly billing. No cash delivered after 14 days, down tools and call them to say why.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> There's a big misunderstanding here, which is that fixed price implies a waterfall methodology. This is not true. All a fixed price does is cap the financial scope of the project.

But the tradeoff is that you need to vary the technical scope. For this reason, agile methodology is actually the best way to do a fixed-price contract. Every sprint is an opportunity to reconsider the technical scope to stay within schedule and budget.

This does reduce risk for the client. Most companies have much more serious limitations on budget and schedule, than they do on their imagination for what an ideal site should do.

And even if the client does decide they want to spend more money to get more functionality, they can just execute a change request or amendment--a process that is much more controlled and transparent (from the client perspective) than just working a few more hours.

</comment><comment><USER21> Any project has a defined scope and set of requirements. If you start the project before these are defined, you're dumb, because you have no idea what you're working on.

I always draft a requirements document for my freelance customers, and spell out exactly what I will do for exactly how much money, by a deadline. This document also says in no uncertain terms, that any deviations will result in a new set of requirements, and thus, a new price.

Hourly rates punish you getting better (why shouldn't I charge the same I did last month for something, despite having found a way to do it twice as fast?) and they open you up for all kinds of "why is this taking you so long" or "I'm paying you X per hour! That's more than I pay my shrink!" comments.

<comment><AUTHOR> One of the points in the article is that it's impossible (and impractical) to scope out everything before you start.

<comment><USER21> I'll admit there's a certain "fudge factor" but the more experience you get with requirements gathering, the less of an issue it is. Ultimately, this is the difference between a "Developer" and an "Engineer".

<comment><AUTHOR> It's not about the lack of skill on the supplier side. It's usually the client that is not sure how exactly the project should look like. And that's ok - <USER2> does not need to scope out every detail - it can be worked out along the way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> 15 years of consulting left me dreading reading this article a little.

There is no set formula that I've found. I'm open to finding it. Until then better I get at business, the better I get at all these different ways of "earning" formulas.

You exist to help the customer get the result they want, who usually don't know what they want.

If you don't know what you're doing, or worse, don't know how to help the customer find what they need, the meter can be run up hourly, or lose your shirt fixed price. Both are poor delivery of value for the customer in retaining a sustainable, no-surprise-giving, stable business partner.

The second we are in consulting, we're in business, not an hourly employee. It's a comfort net to say otherwise of not having to learn business skills.

Still, businesses are great customers. They're a lot more logical than consumers. They especially listen to anything that adds value to their business.

What's this hokey "add value" thing?

One definition is:

Saving or making your customer money, or time.

Time? Yes. The cost of their employees is the #1 cost in their business.

So, if person x spends 5 hours a week generating a spreadsheet at $15/hour, and there's 50 working weeks a year, this spreadsheet cost them $3750 in 1 year.

That's just $15/hr!

If I spent 10 years learning to do something in 2 hours, should I charge the customer the 2 hours, for the 10 years it took to learn, or say.

"This is costing you $4000 a year, I can get rid of it for $1000 permanently".

If it's a large company, you can even look at the savings over 2 or 3 years.

See? You're saving your customer money. Get the sign-offs on any solution from the ground up to the signing authority and put good decisions in front of them.

One reality is you end up doing a bit of both fixed and hourly. The better you understand your clients business, data and processes, the more fixed you can go.

With new clients, for example, I do small fixed price projects to minimize risk for the client and to build small momentum building wins.

When customers see the value themselves, instead of trying to trick them into liking you, what they pay me becomes far less of an issue. Some still prefer hourly so I just quote the total number and let them imagine what the hourly rate is. Some still want to know the hourly rate and I let them know we work extremely fast and have 15 years of experience each.

Regardless of hourly or fixed, if at the end of it they look at it and say "yes, they built what I asked but it wasn't what I wanted", customers will start doubting good decisions in the future because your inability to guide the canoe better. This is a bigger threat to your business than anything, especially if you want to stay in consulting.

Help your customers spend their money with the care as if it was your own, and you'll find yourself with as many long term consulting customers over the years that you can handle.

<comment><AUTHOR> Mentioned it before in another thread here: This makes sense when you have a well established business that's tweaking it's processes. Impossible when building an MVP and/or experimenting with a new product/service.

<comment><USER22> Disagree. Absolutely possible.

I currently build MVP's, in 30-90 days if it can be pushed that fast. I'm a lean practitioner for over 10 years starting in manufacturing.

You want to help your MVP's become long term customers by helping them grow and make money. If they don't get this, it's a real risk to their business, let alone your relationship with them.

For MVP's: You have to invest in understanding your tools and how long it will take to identify and build only the features that customers can't live without.

My original consulting business is for established businesses, but they were all smaller 4-7 years ago.

<comment><AUTHOR> "build only the features that customers can't live without" \- who makes this call? What if you disagree on this? What if the customer learns something new after 2 weeks and needs to change the scope?

<comment><USER22> Who makes the call?

If it's truly a lean MVP, the end user/paying customer. Is it an MVP is if no one is getting out of the building and talking to customers/users before designing or writing a line of code?

Completing the problem solution fit, product market fit, and engaging in customer development prior to writing a line of code has to happen if we are wanting to be honest when using a term like MVP.

If you feel this is a binary issue: ultimately the person signing the cheques make the call, and you have a choice on whether to accept said cheque for managing said potential headache.

The grey area in between:

If the customer wants to do whatever they do and call it an MVP by sprinkling the lean dust on it to justify it, you have to recognize it for what it is and either adjust your approach, or decide if that kind of work is something you can live with. No process can correct development pagentry, management/design by committee, and failing to get out of the building.

Building an MVP requires getting through the build - measure - learn loop as quickly as possible.

Interrupting you mid-cycle if it's that ground breaking (customers are saying I'm trying to find a way to give you money) requires answering "Did we really understand anything before hallucinating an MVP ourselves"?

It leaves a few options:

\- Change the scope

\- Change the deadline

\- Change the budget

\- Trade features -- something that was important can no longer be important as a result of what was traded.

Avoiding this is the business skills development we all constantly need that I mention to in my initial post.

For me, I try to make sure I understand, and the customer understands why we're doing the things we want first and hopefully minimize the above.

I don't rush customers into building something, but rather rush into understanding what our experiment is, and why we're testing those things. It helps create a checklist to test our assumptions/discoveries against when the next great insight comes in.

<comment><USER23> Dont you think that what you are describing sounds like a huge overhead. Rather then tweaking the product you have to "trade features" with customer.

