mekarpeles

"Additionally, just like the real world, there are endless people posting jobs expecting the moon in exchange for peanuts."

I know what you mean. One of the biggest problems I've faced hiring people via oDesk is quality assurance (finding a programmer who will use version control, provide test cases, deliver on their promise). There's some good talent on oDesk (it sounds like you're among the best), but oDesk doesn't specifically cater to the extraordinary, nor do they offer a satisfactory solution for high tier clients (like facebook or google). oDesk tries to be a one-size-fits all, which is enough for many clients.

For me, it's not enough. It doesn't meet my expectations as an engineer. I don't trust oDesk's filters to find a reputable opportunity and clients frequently are not qualified to vet candidates -- this results in me wasting time interviewing with clients. The lack of standardization (demonstrated by a large standard deviation in price and job quality) makes it challenging for talented specialists to get paid what they deserve.

Hackerlist.net has been experimenting with solutions to this problem (all our jobs are geared towards specialists and start at $100/h). There are several others services like grouptalent, gun.io, ooomfg, and toptal which are offering solutions of their own to attack different niches of structuring online opportunities.

The experience (specifically the careful choice of mediums + examples + presentation though which the concepts are conveyed) is pretty fantastic.

I feel like a lot of semantics are lost here. Some of the elements are partially filled -- these elements seem more challenging to classify than the traditional approach. Also, it's unintuitive how "long" a "----" line should be held for.

Would love help simplifying this code (it looks really ugly right now)

I am considering redesigning the api using lxml instead of BeautifulSoup for performance reasons.

https://hackerlist.net:1443/rss -- done, please let me know if you'd like it in a different format or if there are any mistakes. Thanks, stillbourne!

mhluongo -- Love that you specialize in search and have author profiles.

You guys should get in touch with the peer library guys, send me an email if you'd like an intro. I'd love to see more collaboration in the space.

Internet Archive (archive.org) is also interested in contributing to the space and has been super helpful in aiding our efforts at open journal.

I think the three biggest problems in the space are (1) discovery + accessibility (including open-access), (2) collaboration (sharing, commenting, contributing), and (3) quality assurance (maintainability, scm-backed, repeatable research).

There are many solutions to target discovery and accessibility but I'm (as an academic) personally dissatisfied with the level sharing/collaboration/openness, the lack of community, and the lack of standards in academic research. I think the world needs for academia and research what github did for social programming.

Please do, let me know how I can help you with it.

m@hackerlist.net

Thanks ejstronge and great idea. I'll see if I can get a group of hackers together to post one recommended paper a week.

Do you have any interest in being informed? Also, do you know anyone who may be interested in helping curate / contribute?

Let's see what inspiration we can draw from researchblogging.org -- I've read a bunch of data driven / research oriented blogs (or blogs about [understanding] research) and found them helpful.

Thanks James, tag / faceted search is something I've envisioned for openjournal. I'll start working on the feature.

Issue oppened -- thanks! https://github.com/mekarpeles/openjournal/issues/16

I'm a fan of plaus, academia, and mendley, etc. I wish there was more of an outlet/community for people to contribute their own research (in a way that made the research repeatable and improvable)

One of my buddies (michael) is doing something similar with annotations and social reading @ pen.fm. I'll see how we may be able to incorporate some of these ideas.

I do have around 450k papers from JSTOR (released legally via archive.org). I have these papers indexed and can expose them via openjournal.

Also, as I mentioned in my previous post, a few guys from Berkeley (Tony Chen et al) are work on peer library which will be a more complete non profit academic search engine.

Good points about the 'barrier'. I'm hoping people will contribute their own papers (even if they are no published).

My ultimate vision would be for people to write their papers within a git repo and then upload/submit their .tex source (along with unit tests). I'm in the process of building some of these features.

Also, experimenting with some ocr and pdf analysis to scrape as much useful contextual information as I can from the papers contributed (for the great benefit of our users)

Thanks for taking the time to respond, streptomycin!

Adding this to the github issue tracker, I'll get this setup for you as soon as I have a break in my schedule today. Thanks!

rob, not really interested in the monetary aspects of this problem, more interested in the open-access nature.

There is a subreddit for academic papers, I figured it would make sense having something ultra-targeted for computer science papers and I didn't feel like the right community was using the subreddit (the results quality wasn't great). It did teach me that a lot of people like requesting papers, so this is something I am considering.

Also, this was a good opportunity for me to attack a problem I am really passionate about while testing out a web framework I've been writing (waltz).

Finally, I did the project for sentimental reasons. I was talking to Aaron Swartz about open journal a while back over skype and was looking forward to working with him on it, so I thought it would be nice to finish it in his honor :o)

You have some great ideas (mass download is something I've seen requested by some of my friends from my phd program). There's a team called peer library who's attacking many of these problems and I'll be giving them as much support as I can.

Thanks for your kind remarks + great feedback

Also, thanks for your patience, it's running on a micro EC2 and I haven't put too much effort yet into optimizing request handling (just using waltz over web.py at this point)

Would love feedback.

Please feel welcome to submit issues on github and I will try to deal with them in realtime: https://github.com/mekarpeles/openjournal/issues

Interesting application. I know sabalaba @ lambdalabs (lambdal.com) is doing some similar stuff -- you two might want to get in touch.

Aaron, thank you for all you've done. It's had a tremendous impact on my life.

