noahc

The company needs the invoice to make a payment. They typically don't care about the legal correctness. Particularly if the developer is in another country. Making the invoice look legal/official is more important than anything else.

Why are the islands known to accelerate genetic changes specifically? Is it because of sun exposure?

My understanding is that you would only pay $5k - $8k for something like that at most.

What makes you think you have different requirements?

I took a class with Sandi, where this material was covered. I paired with one developer who did mostly Java and he seemed to get a lot of the class even though he hadn't really programmed in Ruby.

Might be worth reconsidering,FWIW.

This is designed for people who just pull out their credit cards and buy the book. I would expect she and Katrina have a significant number of those folks. No preview needed.

Get everything in writing is not the correct advice when something is sketchy.

Getting it in writing means you'll have to invest significant cost/effort/stress in getting it sorted out.

Stop being a software engineer and start focusing on solving business and people problems. My experience has been that if you're good ( at both software and business) the company will try to move you in the 'leadership' direction as opposed to push you into a Sr. dev role.

Companies need more executives that understand technology, because there is a huge technology war going on in old tired industries right now and even the not so bright see technology as the future. Software really is eating the world.

And your point exactly? He already knows it could be much better, obviously. It is his business after all.

And yet despite your finely tuned ability to detect amateurish abandonware he managed to bring in ~$75,000 revenue in on public plans, and if I had to take a guess anywhere between 1x - 1.5x in non-public plans.

As a general rule, we shouldn't use the obvious to tear someone down.

+1. We weren't on AWS, but we had co-located rack space and we moved our main rails app that has been in development for 4 years over to Heroku. It took much much much longer than anyone expected. Like we thought it was a 4 man weeks of work, turned out it was a few man months of work.

Most of the work we had to do centered around data. The rails app it self pretty much worked. We had to change a few things moving from mySQL to Postgres. We depended on a gem that apparently was only tested against mySQL and when we moved to Postgres had to scramble pretty hard to get stuff fixed. How am I going to get this legacy Domino/Lotus Notes system and AS400 to talk to this postgres database or am I going to build APIs around it, etc were harder to solve.

We moved to Heroku because we didn't have the time or skills to do devops well. Heroku has dramatically reduced the amount of time we spend around devops to the point that most months it approaches 0. We also have been using New Relic, which I don't think we would have installed without Heroku. This tool is amazing and has allowed us to respond to trends much better.

Our move to a more SOA infrastructure drove us to Heroku, and for us it was totally worth the switch. If you, or anyone, has specific questions feel free to reach out: noah@noahc.net

In this case, it is an internal project so it never would have touched legal.

Except it will forever be called that. A quick example is where I work we have a 'new product x billing' system and it is still called the 'new' one five years later when it is also the only one.

There is some debate internally over whether 'new' refers to 'new as in old' or 'new' as in the opposite of 'renewal'. No one knows why it is called what it is called.

I suspect it is also true that comments are more of a liability than an asset.

"He has no comments, he must have been busy doing something else interesting." vs "He has 500 comments, and shows he isn't interested in considering other approaches"

You first might want to start investigating COBRA. A good place to start is http://www.dol.gov/ebsa/faqs/faq-consumer-cobra.html.

Without more details, particularly, which country you're in no one can answer this question. Are you giving it to a person or a non-profit? How much? Why are you doing it? Are you trying to make a company have more shareholders? Are you trying to 'share your winnings' ?

I'm from the midwest (USA) and I'm not sure what the rule is but here is how I would say it.

The City Council is … The class is … The police are … The firefighters are …

The phrase "the police is" sounds so foreign to me, that I am almost certain I've never heard nor said it.

You're over thinking this. He means a handful + 3.

Investors understand risk management. It is possible he knows he needs 15MM to go for the home run, but doesn't want put in the 15MM himself and go bankrupt in the process. Investors allow him to shoot for the moon.

Also, investors help with accountability, pushing through tough spots, connections, advice, etc. Investors also add credibility that 'rich white guy throws money at project' doesn't give.

If the only value you add is 'I can do it cheaper than the other guy' then yes it is a race to the bottom. However, I would strongly urge your consider what type of signaling 'I can do it cheaper than the other guy' sends to serious people who have serious amounts of money to get it done without too much involvement from them.

