j4pe

I've been thinking about forming a co-op for a trusted network of freelancers, to handle the crummy parts of the job (sourcing, selling, collecting) while encouraging the good parts (building, branding, partnering with quality colleagues). I had similar experiences being left with fake jobs/bad credit through freelance markets.

Thanks for sharing! I generally take longer-term gigs, so consistent dealflow isn't as big an of an issue for me. OP, what are you planning to do to fix your offline-network problem?

I was certain that the story of NK being the actor here was just publicity, paid for by Sony to promote the film and capitalize on their hacking disaster. The release cancellation nixed the idea that Sony was behind the threats, but it still didn't point to NK's culpability. Any lunatic could have bombed any theater in the country next week and Sony would have been liable.

With these administration comments, is it more likely that NK was actually responsible? It's still possible that this will turn out to be the overblown suspicions of somebody unfamiliar with how digital attacks work, published too quickly because they fit the narrative. We've seen the state of journalistic fact checking lately, and even if this is the NYT, 'senior administration officials' isn't a bulletproof source. But it's also possible that we now live in an era where nations wage proxy digital war against corporations not just for theft but for ideology.

This would be a strange new state of affairs. I wonder how long before corporations are fighting back? If, say, Samsung's expected value for government reconstruction contracts following NK's fall was in the tens of billions, how difficult would it be for them to cause a couple military installations, power plants, or leaders' flights to explode and make regime change more likely?

SEEKING WORK: Boston MA + remote availability

Full-stack web design and development in Ruby (Rails, Sinatra), JS (Ember, other toys), & Python (Django, Flask).

http://j4p3.com/portfolio

I've been helping ambitious tech companies craft really excellent stuff for a few years now, from MVPs to UI widgets to new features on massive products. I work fast, communicate constantly, and leave you with clean, highly readable code that holds up well under future development.

Contact me if you need something built: bonner jp at gmail.

Even though I've always been a bit repulsed by Product Hunt, I'm really glad to see it succeeding - hopefully it will take the whole startup daily news/gossip business away and leave HN with the cool hacks and new tech, As Its Creator Intended.

(Why am I repulsed by PH? Not sure, but I tend to lump it in with the whole cargo cult, ping pong tables, beers kegs, fashion and gossip and startups Valley scene. The most common context in which I encounter it is people asking me to vote them up so they can get 'discovered', as if entrepreneurship were Hollywood or Nashville. It's a meta-startup for discussing other people's startups; it's a carbuncle on a vain, self-absorbed slice of our industry. I guess it serves a niche well and I'm just repelled by the niche.)

Partly a location thing. There was an excellent comment [1] in the last few days about how coastal business has always had a mercantile growth culture, while midwest business culture has centered on commodities and thrift. Please, please don't buy into to Valley hype - it's good for fundraising and hiring but by no means your only option.

(I liked 0->1 too, especially chapter 8, but it's being massively overrated. Go read PG's thoughts on rhetoric - 'a real essay doesn't take a position and then defend it' [2] - then go back and look at 0->1. Thiel is compelling, but his paragraphs feel like advocacy rather than the unveiling of new information.)

Recommendation: check out Founders at Work, Revolution in the Valley for some fun firsthand accounts of startup culture. Then move to a big city, not necessarily a coastal one.

1: http://www.reddit.com/r/energy/comments/2j3g14/walmart_provi...

2: http://www.paulgraham.com/essay.html

I was really surprised to see that you're actually disintermediating microfinance. Other crowdfunded/donor-choice orgs create profiles after a borrower has received a loan, and pay any loans made to that profile into a pool for future borrowers. I thought this was a scammy but necessary part of the business model until I saw your new loan growth - very exciting development in microfinance.

I'd be curious to see how BI can inform your strategy in areas like market selection, which can be especially crucial in microfinance. Which region should you enter next, and what type of borrower should you focus on first? There's plenty of data out there for analysis, but maybe others' repayment rates for models like lending circles may not correlate too closely with yours.

SEEKING WORK: Boston MA + remote availability

Full-stack web design and development in Ruby (Rails, Sinatra), JS (Ember, other toys), Python (Django, Flask), & PHP (Laravel).

http://j4p3.com/portfolio

I've been helping ambitious tech companies craft really excellent stuff for a few years now, from MVPs to UI widgets to new features on massive products. I work fast, communicate constantly, and leave you with clean, highly readable code that holds up well under future development.

It's been fun so far. Contact me if you need something built: bonner jp at gmail.

I've been working on a Django project for the last few months. In past gigs I've used Drupal, and even talked community with one of Drupal's corporate overlords at Acquia. I enjoy working with Ember and follow its releases. But I've never grinned and cheered for new features the way I do with Rails.