It's also something that is very difficult to scale. It's hard to expect that every person who is good on the job is also good in negotiating with customers.

<comment><USER22> Project management is a real part of software development.

I make no statements about whether the developer should do the project management -- only when a good process happens, results are good.

The developers who can manage a process that they're a part of is a skill that we should all aspire to, though, because people aren't hiring us for just our technical prowess, but rather, our ability to interface those skills to finding and completing business goals.

I do agree that avoiding the scope changes while doing an iteration is essential, and can be often lessened or deferred until the next .. sprint.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I think a lot of freelancers (myself included) go through the following process:

1 - Start out with fixed price estimates based on time (I think this will take 10 hours, so I estimate £1000)

2 - Develop good relationships with clients and start just charging hourly for work done (This took 12 hours, so here's a bill for £1200)

3 - Take patio11 (et al)'s advice and start charging based on value (this 10 hour job will increase your profits by £100,000 so I'll charge you £10,000)

In short, hourly IS better than fixed price time based estimates, but fixed price value based estimates are even better.

<comment><AUTHOR> The problem with no 3 is that not every job can be measured in $$$. Especially when you are building an MVP and/or experimenting with features.

I think your approach is definitely valid for "traditional consulting" but a bit less so for more plain webdev work.

<comment><USER22> I disagree. Every job can be measured in terms of value. Especially mutually agreeable value. These though, are business skills and not tech skills.

<comment><AUTHOR> But than you are introducing overhead of deciding this. For obvious reasons this is something that needs to be negotiated with a client and documented.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> There are a lot of counterpoints here saying that fixed-price is better for us as consultants.

But this article is saying hourly-billing is better for the _CLIENT_.

I think this is an important distinction. Obviously there are advantages for us to doing value-based fixed-price billing, but that says nothing about the merits to our clients. If you don't do hourly billing, you should be aware of these potential gotchas, and be aware that some clients won't work with you.

</comment><comment><USER26> If you are ten times faster than other developers, fixed price per milestone lets you charge ten times as much. If I'm writing a custom map screen for the first time it is going to take me all day. If I'm writing it the 12th time it is more like an hour. I can charge a lot more for a custom map screen than an hour, however, even an hour at the highest hourly rate the market would bear.

</comment><comment><USER27> 5 reasons? Why not 4, or even 6?</comment>


The Most and Least Paid Teachers in the World - <AUTHOR> https://talk.chalk.com/the-most-and-least-paid-teachers-in-the-world-76e312dc2cd1 <comment><USER2> The first chart is not how stacked bar charts work. You can't use those to represent a _range_ , especially one whose categories may have overlapping values.

The second plot should be a labeled scatter plot, not a 2-axis chart, which is unreadable.</comment>


A new Facebook newsfeed is coming What features would you… - <AUTHOR> https://plus.google.com/u/0/102424966509435911416/posts/VyV5hxhhGve <comment><USER2> whats the use of blurring the location, the last line is pretty clear: Menlo Park, CA.

A easy way to see past blur is, to look at the letter spacing and word size, comparing height of letters, and matching it with possible answers.

For ex: look at CA, height of the blurred space, one can tell, both are Capital letters, the position says, its a state acronym, and the curve of C on left side seals it.</comment>


AWS Blip? - <AUTHOR> Just had a few AWS issues, ELB; US-EAST - affecting more than one of my consulting clients.  Anyone seeing this? <comment><USER2> I had ELB issues all week - might be related to a change in their scaling policies.

</comment><comment><USER3> Maybe, twitter seems to be in trouble also</comment>


Sentient: a high-level, declarative programming language - <AUTHOR> https://sentient-lang.org <comment><USER2> Something feels kind of "right" about this in the same sense that machine learning techniques seem to be able to produce correct results. In my "things that exist in Star Trek:TNG that we should be making more progress on" list, I think that how we program is wrong for a great many of use-cases.

In the Star Trek fictional universe, you often see characters programming impossibly complex things very quickly. There's several episodes where a character will create a holodeck simulation simply by describing what they want and providing detail for the parts the computer got wrong until the simulation is more or less what they want.

I feel like in some cases we're starting to figure this out like with GauGAN: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5U4NgVGAwg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5U4NgVGAwg)

But what about other cases? Can we just sort of describe the output we want, feed in data and have the computer more or less figure out the set of functions that produces what we're looking for? Such a paradigm would basically allow anybody to make a huge array of one-off, ultra-custom, long- tail, "programs" that solve extremely niche needs without needing to learn all the rigor of actually programming.

<comment><USER3> I think one programming paradigm that is very underserved is something in the sorts of filters.

GPU shaders, Signal Processing or a Nginx filter are all on this line of thinking.

We should be more inclined into program things as filters where we manipulate and maybe mutate/transform the data that is passing through that filter, so this could be easily paralelized, cut a lot of expensive CPU branches and where humans and machines could work together making those filters. (It would be much easiar for an AI to infer/learn about how to program like this)

In this perspective how we layout and shape the data is much more important.. so if we could create new standards where we can represent anything as a matrix for instance, we could have state-of-the-art engines who would care about scheduling, compilation and paralelization so we could only focus on manipulate and transform data according to the goals of what we are trying to achieve.

<comment><USER4> I'm inclined to agree but if an nginx filter is like (HttpRequest, HttpResponse) => (HttpRequest, HttpResponse) then aren't we basically saying we like purely problems that can be expressed as compositions of pure functions? Signal programming I have less feelings on

<comment><USER3> Just to add to this, more to the spot of your question, i think a no side- effect is often desirable, but i dont think it should be an impediment.

As you might need to call another function inside of our procedure that mutates some data.

But i think there are some sort of problems we are imposing to ourselves just because we need to deal with the millions possible ways a data could be laid out or modeled based in our type-system centric world.

In my perfect world, we should model functions in a DNA fashion, so function is also data, and if is mutable, could even be changed by the data depending of the what is in it.

First, we would never have to re-create a function again, and if we do, the data signature would be exactly the same as the other one created before, so we can match in a index for instance.

Im more inspired by the way things are done in the natural world, than the way we ended up shaping math (where the concepts of FP are more based on).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Hey everyone, I'm really flattered by everyone's interest in the language. I had no expectation of that when I worked on it. I'm happy to try and answer questions, though my memory's a bit fuzzy now. I think the reason for this sudden interest was this self-referential Tweet by Robin Houston which used Sentient to construct a pangram:

[https://twitter.com/robinhouston/status/1177575725240639489?...](https://twitter.com/robinhouston/status/1177575725240639489?s=20)

The best resource to understand the language is probably this podcast: [https://whyarecomputers.com/4](https://whyarecomputers.com/4)

I'm immensely grateful to Tom for coaxing me into recording it with him.

