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Comment by mhagiwara | Hacker News Reader

Wow, it's nice to see my post on the top page of Hacker News.

Note that I wrote this post back in February 2020 and there are a couple of things that I would like to add:

- Due to high demand, I increased my rate to $250/hour + some fixed monthly fee in April. I didn't drop any single client :)

- I'm seeing very little impact from the coronavirus. I have a client base spanning between Japan and the US in a little-impacted industry (education). Don't put all your eggs in one basket.

- I would strongly encourage everyone who's considering making a leap to read "The Win Without Pitching Manifesto" https://www.winwithoutpitching.com/the-manifesto/

- Due to a sheer volume of my incoming emails I can't answer all of them, but do let me know if you are interested in working with me!

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Thanks for sharing your experiences!

I did well in Kaggle's highest-prized competition[1], so I wondered if I should explore this kind of consulting myself.

The competition I was in was effectively limited to US residents though, but as a "remote" freelancer you compete world-wide, potentially with people willing to work for far less. Are there reasons your clients prefer US-based freelancers enough to justify the gap in pay?

[1] Top 1% (5th/518), #1 result in California: https://www.dhs.gov/science-and-technology/news/2018/07/09/n...

If your clients are choosing you based on where you are and how your rate compares with other freelancers, I think you have wrong clients.

They were referring to other externalities like work that requires security clearance.

I am experienced software engineer. I want to start learning AI, do you recommend any articles books, and order in which I need to proceed.

Thanks for sharing!

How often will the clients find you again to do the follow-up work, e.g. new software feature requests, for the previous projects? If you refuse the requests, will this undermine the business relationship?

This has never happened to me (yet).

I don’t get what “NLP/ML for Asian language processing and language education” work is. Can someone explain a bit more. What kinds of companies do this, what kind of businesses?

I may be wrong but I think an obvious example is Google search.

An example of "language education" is Duolingo, where the author used to be an employee.

"NLP/ML for Asian language processing" covers anything that has text in CJK/other languages. I work with Japanese and lots of things taken for granted in NLP pipelines require entirely different approaches specifically for Japanese. For example, there's no spaces, so word tokenization is actually a complicated issue.

Thanks for sharing!

As you work between Japan and the US, I'm curious about the rate difference. Are you able to charge the same?

Yes. I basically charge the same rate in USD no matter where my client is.

Good to know, thank you.

Do you have an example of a practical problem that your AI consulting solves?

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