It took me a long time to realize that Rails' greatness isn't due to magical omakase magic - it's the community DHH (and the core team) have built over the years, and the strong product focus they've applied. Really impressive. Did Torvalds work like this? Has anyone has studied or written about organizational behavior in the open-source community?

It amazes me a little, and says something about Håkon's perspective, that all of his examples are newspaper pages.

This looks like the makings of a high quality spec from 2004. Granted, CSS should natively support responsive columns, but it's a solved problem. Does he really think that Figure support is what limits web from competing with native? The problem with presentation of web apps has always been that we use a language designed for describing newspaper layouts to structure a dynamic, morphing interface. And its creator wants more succinct descriptors for recreating the above-the-fold of the New York times at variable widths.

It's almost saddening when the creator of something is no longer the guy driving it forward.

I wonder what the author thinks can be done to improve volunteerism?

Here in the Philippines I met a troop of British deaf-assistance volunteers, visiting for three months, who don't know sign language and happily admit their own uselessness. Clearly this is suboptimal. But the only solution he presents in the piece - make money and give it to NGOs to hire professionals - sounds, well, not exactly surprising coming from a grant writing consultant. The authors of books like Dead Aid [1] and White Man's Burden [2] would have a few research-backed criticisms of what his suggested approach does to NGOs' effectiveness.

I was hoping to find some in-trade NGO hacks for travel volunteerism, or Doctors Without Borders for Everything, but without any new approach presented, this piece is just complaining about a pretty obvious problem.

-------------------

[1] Dead Aid https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6184317-dead-aid [2] White Man's Burden https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/33513.The_White_Man_s_Bu...

I am in the exact same line of work as the author. I can't imagine working the way he describes.

It's great that he's made this lifestyle work for him, but I'm not convinced I'd like to be one of his clients. A technology company with a developer on staff one day per week? Coordinating a project is difficult enough when everybody is full-time. ("Sure thing, I'll tackle that bug in six days" is not a recipe for a functional sprint.)

My solution has been to charge hard at whatever milestone I've committed to, working as a de facto team member, and then taking the next month off. This works well with my lifestyle, since I try to take each project in a new city and I live cheaply.

What I would say to the author: you want fulfilling? Participate in the optimistic urgency of a new tech venture fully - then take your time off when you've finished. If you can't afford to spend that much time away from developing your startup, then how can you expect your clients to wait while you take time off from theirs?

I also wish they had interviewed the runner more deeply. I'd speculate that her advantage is almost entirely mental. Middle-distance races inflict pain on the whole body - guts, arms, neck, everywhere - the legs are by no means the only part under stress. The quote about not knowing how much time she had left was also telling: not many high school runners have that kind of motivation, and motivation to train and race is 90% of the competition at that level.

This post belongs to Shawn McCool of Big Name (http://heybigname.com/2013/01/21/how-to-become-a-better-deve...). Though he was credited, I think we should use the original content source when possible.

McCool does make some excellent points and his contributions to Laravel and other projects have been very helpful to me.

If you're saddened by the steady encroachment of pop culture onto your HN frontpage, look at it like this: what a masterful piece of content marketing by the outfit behind Dear JJ.

It doesn't have much merit outside of that - the recommendations pick out a few arbitrary elements and say 'this is what made star wars great'. Classic cargo cult. Sincerely Truman may be a 'squadron of storytellers', but they don't seem understand that movies are comprised of characters.

That said, what a great soundtrack backing their Yoda scene. Wow.

Sounds like they've come a long way since they started. Whoever had to go door-to-door pitching a web startup to local shop owners in the Bay Area should get some kind of medal.

This is a really well-constructed piece of marketing. Yes please, I do want to code like Yehuda Katz! Sure, I'll connect my entire web presence to your service to earn credit!

But is nobody else concerned about needing an internet connection to write code? It looks possible to sync a local repo with their boxes when connected, dropbox-style. But the use case they appear to be focusing on is their in-browser collaborative IDE, which is all kinds of problematic for me in cases like using my own bash settings, coding on airplanes, simulating my production environment, coding on life rafts on approach to a refugee flotilla in the Pacific ocean, and just plain hating latency.

Looks like a perfect for coding on a Chromebook or similarly handicapped machine. For the time being, though, I like my dev environments like I like my video games - offline.

Yes, granted, the title's intention is to inspire controversy, but it's still worth pointing out that the author's two concluding avenues to 'learning to code' - all-or-nothing desperation and irresistible intellectual attraction - are baseless. I'm confident that they're entirely false. Just more evidence-free platitudes dreamed up by a fellow twenty-something. I'd wager that these two extremes represent a very small percentage of real coders.