</comment><comment><USER6> This is pretty neat about this: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12429393](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12429393).

</comment><comment><USER7> Prolog, and Lambda Prolog are much more universal. See the Awesome Prolog[1] list for more resources and examples.

[1] [https://github.com/klaussinani/awesome- prolog](https://github.com/klaussinani/awesome-prolog)

</comment><comment><USER8> At first glance, this appears to be similar to languages like MiniZinc ([https://www.minizinc.org/](https://www.minizinc.org/)) and maybe AMPL ([https://ampl.com/](https://ampl.com/)). That is, you describe a problem in some form of constraint-based programming language, and you send it to a solver to find the solution.

Am I understanding this correctly? Or am I missing something? What are the differences between Sentient and MiniZinc etc?

</comment><comment><USER9> this is something that hardware verification languages like specman-e and systemverilog have been doing for decades

</comment><comment><USER10> Neat, but not the most illuminating introductory demo. Took me a few minutes to figure out the UI is filling in the blanks at runtime, and I still don't see how/where it assigns an index to "members", or how it reasons about "members" at all.

Also confusing is declaring sum=0 instead of sum=?, since the program doesn't know what "sum" is until runtime. If I change the declaration to sum=10, does that change the runtime count?

<comment><USER5> >Neat, but not the most illuminating introductory demo.

Agreed. It was the first one I made so it just happened to become the homepage. It'd probably be better served by one of the others.

>I still don't see how/where it assigns an index to "members", or how it reasons about "members" at all

Members is an array of booleans. Its intended meaning is: "is the number with this index in the subset?". When it iterates over the numbers, it only adds them to the sum if members[index] is true. The standard library is light so doesn't have a #zip function which would probably help clarity.

>Also confusing is declaring sum=0 instead of sum=?

I think this demonstrates an unusual thing about Sentient in that you can write your constraint-based programs in a procedural style, but their evaluation is far from procedural such that you can set sum to anything you like at runtime.

I sometimes think of Sentient programs as running over the space of all possible values for variables. Sometimes they're completely deterministic (as in a conventional language) but other times they're determined at runtime as a consequence of the invariants of your program.

It reminds me a bit of quantum physics where the 'act of measuring' seems to determine the actual value of something.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> See also Tau Prolog implemented in Javascript [http://tau- prolog.org/](http://tau-prolog.org/)

</comment><comment><USER12> Why does the subset sum example here seem to fail on '0'? Or is it just returning the empty set?

<comment><USER5> It's returning the empty set. You can click on the grid to cycle through some of the solutions.

Also, there's an easter egg hidden in this example.</comment></comment>


At $400 billion, Apple is worth more than Greece - <AUTHOR> http://money.cnn.com/2012/01/19/technology/apple_market_cap/index.htm?iid=HP_LN&hpt=hp_t3

<comment><USER2> Deceptive headline: GDP is annual revenue, yet they are comparing that with market capitalisation... What would the total assets (government, public and private) of Greece cost to buy?

Confusingly <http://www.dailyreckoning.com.au/gdp-market-cap/2006/12/21/> implies that amount of GDP is crudely comparible with the amount of market cap (which ignores govt or private equity) - due to other reasons!

</comment><comment><USER3> Sigh. Someday, people will realize that GDP is a crappy measure for... anything.

</comment><comment><USER4> Completely ridiculous. Flagged.

</comment><comment><USER5> Extra moronic, racist and apple-mersial article. I'm not sure why it even got here.</comment>


Haskell now has official commercial backing : the Industrial Haskell Group is launched - <AUTHOR> http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell/2009-March/021060.html

<comment><USER2> Who is the third partner?</comment>


Isohunt users beware - <AUTHOR>

If you are using isohunt as your torrent tracker you should beware. Recently a friend of mine had to pay a fine of $250 for downloading a Rhapsody album and it seems like he is not the first, neither the last.<p>Does bittorrent had become a hostile environment for users or is it just isohunt? <comment><USER2> isohunt is an aggregator not a tracker. Your friend was probably downloading a torrent which used lots of trackers (usually piratebay, demonoid, etc.. you can see them in the torrent description)

It makes no sense to recomend people to be careful using isohunt when bittorrent itself is the problem. Anyone downloading that torrent, doesn't matter if he got it from isohunt or TPB will be able to see you in the swarm. Even if you use an isolated tracker, isohunt and other aggregators usually add all the trackers they find to the torrent to have only one multitracker torrent per hash.

That way even if the sources are on an isolated private tracker they will spread using PEX to the public trackers the moment one peer uses a multitracker torrent.

I've run a tracker at <http://tracker.frozen-layer.net:6969/stats> for the last 7 years. We used to have 250000 peers in 2005 and I think that the decentralization of BT has become more of a problem than a solution. If you have stable trackers you don't need DHT or multitorrent trackers.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for the knowledge. I did not know much about the way bittorrent works, but your comment made me research and learn.

In the meantime, I learned more about that occurrence; The comapany who is behind this is digiprotect: <http://www.digiprotect.org/html/wirliebenmusik2.html> You can read about that incident at bbc news: <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8619407.stm> and techdirt: <http://www.techdirt.com/blog.php?company=digiprotect></comment></comment>


Continuous Delivery vs. Continuous Integration - <AUTHOR> https://learnkode.wordpress.com/2015/07/21/continuous-delivery-vs-continuous-integration/

<comment><AUTHOR> I intend this to be a series where I talk about continuous integration vs continuous delivery. I would appreciate if people leave some valid feedback that would help me in focusing on the required details</comment>


Camden, New Jersey: America's Most Desperate Town - <AUTHOR> http://m.rollingstone.com/culture/news/apocalypse-new-jersey-a-dispatch-from-americas-most-desperate-town-20131211 <comment><USER3> If I were the king, I would fix Camden (and dozens of other grim urban districts around the country such as Detroit, north St. Louis, etc.) with the following plan:

1\. Legalize drugs. Allow local municipalities to regulate and tax recreational substances. Boom. You have an instant local revenue stream, the police are suddenly out of the business of arresting people for "possession", and can focus more on violent crime, domestic disturbances, etc. In the short term, drug-funded gangs will turn to theft and robbery to stay in business, but anyway a major, relatively safe and easy source of revenue will be gone.

