acconrad

I'm a UX developer who has tried and failed every time to get vertical rhythm working. It doesn't.

Vertical rhythm is great in theory. You can even program it in if you use SASS or something like that.

The problem is every example of vertical rhythm is a blog post on a blank page with a school paper ruler underneath.

Even if you add multiple columns it will look great, but the moment you add any sort of visual offset it will break things.

Cards are all the rage right now in UI design. Usually you want card headers to abutt the top of the card by some padding offset (padding on the card). Now you need to make that heading work without padding and still obey vertical rhythm. Good luck.

Borders? Haha sorry, you've now introduced an off by one error (or two if you put them on top and bottom of your object). You probably thought of that already for tables, but you didn't think of that for your buttons or any of your form elements (who also have labels that you don't want to be oddly distant from their form elements).

I could go on, but outside of a mimnimalist page I've yet to see it be more of a benefit than a PITA

This is super actionable and useful advice. I love it, thank you so much!

I've also done this and can agree with the parent of this comment.

The problem here is once they have traction and funding, they likely have a full-time CTO. Fractional CTOs are generally needed at the seed stage when the technical solution hasn't really come together and they don't have this skill-set in house. They also don't have money. It's a slippery slope, and you're better off being a technical advisor (low effort, low equity, low risk) than working underpaid and overworked.

I should have asked what you believe is more. $75-100 is definitely in the "cheap" range, $100-150 I see for senior generalists, and $150-300 I see for the principal/architect/specialist rates. At some point the number isn't sustainable unless you're like a brand-name entity (e.g. John Carmack, Jeff Atwood, John Resig, and I'm just guessing here).

I was able to stay this route. Started at $4k/week and worked my way up to $6k/week and still rising. If you can manage a project/have technical lead skills/have a hyper specialty (e.g. AR/VR, cryptography/security, AI/ML) I've seen rates anywhere from $150-300/hr.

So the breakdown I saw this past year was:

* 5% consulting (e.g. reports, audits, et al)

* 10% subcontracting to other devs

* 85% direct software development

The highest margins were certainly on that 15%, but the volume was not nearly high enough to be able to make it work.

Would a scenario be something like:

Prospect wants work done. Instead of turning them down because my rate is too, subcontract that to someone who is maybe less experienced and can do it at less than the advertised rate and bake in a margin there?

When I got into consulting I read that MacKenzie article and answered an ecstatic "Yes" to all three and yet people see my resume and previous work and just immediately slot me into the "code monkey" territory. I am able to negotiate a great rate, so I've done very well, but I believe I could do better if I was able to get the higher value projects, but no one has yet to perceive me this way.

Easier said than done. They may respect you but they'll also likely not hire you. They have to respect you AND know you. It's hard to justify paying someone a lot if they are an unknown quantity. I checked out your HN profile: do you think you can hire more because you specialize in Computer Vision/Graphics? I'd also imagine your clientele is highly-targeted as well?

I've only been at it a year but I find this to be nearly impossible. 95% of my income this past year was writing software. Whenever someone saw me as a "software consultant" they thought "well why don't we pay him to implement it too?" But I also made more than double what I made when I was full-time.

I really would like to know how to not immediately be slotted as someone who is just a coding mercenary.

It's one thing to not be happy at Google+, which is the center of this rant. But to put targets on all of the companies you interviewed at along the way with their founders Twitter names? Incredibly bitter and salty. It's no way to strengthen your argument or to live.

Boston is terrible at this. It seems like it's the only thing they're building right now in the city's most popular neighborhoods (South End, South Boston, Seaport). All the other neighborhoods are just renos, renos, renos.

And yet occupancy rates are at around 50%, a good portion of the ones that are taken up are from foreign investors paying all cash, and like someone else mentioned, the workmanship is mediocre at best (I saw one go up literally right next to my house from the studs).

I just can't see why it's either luxury or low-income housing. The margins can't be that good if you have huge occupancy rates, and it's certainly subsidized if you're building for low-income housing...isn't there a better way in the middle?

I'm happy for you but this is a super privileged viewpoint that most people can't really learn from. I'd be happy too if I could just take a year off and do whatever I want. Most people can't do things like traveling to different cities and trying out a new place for 3 months. It's just unrealistic and only reflects and incredibly tiny population.