If you sell to businesses, this is a horrible idea. I'd rather you charge me $150/month and have no one use the service than have to explain to my boss, "Why are we paying $110 this month, when it was $70 last month and two guys no longer work for us?"

Also, customers are paying for the option to use your software at any time without signing up again. You're providing some amount of value just in holding their data on your system. You shouldn't avoid capturing that value.

If you're serious about being a security consultant, I'd checkout https://breaker101.daeken.com. Not sure when the next class is going to be, but I took the first iteration of the course and people were able to transition from developers to security consultants if they put the time in.

Not sure how much time most people spent on the course, but I spent between 3 and 8 hours a week. I took the course mostly for fun and to get more familiar with security, but I learned all the major web security flaws and a bit of crypto. Enough that I'd be confident I could find a job in the security field if I wanted to. It also helps that you can add Cody(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cody_Brocious) to your references.

If you (or anyone else) want to know more about the course feel free to email me: noah@noahc.net . I'm happy answer whatever questions you might have.

It seems like you're trying to do finance -> machine learning. When maybe a more appropriate (and faster) way of going to just do finance -> programming. You're in NYC so finding a job shouldn't be a problem, but http://careers.stackoverflow.com/jobs?searchTerm=python&allo... might be useful.

Why aren't you applying for jobs right now? (and working on getting better at work).

As far as acceptance to anything, You won't know unless you try (and apply). Don't self select as someone who can't get in because you didn't apply. Make them say no.

One definition of a startup is a company (person or business) that is still looking for product/market fit. I'd argue that you're a startup until you've found product/market fit and have found a verifiable profit generation mechanism in which you can put $10 in and get $10+ dollars out reliably.

No.

What about 1Gb fiber connection makes one a terrorist?

What about buying Uranium off Amazon[1] makes one a terrorist?

What about starting an organization that promotes technology in the Midwest, a typically rural and industrial location, in need of new sectors makes one a terrorist?

The point is that we need to be more nuanced in our approach and show restraint. There are a lot of people with crazy ideas, however, doing things differently or having eclectic hobbies or dreams isn't what makes someone a terrorist.

What do we prefer?

We prefer freedom, liberty, and privacy to live our lives according to our own desires. Our desire for real safety is there, but security theater is ineffective. We can not prevent all terrorism, we can not prevent all harm. It is the cost of the freedom, liberty and privacy and one that we should be willing to pay. These are not absolutes, and trade offs can certainly be made. But today, we have traded too much freedom, liberty, and privacy for a false sense of security.

This is what we prefer: real safety balanced with real freedom, liberty and privacy.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Images-SI-Inc-Uranium-Ore/dp/B000796XX...

It's not a stupid question, but often times open sourcing something involves one or more of the following:

1. Documenting everything so it's actually usable. At a minimum, "here is how to install the dumb thing" should probably be documented.

2. Often times there are hard-coded values that would need to be extracted out for security reasons or to simply allow someone to install it on a system not quite like yours.

3. Often times there are other dependences that would also have to be open sources such as modifications to libraries, internal libraries released, shell scrips, cron jobs, messaging queues, delayed job worker tasks, etc that the system may rely on. These all need to be packaged up, documented and/or released.

In short it is a ton of work to take something that is running in our way on our hardware and generalize it enough that anyone else can run it.

On the other hand, you wouldn't need their service to give you the protections they offered. Essentially, encrypted email storage. You can get that mostly off the shelf using any linux distro if you run your own mail service.

I just wanted to say congrats on getting something out in the world.

Don't worry about all the criticism on this page, particularly from anyone who has never written a book before.

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.

It's obvious, what is going on here. He's got two groups he's trying to reach and "the front page of HN" isn't one of the groups. The first group is his mailing list. People who have expressed a general interest in what Patrick has to say. Patrick is investing hours (probably) into each mailing and knows there are people who have a specific interest in each one of these mailings. Through the Magic of the Interwebs it's possible that this second group of people with a specific interest could possibly find this mailing if only he would put it on the internet publicly. And for various reasons putting it on his blog probably isn't the most advantageous way of putting it out there publicly.

I hope your day improves, because it looks like it isn't going so well by the tone of your comment!

Pay != quality.

As another person mentioned, being in the UK you face different challenges. My reply was partially to help you, but also to let other American programers know that there are better options out there.

Being underpaid isn't a function of being in a particular region (assuming your in America). Middle America Jr. Devs with little/no programming experience are getting started around $70K.