2\. Declare certain urban areas to be economic development zones with drastically reduced taxes and regulations. Make it dirt cheap to locate factories and plants there. Provide start-up grants to local entrepreneurs, with real oversight, not just feel-good handouts. Lower the barriers to business start-ups and there will be business activity, and it will accelerate as the cycle of crime and poverty is reduced.

3\. Fix the K-12 schools. Double the teachers' pay, double the security around the schools and provide secure bus rides to and from the projects and tenements. Make the school day longer, and ratchet up the standards. Demand higher achievement, and don't let a kid just flunk and walk away; make them re-take, make them realize the importance. Make school a destination, not a chore.

Teach democracy in the schools. Emphasize basic literacy skills, ethics and morality, history, how to speak and write properly, mathematics and science. Make the schools the best in the state in terms of standards.

These are all easier said than done, but can we afford to do anything less? We have spent trillions of dollars trying to fix similar problems in other countries, so why not spend a tenth of that or a thousandth of that fixing some of the problems in our own country?

<comment><USER4> I'm not sure about the impact of drug legalization on the local economies of these areas. Right now, the drug trade is actually one of the few sources of remunerative work available for unskilled people in these cities. You mention police arresting people for "possession" but the fact is that they have little time for that around here. There's enough dealers and traffickers to keep them busy. You think all those guys are going to go straight when drugs are legalized? I think legalization would help, don't get me wrong, but I think the positive impact would be a lot less than many opponents of the drug war would like to believe.

These areas are already very cheap to build in. Delaware, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey practically give away abandoned industrial sites hoping to find companies to take them over. Getting rid of regulations can be iffy. After all, the outputs of polluting activities in Camden flow down the Delaware River to a whole bunch of other people.

Fixing education in these communities is intractable. You can't teach kids in a community where gang leaders have more authority than parents. You have to fix the community before you can make a dent in the education problem.

<comment><USER5> Agreed with legalization not necessarily reducing criminal behavior. Where I live in the Bay Area, the reduction in the street drug dealing trade (perhaps due to legalized dispensaries, and also the prevalence of smartphones) has coincided with an increase in the armed robbery and burglary rate.

Local police investigators have confirmed that many individuals who have been apprehended for robberies were previously involved in the local drug trade.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> For folks wondering why this is on HN, there's some interesting info in the middle of the article about the tech the new police force are using in Camden:

"There are 35 microphones planted around the city that can instantly detect the exact location of a gunshot down to a few meters (and just as instantly train cameras on escape routes)."

<comment><USER7> "For folks wondering why this is on HN"

I'm glad it is. There are (much) bigger problems in the world than growth hacking and nginx performance.

There are many bright people here, it'd be a waste if important issues like these weren't discussed in this forum.

<comment><USER8> And there are countless forums to discuss such "important" issues. Just because a story has humanistic touch, that doesn't mean it belongs here.

<comment><USER9> You don't need to read it if you are not interested. I'm a tech guy and I found it very interesting to read.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> According to Taibbi, the only person in the state of New Jersey with any moral responsibility for his or her actions is the governor. The city of Camden is populated entirely by victims, and the cause of their misery is Chris Christie.

<comment><USER11> I believe Camden is more or less under state control so it is right to blame the state. NJ has an awful track record when it comes to how it treats its urban areas. Newark, which would be considered a crown jewel anywhere else has been left to rot for 40yrs. The state is very unequal in terms of investment to various areas, basically you can quickly tell where the high income earners live and where the rest live wherever you go in NJ.

I didn't realize how shitty NJ's resource distribution model was until I moved down to Baltimore and saw how differently Maryland invests in the state as a whole.

<comment><USER12> According to the article Christie was unable to take over the schools in Camden, and took over the police force in 2013. Blaming him for not fixing the problems of Camden in less than a year is a little silly.

Complaining that NJ didn't force Hoboken to subsidize Newark is silly - <USER2> Fransisco and Toronto didn't subsidize Camden either, but I don't see you blaming them.

<comment><USER11> In a single comment you've managed to deploy all the dismissive language anti- government folks use to derail meaningful discussion.

 __Complaining __:

Pointing out problems isn't complaining.

 __Subsidize __:

Investing and subsidizing aren't the same thing. When the arena was built in Newark I am sure some state help was involved, the end result has been an attraction that brings hockey fans to Newark who otherwise would have no reason to be there and patronize businesses.

I am not sure where SF and Toronto factor into what goes on in NJ.

 __Blaming __:

You mean as opposed to the poor citizens taking responsibility and rebuilding the city?

<comment><USER10> "...derail meaningful discussion..." Oh. Who's being dismissive, Kay?

You refuse to address the parent's arguments on their own terms, purposefully reading them in as obdurate a manner as possible, completely failing to engage them, and then blame the parent's "dismissive language". They are meaningful discussion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> >> The police force alone in Camden costs more than $65 million a year.

I'd be curious as to how much of that $65,000,000 goes towards funding things like pensions and healthcare for retired workers. All of the new cops are starting without pensions in most municipalities (at least the ones that are low on money) and a huge part of their budget is paying for long-retired cops.

<comment><USER14> I'd like to play devil's advocate for a bit: are we ignoring the value of credibility with cops? Cut off benefits previously promised, and you find potential workers no longer trust you.

This really is devil's advocate, because I think pensions are outdated and shouldn't be offered to new workers. But part of the bargain with the civil service has been, basically, lifetime employment + retirement. There are costs to backing out on that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Camden was a shithole even in the early '70s. My great grandmother was robbed, beaten, tied up and left for dead on the floor of her tenement looking apartment. She was found alive a few days later.

<comment><USER16> Woah. I'm not questioning the authenticity of your story, but do you have a news article about that? That's a crazy thing to have happen to you anywhere and I'd be curious where exactly in Camden it occurred.

<comment><USER15> This was the 70s so of course you can't exactly link a story. This wouldn't have been that big of a story back then - too much crime going on at once.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> >> In September, its last supermarket closed, and the city has been declared a "food desert" by the USDA.

There might not be a Safeway or a Kroger, but there are still places to buy groceries.

[http://i.imgur.com/Ey903PW.png](http://i.imgur.com/Ey903PW.png)

Really tied of the media exaggerating the term 'food desert'

<comment><USER17> What are these buildings? Are they discount grocers, with cheap but OK food, or are they gas stations, with lunchables and frozen pizzas? It's hard to tell from a screenshot of a map.

I'm not denying that the term "food desert" is suspect, I just can't tell what you're trying to prove.

<comment><USER18> Based on street view (and my limited knowledge of Camden based on living across the Delaware River in Philadelphia) these are all corner stores and bodegas that in some cases may have some limited fresh food, but most of the sales volume is likely packaged goods.