To answer anecdotal proof with anecdotal proof, I studied finance and taught myself to build web apps. I didn't do it because I had to. I didn't do it because I couldn't stop myself. I just forced myself to do it the same way I force myself to memorize Chinese characters, the same way I force myself out of bed every morning. Willpower isn't some mythical ability granted to the anointed few. It's just asking yourself, what am I doing right now? Is it what I want?

There's also a troubling perception of what 'coding' is behind this post and many others. I write code for a living and I'm under no illusions about my abilities. As James Somers pointed out in Aeon, I'm a kid playing around with tools given to me by adults. Nobody like myself or the author is going to build a Rails, a V8, an Ember, a Heroku. If I learned how to use a brush I wouldn't call myself an artist. It's fine that we're becoming more abstracted from the machine's reality - thank God DHH didn't have to use punchcards - but with that abstraction should come a bit of humility about what we've actually learned. Because for web development, at least, it's mostly syntax.

I'd better stop before I exceed than the original post length. If you'd like a tl;dr, it is: fuck the author's position, my experiences contradict it, and the author is confused about what 'real' code constitutes. (However, I wholeheartedly agree with his suggestion to learn by building something you yourself want.)

Thanks for posting this. I had a difficult time understanding why my family and friends back in the States have such a problem with Snowden until I saw the tone of this article. Every topic in the story digs the knife a little deeper: did Hong Kong screw us with red tape? Have the Russians and the Chinese copied his hard drives (with their 'pilfered files') already? Did he set out to conduct espionage from the get-go? Find out at 11, viewers, and don't touch that dial.

Wow, I thought the Run-DMC thing was going to be a gimmick, but this analysis has some depth. Thanks for the follow-along instructions. However, your writing needed more song lyric callouts.

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Just one more data point from this hackathon:

Jen is as smart and motivated a 17-year-old I've ever met, and she solved a real pain point of mine with nothing but one day of a two-day hackathon and a greasemonkey script.

But.

If I were her, and the judges were commanding applause from the audience with specific references to my age and gender (this happened twice) instead of my app and skill - if I became this symbolic object of a story we all want to tell - I don't know how I'd feel about that. I wonder how she feels about it, especially in light of stmchn's comment on winning.

Personally, I wish we lived in a world where this headline could read "Smart kid wins with cool hack." I guess when stories like this are no longer news, we'll know we've achieved normalcy.

It's also fair to ask if websites will kill apps. Widespread mobile data access and HTML5/CSS3 are beginning to let developers duplicate the advantages of apps and keep the advantages of web. The winner will be determined by cashflow - apps are often purchased; many sites still rely on ads. Which model is more profitable?

I like to think that there's something special about Paris that inspires these underground art movements. Back in '04 the group called themselves LMDP in a Guardian interview, and they didn't mention restoration. Maybe there are multiple underground hacker-artist societies. [ http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2004/sep/11/film.france ]

Chinese internet censorship is driven by the Party's need to remain in control, not by corporations seeking intellectual property protection. Little effort is made by Chinese censors to protect copyright holders' content. Though the parallel feels right, the rampant copyright infringement in China cannot be called a result of its internet controls. SOPA has nothing to do with the Great Firewall.

Having spent a long time in China, I can see the dangers of the censorship enabled by SOPA. But I also know that, should the Party decide to eliminate piracy, they could do so. There's simply no incentive right now - it would be an unpopular policy that would largely benefit foreign firms.

"CEO, Internet Payment Company" -

This guy dropped 600 pounds of ice outside PayPal's dev conference. He really can't get some producer to use his company's name on television? Although after watching the clip, I think I can understand why Bill wouldn't want WePay's name associated with this piece of fine television.

"Why do ordinary thoughts gain such credibility just because their source is dying?"

I feel a bit guilty for thinking like this while reading the thread. Maybe a raw vision of mortality makes us emotional, less cynical, and we're more receptive as a result. Maybe we look to last words as an encapsulation of a person's life philosophy, as if they became wiser in the knowledge of imminent death. Or maybe an overly detached analysis is just another reaction to a reminder that we're going to die.

'Winning' was his priority, so Creighton found a way to win. Congratulations to him. Taking a risk like that in front of people you respect is tough, especially when it results in everyone in your industry remembering you as 'that guy'.

Edit: Better mirror, courtesy of reddit user FunkyFreshFlow: http://rorr.im/reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/fya4n/

There is no reason for Facebook to go public anytime in the near future. It will be more and more revenue positive as it refines its advertising model. Zuckerberg's contribution is therefore worth very little at the moment, outside of the tremendous commitment it implies for Mark. At some point, he will probably control huge amounts of wealth and it's bold of him to sign away most of the cash before he ever has control over it.

But wouldn't it be amusing if Facebook were to go the way of preceding social networks, and leave the "world's youngest billionaire" looking a little silly for pledging a fortune that never materialized?