Aaron had a really interesting blog post on pain worth reading called, "Leaning into the Pain". It's worth considering that pain doesn't just impact the individual. Try to let others help. http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/dalio

The inspiration for the project came from having to rebuild scaffolding for web.py projects over and over again.

I figured, people should just be able to clone a repository, install dependencies, and have a working web.py application.

I also added a key feature which I've been missing in my own applications -- default support for logging analytics.

Overall, the application is ideal for getting a website live in the time it takes to 'git clone'. The analytics currently driven by lazydb (which isn't production ready) so I'd suggest modifying the @track decorator in waltz/main.py to fit your tastes.

The next step is to add default flatfile support for sessions.

I think github and stackoverflow are both good indicators of how people use their spare time (and the quality of work they expect from themselves). It shouldn't be used blindly or out of context, however I feel both can be a powerful addition to a talent-judging heuristic.

To comment on the actual question, i.e. which do I value more, I'd say github. This probably comes from my bias of valuing execution slightly more than domain knowledge (and understanding executors better than domain experts).

Here's an example to illustrate why I believe this way. Person 'a' may write an instruction manual for some appliance -- this may take considerable skills (it is unclear whether they borrowed the instructions or composed them entirely themselves). How do we know if the instructions are accurate without first implementing them? Either we or someone else, let's say person 'b', must execute on said instructions and have the knowledge to know whether the build was a success. By this, I do not make the claim that everyone on github who builds things writes good code (or even understands if they've assembled the parts correctly). I have, however, experienced that a good github profile (on average) provides me with more information than a stackoverflow post. Do they contribute with others, do they comment their code, do they catch bugs, do they write efficient code, how regularly do they contribute? Granted you can obtain some of this information from stackoverflow, but this leads me to a question of my own -- why choose just one?

Thanks for the feedback Zephyr, we'll update the site shortly

Hi citricsquid, you're right -- the website is very plain and not entirely helpful. For our first batch, we will be working directly with accepted engineers, offering them the opportunity to work with several companies who have already expressed interested in the hackerlist network.

In the future, we'll provide an interface which is very similar to oDesk. The main difference will be, we plan on changing the process to remove a lot of the pain points that clients and freelancers currently face (vetting, interviews, payment, and all the other time wasting blockers).

If you'd like to setup a time to chat, I'd be happy to tell you more about our next steps and would love to listen to your suggestions and needs. (michael.karpeles@gmail.com)

Hi Eric, your github account has a link to your website where (only if you've made it public) I will take the initiative to contact you. I don't intend on excluding people just because their github account doesn't have 20 projects on it. Moreso, it's just a selector for the target demographic. Also, feel free to be creative and put your linked in url or email in if you think that's more representative of your background. Last, but not least, I'm happy to hear more about your talents if you send me an email (michael.karpeles@gmail.com). Sabalaba and I will be going through each submission, one at a time.

As suggested before, we're keeping our first batch of acceptances small so we can better understand the challenges which you face and help you overcome them.

cheers!

Hi Zack, this is a really great point. I wouldn't claim to be the best hacker in the world and your insight is spot on as to the problems this introduces. I can say that, like most marketplaces, hackerlist will be ever evolving and dynamic. Our objective and our promise is to increase quality over time.

This means offering the right tools to help companies and freelancers make educated decisions (rating systems, reviews, programming tests, etc). It having dedicated staff to vett programmers and companies.

Specifically in terms of the Blub paradox, I can say that sabalaba and I have used a myriad of different freelance services and have a pretty good idea of the services they are missing. If we are able to curate and nurture a ecosystem with better hackers than any of our competitors, I'll feel proud that we've been able to at least offer our clients a superior service.

I really appreciate your points and I admit this is something we're going to simply have to prove. That's why we're not earning any commissions for our first batch and are keeping our network small enough that we can resolve problems one at a time.

cheers, Zack!

Hi Hansi, I'm really thankful for the feedback. We'll work on creating a page with additional information (FAQs).

You're right about one thing -- the service is very much incomplete. Our philosophy is to continue to talk to customers (hackers and companies) and minimize the amount of building we do without their blessing.

In terms of the limiting the network size, we know we're going to encounter problems (we're counting on it!). As a result, we want to make sure we'll have the resources to spend time with each of our customers during early alpha stages.

I'd love to hear your feedback on how we can improve the site. Do you hire contractors or are you looking for opportunities? Let me know how I can help.

I don't think there's one magical solution. The more we work with you guys, the better we will become at reducing friction and eliminating wasted time in the process. It shouldn't take 5 days for companies to vet potential contractors, like is often the case with oDesk.

You mention a lot of important issues like trust. I'm hoping by being extremely selective (and limiting the number of accepted hackers initially), we'll be able to keep quality and trust high (or make necessary adjustments).

Howdy brandall, great question.

Geeklist is a great idea for building community and sharing. This just isn't a problem we're trying to solve.

Hackerlist provide a premium network to match skilled engineering freelancers with companies. It seems like a lot of people currently rely on hackernews freelance posts to accomplish such. Current competitors like oDesk tend to underpay, lack the same quality standards, and don't specialize exclusively in skilled engineering jobs.

I think toptal.com does something similar but it is focused on recruiting freelancers rather than providing a useful odesk-like interface.

Howdy lxpk, I might know some programmers who are a good fit. We'll be sure to throw you some free credits when the marketplace officially opens. Keep in touch and email me if you have any questions - michael.karpeles@gmail.com

TL;DR - Hackerlist is an oDesk alternative specifically for talented engineers.