The idea of a "food desert" as I understand it is that it's an area with limited access to nutritious foods. Most of Camden definitely qualifies, especially for residents without cars.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I believe the term is "poverty porn": [http://www.phillymag.com/news/2013/12/12/rolling-stone- camde...](http://www.phillymag.com/news/2013/12/12/rolling-stone-camden- article-poverty-porn-rutgers-professor/)

Thanks Taibbi for stoking people's fears needlessly

</comment><comment><USER5> The greatest tragedy of places like this is that the law abiding population is held hostage by the threat (and exercise) of violence by the dangerous members of their own community - who are relatively fewer in number.

In such circumstances, those who can afford to leave - leave, and those who must stay make the choice to speak out against the situation and put themselves at terrible risk, or stay quiet, and witness the decline of the community.

</comment><comment><USER20> "a graphic preview of what might lie ahead for communities that don't generate enough of their own tax revenue to keep their lights on. "

With shrinking tax revenue from corporations cheating on their taxes and the rise of bitcoin sucking even more fiat currency away from taxes, I do not like this future.

</comment><comment><USER21> A disappointing effort by Taibbi, usually does a lot better. Way too much exaggeration.

Its a dying city because its population dropped about 0.3% per year. Like saying my blood pressure has dropped about 1 point due to some (minimal) exercise in the last month, therefore I'm dead. And then later on the population is now booming because of white heroin addicts moving into the city, but its also dying anyway at the same time or some foolishness.

The rust belt was news and new and insightful in 1970 or so. Unfortunately its almost the spring of 2014. That's all ancient history. Like reading breathless reporting of the activities of Martin Luther (not MLKjr, I mean the original ML). My grandpa thought stories about "rust belts" are "news", and I'm not that young anymore.

"Not long ago" means a century ago, in a nation with a 24 hour news cycle. Uh huh. Just a few moments ago I was driving my covered wagon to work and ... oh wait.

There is some insight in the "future is already here, just unevenly distributed" aspect of the story. Also its got some "true crime" voyeurism.

He's a good writer, usually better than this. If joe average journalist wrote this I wouldn't be as... offended. For my local fishwrap of a newspaper this would be an average tolerable article, which might be why its going out of business slowly, the point is he usually does much better than this.

It is funny to see articles like this on a site with so many hard core followers of urban living. For 99% of the population, Camden is "real urban living" not SV/SFO and NYC. So you can see the disbelief bordering on laughter WRT urban revival. Yeah I can't wait until I can live in Camden and walk to work LOL, sounds like paradise. And Camden is a thousand miles from here, but where I live you need a car and a suburban house and a (short) commute if you don't want to live in Camden-Lite. And that's what the real world is like.

<comment><USER4> > The rust belt was news and new and insightful in 1970 or so

As someone living in a city gutted by de-industrialization and the drug trade (Wilmington, DE), I think it's news that 40 years later, these places are still in poor shape. The usual response to concerns about technology or globalization putting people out of work is that it just frees them up to work on something better and more useful. "New jobs will replace those that are lost." Well, the people here are still waiting for those new jobs to replace the ones that got automated or outsourced away.

> And Camden is a thousand miles from here, but where I live you need a car > and a suburban house and a (short) commute if you don't want to live in > Camden-Lite.

I think this is quite exaggerated. Aside from Detroit and New Orleans, cities in the Delaware Valley like Camden and Wilmington have some of the worst crime in the country, because they face the challenges of other Rust-belt cities and are also on the major drug trade route up I-95.

Fully a quarter of the U.S. population lives in the metro areas of just six cities: New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington, San Jose/San Francisco, and Boston. These cities are all quite safe, and the idea that people might either move into the core cities or to satellite cities in those areas is hardly ridiculous. And there's a long list of cities that are perfectly safe that aren't one of those six: San Diego, Austin, Seattle, Portland, Charlotte, etc. And there are even more cities that are perfectly safe in the areas middle class people would actually live. I lived for seven years in Atlanta, and it was very safe as long as you lived on the north side.

<comment><USER13> >> Fully a quarter of the U.S. population lives in the metro areas of just six cities: New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington, San Jose/San Francisco, and Boston.

Chicago and Los Angeles are safe if you live in a upper-middle class white neighborhood. Chicago is the most dangerous large city in the US.

<comment><USER22> First, no, Chicago is not the most dangerous city in the US. Per capita, it's not even in the top ten. People have a bad habit of looking at Chicago's totals while forgetting that the city is gigantic. The logic that says Chicago is the most dangerous city in the US also says that Camden is safer than Dallas.

Second, it is not true that Chicago is only safe if you live in rich white enclaves. What is instead true is that two large tracts on the south and west sides of the city (Englewood and Lawndale, respectively) are currently lost to gang violence. But Chicago also has huge swaths of lower-middle-class neighborhoods that are no more dangerous than those of any other big city. A huge portion of those neighborhoods are hispanic, and there are many majority- African American neighborhoods with low crime stats as well.

It is possible that your friends who live in Chicago don't realize this, because what is also true about Chicago is that the 20-something hipster demographic lives almost exclusively in just a few neighborhoods on the north and near northwest sides.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> > Elsewhere, struggling white rural America is stocking up on canned goods and > embracing the politics of chaos, sending pols to Washington ready to hit the > default button and start the whole national experiment all over again.

Is it really that bad?

</comment><comment><USER24> I think Camden and other cities in similar situations can provide us with learning --

1) Can cities outlive their usefulness? My answer = yes. 2) If yes, what should happen when they do? My answer = most try to hang on or re-invent themselves, but restructuring sooner rather than later might be best.</comment>


Cr-48 Recipient Tries Selling Laptop on eBay, Gets Shut Down - <AUTHOR> http://www.thechromesource.com/cr-48-recipient-tries-selling-laptop-on-ebay-gets-shut-down/ <comment><USER2> "I agree to not sell or transfer the device to anyone else, unless under written instruction from Google to do so." – <https://services.google.com/fb/forms/cr48advanced/>

– edit: quoting the actual fine print you agree to when applying – something the linked article does not do – seemed like a useful thing to do. Oh, well.

<comment><USER3> Nice to see, clearly I didn't read that when I applied =)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> IANAL but selling the device is not illegal and a court would not consider it a stolen item. It's against Google's terms, which is a contract between Google and the recipient of the cr48. Why is eBay enforcing that contract?

<comment><USER5> _Why is eBay enforcing that contract?_

Maybe Google is worth more to them than this dude?

<comment><USER4> Ok, I get that. What I meant was, what's their legal justification?

<comment><USER6> Ebay is a private marketplace. I don't need a reason to kick you out of my house.

<comment><USER7> Agreed. People on the Internet seem to always demand companies to act in accordance with some law that does not apply. Freedom of speech is a fantastic thing. However, it does not mean that you can walk into a restaurant and scream at the patrons and the owner is somehow unable to kick you out. Same thing happens online on sites like Digg where "censorship" is usually greeted with "it is my constitutional right..." By the same token most businesses can refuse to do business with you, and frankly more should. The "customer is always right" mantra is not a dogma. If a client is toxic, cut your loses. It's better than getting ulcers, I hear. I'll get off the soap box now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The application form is broken... When you select another country the state field doesn't update. :(

<https://services.google.com/fb/forms/cr48advanced/>

EDIT: never mind... "The Pilot program is open to individuals, businesses, schools, non-profits and developers based in the United States"

<comment><USER9> It is funny how many people have mentioned this issue with the form on other threads and then realized it was USA only.</comment></comment>


The world's biggest telescope is ready. The problem: staffing it - <AUTHOR> https://www.inkstonenews.com/science/alien-hunting-fast-telescope-struggling-attract-scientists/article/2171152 <comment><USER2> > Astronomers interested in joining the team should speak fluent English and > expect to work in the remote location on a long-term basis, according to the > job postings. The compensation package totals around $14,400 per year.

> "It's not surprising they have had difficulties hiring people, given the low > pay compared with similar international institutes," said a chemical physics > researcher with the Chinese Academy of Sciences, who asked not to be > identified.

> They added that an additional problem was that they were looking for > contract workers, not permanent staff.

Seems like the issue is not that they can't staff it but rather aren't competitive with other institutes who attract the same talent.

<comment><USER3> There is no shortage of unemployed academics (including radio astronomers). At that salary, located in rural China, they're not competitive with the local Walmart.

<comment><USER4> Based on the ads I see when traveling in asia it's not even that competitive with jobs teaching English to kids in a medium size Chinese city.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> There's an interesting parallel to the start of radio astronomy in the United States. Immediately after World War II, the US largely ignored radio astronomy in the 40's and early 50's while the British, Dutch, and Australians turned their experience with radar to astronomy. The US in the early 50's now turned to make up lost time, and through the recently established National Science Foundation (NSF, est. 1950) created the National Radio Astronomy Observatory. The parallel is, that there were no people with the appropriate skills to create an observatory within the US, and they specifically hired one of the world's leading radio astronomers, the Australian Joseph Pawsey, to be the NRAO's first director. Tragically, he died of cancer shortly after beginning the job, but the NRAO went on to pioneer some of the most sensitive radio telescopes ever built, like the Very Large Array.

</comment><comment><USER6> Why would people need to actually be on site? Isn't a lot of astronomy done remotely these days?

<comment><USER7> That's true for the astronomers who will use the results of the telescopes. But there have to be engineers, technicians and physicists on-site to ensure that the telescope is working well and producing the data that can be used by astronomers downstream.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> What's the motivation behind building a $180 million telescope then offering poverty wages to the researchers using it?

</comment><comment><USER9> _"The project has also been searching for a chief scientist, with a pay package of $1.2 million, since late 2017. The post is open to qualified astronomers from any country but so far no results of the search have been announced."_

</comment><comment><USER10> damnnn that pay is low !</comment>


I'm offering my web development services for free - <AUTHOR> https://dinnu93.github.io/blog/I%27m-offering-my-web-development-services-for-free/ <comment> noah-kun What are the signs of a tech bubble bursting?

<comment><AUTHOR> What tech bubble dude ?</comment></comment>


C programmers with Mac experience wanted for revival of Eudora eMail client - <AUTHOR> https://www.reddit.com/r/opensource/comments/ad27vg/help_wanted_c_programmers_with_mac_experience/ <comment><USER2> In my opinion, here is how I would handle this:

Use git and not mercurial. Use github over Source Forge. This will get you more eye balls on the project. Developers are more skilled in git than mercurial as well.

\- Create a core in C that handles all the base functionality of the email client

\- Create a UI for each platform using its native toolkits. Cocoa for macOS, MFC/.Net for Windows, GTK+ etc. You want the client to be native to the platform so it feels natural in all UI aspects and integration with the underlying OS.

I believe Transmission takes this approach and it seems to work well: [https://github.com/transmission/transmission](https://github.com/transmission/transmission)

<comment><USER3> Who in this current world wants to create or promote a growing community of free software developers, and chooses SourceForge as a platform instead of GitHub or GitLab?

Not that other alternatives are bad, but let me insist: especially if the intent is to attract more developers, GitHub has been THE choice already for several years.

<comment><USER4> Isn't SourceForge synonymous with aggressive and intrusive advertisements all over the site and didn't they get in trouble for inserting adware and spyware into projects' binary downloads?

<comment><USER5> They did wrap installers in malware but have stopped now. Regardless, the site is very poorly designed and makes for a bad developer and user experience. To users and potential contributors, using SourceForge is synonymous with not caring.

<comment><USER6> I've registered a custom domain, which will be our primary user-facing point of contact. Developers use SF essentially purely as a Mercurial host; everything else is run over eMail.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> Birch-san I'm concerned by the team-shaming [0]:

> The only issue left is that of preventable costs arising from error, > oversight, or incompetence

> [notably,] the indiscriminate destruction of data […] under the mistaken > impression that it was otiose, by a programmer whose experience was > insufficient for the task at hand.

> Although he might have been the 'cause of more harm than good' (in the > opinion of another of our programmers), […] and while correction of the > mistake took some time and effort, it did not result in schedule slippage.

His assertion that "the only phone suitable for the task (of talking to 3 people)" is a crowdfunded phone that doesn't exist yet, shows (at best) poor risk-management.

I don't understand how one developer could need $170/month of mobile data to fulfil their commitments to this project.

I don't understand why the Enterprise edition of Visual Studio would be necessary… nor why Visual Studio would be the right choice for macOS development.

I don't understand why he's being so open with such indefensible spending.

The project seems out-of-touch. One of his roles is to inspire collaboration, so he would have more luck using technologies that excite people today.

[0] [https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1313324524/hermes- eudor...](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1313324524/hermes-eudoras-next- generation/posts/2329358)

<comment><USER3> You only have to see how he writes. What other projects / teams would have reported as "fixed some bugs and replaced the unsupported spell checker technology with hunspell, all going well!" here it takes several pages of... fluff, if you ask me. Either that, or contrived phrases just for the sake of writing _a lot_ of latin expressions.

You never get too much latin in your product updates!!

<comment><USER6> Fixed some bugs? The project _didn 't compile_ under a modern compiler. The compiled version didn't work well with any language besides English or Latin. There _was_ no spell-checker included with the source and we had to re-write the library. Then there was the total inability to negotiate an SSL/TLS connexion... don't get me started.

I wrote for a general audience. Yes, it's a bit fluffy, but I had to try to explain certain things to people who don't know the first thing about computers (if you don't believe me, take a look at the eudora listmoms listserv). The responses I received were overwhelmingly "don't change a thing but the Unicode handling and the SSL!"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It is not clear to me if the project is a new mail client based on the old Eudora codebase, or simply making that code portable to MacOS, but anyway, we already have a multiplatform, small but powerful and very fast mail client that shares a lot of concepts taken from the good old Eudora, and ready to be ported to MacOS: Claws Mail. It's stable and works on most systems and hardware out there, Windows, Linux, BSD, including ARM SBCs (Raspberry PIs, etc). It does work under MacOS, but has to be built locally. If I wanted to make an easy to install Eudora-like mail client for MacOS I'd probably start by contributing to that project for being already very mature on other platforms; I use it on Linux since it was called Sylpheed -that's like 17 years back- and compared to Eudora I used before, from which I could import all email flawlessly, it has been a nice step forward without problems at all.

[https://www.claws-mail.org/features.php?section=general](https://www.claws- mail.org/features.php?section=general)

[https://www.claws- mail.org/faq/index.php/Installation_and_Co...](https://www.claws- mail.org/faq/index.php/Installation_and_Configuration#How_to_build_Claws_Mail_on_Mac_OS_X.3F)

<comment><USER8> I used Claws on Linux. What a great little mail client. Software developers love rebuilding stuff for a variety of valid reasons, but one does ponder at the amount of rework done in the name of those reasons.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Looks like they raised money, and having received it used it on some questionable choices:

[https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1313324524/hermes- eudor...](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1313324524/hermes-eudoras-next- generation/posts/2329358)

Paying for phone bill? Buying software licenses? Perhaps that's a fair use of cash, but it feels a little icky.

<comment><USER10> Guy's bought himself an expensive phone to "communicate with the team" and the phone's not even available yet.

<comment><USER11> Phone is also only $570 on IndieGogo wtf.

The last time I funded a software development effort was neovim and those guys had stuff out super fast. A Github repo, plans, the binary. It's a successful project. That is some gold standard development, imho.

<comment><USER6> Canadian and American dollars, remember. $570 US = $800ish Can. The Kickstarter is also in Canadian dollars.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I've been through this process with several projects. At this point a Carbon codebase like that needs to be rewritten from scratch.

The best path forward if you want a program that works like the old one but runs on the current version of macOS is to use the old version to create a requirements document and then develop that using modern techniques.

Same as with restoring a 19th century farm house with a bad foundation. The cost of restoring it and bringing it up to modern standards will typically be 5-20 times more than knocking it down and building a lookalike from scratch using modern building techniques.

<comment><USER13> I have no specific experience with carbon but in almost (arguably) similar cases I've come across as a developer, I've found a better approach to look for a mechanism to allow for granular upgrades over time.

In this specific case I could imagine supporting both carbon and cocoa screens / logic at the same time, and begin conversion screen-by-screen or feature-by- feature.

In the end this might mean maintaining extra complexity to support both technologies, but protects you from the danger of having to implement a complet syst m to feature parity at once.

<comment><USER14> I believe at this point no incremental upgrade is possible, because Carbon is entirely deprecated and will not run on current Macs.

<comment><USER15> You could reimplement Carbon in Cocoa.

<comment><USER16> You're so right, I'll go grab the source code for both and work on that right away.

It's so obvious - why has nobody done it before?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> As someone who had to deal with Eudora in a support environment for many years, I hope this revival is a colossal failure.

</comment><comment><USER18> Looking at this source code... it's a window into the past that nobody should have to revisit.

I would recommend:

\- Start a new program from scratch

\- Refer to old code to port over "novel" concepts/logic

\- Publish a skeleton / MVP project so people can add to it (instead of trying to start from an unusable codebase).

Some fun snippets from main.c:

      // Update the emo turd cache
      EmoTurdCache = EmoLitterInternetWithTurds();

      /*
       * run the text analyzer
       */
      if (!TypingRecently && BeingAnal()) AnalScan();

      // and the emoticon scanner
      if (!TypingRecently && HasFeature(featureEmo) && EmoDo()) EmoScan();

Looks like the person who wrote this had fun with naming conventions... :)

</comment><comment> c-smile Interesting. As a part of Sciter.Node([https://terrainformatica.com/2018/12/23/sciternode-versus- el...](https://terrainformatica.com/2018/12/23/sciternode-versus-electron/)) project I was thinking about "flagship demonstrator" project for it.

One of ideas is to create e-mail client. In principle its UI will be quite close to another Sciter application: [https://notes.sciter.com/](https://notes.sciter.com/) that is multiplatform and simple - the application was created in 4 months as a side project. Its UI can be morphed to e-mail one in comparable time frame.

Will it be better to focus on this rather on totall rewrite of MFC based project? Especially because Sciter is multiplatform already by nature...

</comment><comment><USER6> I decided to deal with all issues raised here, in one big Reddit post: [https://www.reddit.com/r/opensource/comments/aeo39h/hermes_m...](https://www.reddit.com/r/opensource/comments/aeo39h/hermes_mail_your_questions_here_and_on_hacker/)

</comment><comment><USER19> I think it's good that we see more efforts at making good e-mail clients. Outlook was never great, but it has really ruined e-mail with the current font and design layout that makes it even harder for people to notice important e-mails and this is killing it off as a communications medium.

We have the advantage nowadays that the server protocols are more open than they have been for a long time, also the rendering of rich e-mails is more standard so it's a good time for alternatives to gain some of the market.

</comment><comment><USER20> Copied from reddit comment:

Also, from this update it can be seen that the OP already burnt through all the funds without even putting out a single line of code. The expenses include:

"Finally, because our team is scattered all over the world, I need a device to communicate with them; I found only one suitable for the task (the Cosmo Communicator), which I purchased for the princely sum of $840"

</comment><comment><USER21> Most C programmers with Mac experience know better.

</comment><comment><USER22> Just want to read Eudora database. Still have some old one in 1998 archive.

<comment><USER23> Would this do what you want?

[https://turgs.com/eudora/viewer/](https://turgs.com/eudora/viewer/)

(Downside: appears to be Windows only, but you could always run it on an Azure VM and remote desktop in if you don't have access to a Windows box of your own.)

<comment><USER24> It might work under Wine.

<comment><USER23> Good point: I always forget about Wine, due to always having Windows available _somehow_ , but it's often a viable alternative. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> WHY!?

<comment><USER26> tldr: needed new phone

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> cool. but i'd rather see revival of mulberry. which was the spiritual successor to eudora IMHO. eudora was good for its day but modern email means it is obsolete.

it doesn't need "revival" so much as "rewrite"

</comment><comment><USER28> interesting to see the "blind man and the elephant" responses here, each hacker/blind man insisting that the beast needs to be tamed this way.. For the critics - do you value the human happiness that a software user has, with a well-made and visually pleasing app environment ?

porting software has been accomplished for decades, to varying degrees of success - of course this can be done.. go for it !!

</comment><comment><USER29> Scrap it then build a modern client in Electron. Allow modern features by hosting servers to filter, search, and glean info from email paid for by slipping ads back into the email.

<comment><USER30> Surely this is sarcasm.

<comment><USER31> It seems far more likely to succeed IMO.

Also isn't this essentially the business models of Airmail and Spark and (I'm sure) many others? They do this all up to the point of actually injecting ads. Which is absurd; these days access to your email is probably more dangerous than access to your SSN.</comment></comment></comment>


Steve Jobs told Rupert Murdoch Fox News is an "incredibly destructive force" - <AUTHOR> http://9to5mac.com/2011/10/26/steve-jobs-told-rupert-murdoch-fox-news-is-an-incredibly-destructive-force/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+9To5Mac-MacAllDay+%289+to+5+Mac+-+Apple+Intelligence%29 <comment><USER2> sigh. For how long will every paragraph from the Steve Jobs biography be buzzed as news? Just buy and read it, I'm pretty sure it'll be well worth both your money and your time.

</comment><comment><USER3> The solution for destructive brainwashing media machines is not to disrupt them, I believe the solution is having an extra emphasis in school and during parent-child interaction that teaches them the scientific method in the reasoning process and how to shield against predatory mind control.

Fox news is one of those predatory mind control machines, if you make them illegal, then another country will build one and vacuum up the hearts and minds of all the idiots in this country, THAT would be an even greater destructive force.</comment>


Debian drops redis non-systemd support - <AUTHOR> http://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php/?f=20&t=135039 <comment><USER2> That is only a true headline if one does not read the actual commit, but rather blindly accepts the incorrect descriptions posted on two discussion fora from a couple of people.

What Chris Lamb of Debian has _actually_ done is removed _a Debian-specific mechanism_ , that runs a set of Debian-specific scripts (using its run-parts tool) that _are not rc scripts_ , from _both_ the systemd service unit and the van Smoorenburg rc file, and _not_ eliminated any support for an init system.

This is stuff that was _never in Redis proper_ and that has always been a Debian addition to Redis, included in the Debian packaging for Redis, and here dropped from that very same packaging and not from Redis proper. It was in fact Chris Lamb that _added_ this Debian-specific mechanism in the first place, and it has only been there since 2015.

* [https://github.com/lamby/pkg-redis/commit/e427f8db8954bb7836...](https://github.com/lamby/pkg-redis/commit/e427f8db8954bb78364d89defdb3dee47b8b998a)

* [https://github.com/lamby/pkg-redis/commit/0d7bc7aed4202dba0b...](https://github.com/lamby/pkg-redis/commit/0d7bc7aed4202dba0b698a57d703d1a5648caa39)

The van Smoorenburg rc file being touched is not even part of Redis proper, _either_. The Redis proper one is markedly different, lacking LSB headers and assuming the software to be in /usr/local rather than in /usr .

* [https://github.com/lamby/pkg-redis/blob/debian/sid/utils/red...](https://github.com/lamby/pkg-redis/blob/debian/sid/utils/redis_init_script)</comment>


Ask HN: What's next : RoR, Symfony2, Responsive or ... Arduino? - <AUTHOR>

I wonder what would be the best to learn for my website creation skill set : - Ruby on rails - Symfony 2 - Responsive design - Drupal - Arduino & electronics<p>Any advice ? <comment><USER2> Are you starting with no programming experience? If not, what programming languages or frameworks do you know? What is your ultimate goal for programming? Are you building a product, a consultancy, or a hobby?</comment>


Ask HN: Which VPN service do you trust to have your back? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> I use Private Internet Access.

You can create an account anonymously and pay in Bitcoin, and not leave a paper trail. That's exactly what I did.

Their policies state that they do not log, but I personally find this questionable. Much torrent traffic goes through their network, and I couldn't imagine how they respond to complaints sent by media companies to their US servers. They claim that they use "proprietary technology" to deal with abuse, but that seems only to be with blocking outgoing DoS attacks.

However, policies of "not logging" aren't particularly new to [many providers]([http://torrentfreak.com/which-vpn-providers-really-take- anon...](http://torrentfreak.com/which-vpn-providers-really-take-anonymity- seriously-111007/)), so I'm not really concerned.

It may also be useful to note that they've been supportive of the Bitcoin community. They host BitcoinTalk, and were also one of the first VPNs to accept Bitcoin.</comment>


Learn a Language in a Custom Tailored VR Experience by Christmas - <AUTHOR> https://learnimmersive.wufoo.com/forms/immerse-yourself-in-a-vr-simulation-by-xmas/

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey guys (TC here),

As the holidays come up, I'm sure many of you might be around friends or family who don't speak your native language (my girlfriend's entire family speaks Spanish instead of English and it's tough for me to keep up).

If you're in the same boat as me, and want some highly relevant/intensive practice, I will simulate your upcoming situation for you in VR. Provide me some details/photos, and I'll send you a short game where you need to speak your way through the simulation.

Each experience will take me about a day or two to create (I'm using some advanced speech recognition software), so I'm just asking for $5 per experience. Hopefully this is helpful!</comment>


The Machine Stops by E.M. Forster (1909) - <AUTHOR> http://archive.ncsa.illinois.edu/prajlich/forster.html

<comment><USER2> Though it may not rise to the airy ranks of the front page, thank you.

It is an interesting idea.

 _Edit: Thank you for preserving a mortal hand's revenge.[http://johnbakersblog.co.uk/the-joy-of-writing-by-wislawa- sz...](http://johnbakersblog.co.uk/the-joy-of-writing-by-wislawa-szymborska/) _</comment>