More importantly: has it really been the best thing you've done for your career? It sounds like you've had a great time but we don't know how this materially affected your career.

What about your sabbatical has made your career better now that you've done it? All I've seen is that you've open sourced a Hugo theme, read a few books, and you worked on a side project. Sounds like something plenty of people do with 40 hour workweeks.

The million-dollar question: how do you find clients?

Honestly, the first one approached me via HackerNews. The rest have been from my network.

Blogging has yet to bring me more business, because my name and brand have not reached the mind-share yet to rely solely on that. But I'm working on it!

I also realize that this is a long-term play, it will likely take me 3+ years before my name is reputable enough to be the reason someone hires me from all the places they've seen my name.

My wife and I went to Paris for our anniversary and we didn't realize until we were there that it was Fashion Week.

I am genuinely not surprised at all that this guy made it to the top.

Streetwear has become so ironic because the lines have blurred between haute culture/high fashion and bargain basement designs that you genuinely can't tell what is $800 (Balenciaga Triple S https://www.balenciaga.com/us/triple-s-shoes_cod11271302nb.h...) and what is $55 (Nike Air Monarch https://www.nike.com/t/air-monarch-iv-lifestyle-gym-shoe-lPt...) unless you know the brands and styles.

Does Microsoft count? It's in the same market cap as Amazon and Google.

I've been consulting for the past year while I build a few side-projects, hoping they'll turn into businesses.

I'm making more than I ever have before and this was only year one. My hope is the next few years the time spent marketing myself through blogs, podcasts, and some books I'm working on will pay off either to make raising money easier for a business idea or to solidify higher rates for consulting.

Front page quality seems to have deteriorated. I brought this up in an Ask HN and I think I came off as self-righteous and that was my fault.

But I think the crux of the issue is I just don't get how certain low-quality stuff makes the front-page and a lot of high-quality stuff from new gets missed.

I've actually created an RSS feed that grabs anything in New that has gotten at least 1 upvote. It's a lot of content but at least it is going beyond what is displayed on the front page.

How did this get upvoted so much for something that has so little substance?

Fun fact: I am now learning theory and chord names.

I was in a band in college and I could never play along with the properly trained. "Can you play that in a C minor pentatonic scale?"

"Yeah!... So what frets are those?"

I learned the guitar playing by ear. As a kid I would just lock myself in my bedroom and play along with my CDs until my fingers were raw.

It's a lot of screwing up, starting the song over, and trying again until it sounds right. I started doing this about 20 years ago so I've had quite a bit of practice, but at this point it's really a great feeling to listen to a song on YouTube and know pretty much before I pick up the guitar whether I'm capable of playing it within an hour or so.

It just takes practice. Lots of it. Lots of trial and error. Lots of screw ups. And just embracing/loving the process.

Actually the last part is the most important, because I love playing the guitar. I love music. I play 5 different instruments and music is a deeply important part of my life. My desire to play along to the songs I love trumps wanting to learn it in a more traditional fashion. I could have taken guitar lessons or gotten a teacher to learn proper theory and all of that. But all of that stuff just got in the way of what I wanted to do: play the music I love. Now.

So just go out there and fiddle with your instrument and play along to stuff you like!

Where are you seeing that? I'm designing the Model 3 right now and with AWD and autopilot it comes to $63k before incentives and $53k after... https://3.tesla.com/model3/design#autopilot

They seem more excited about the 6.1[1] than the 7.1...anyone have experience with it?

I'm really disappointed with the Pixel line and have no interest in spending nearly $1000 on a phone so the 6.1 sounds like a nice compromise but wanted to see if anyone had any opinions first.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/07/nokia-6-1-review-the...

Fellow consultant here. These are the top 3 things you should fix:

1. The site loads very slowly. This is largely static content, it should not take this long to load. Adding in all of the whiz-bang animations and transitions detracts from your overall message.

2. It's not very accessible. Small fonts, poor contrast, it's very difficult to read. If you have a 50-year old CEO with money to burn, do you really want him/her to pass on your firm because they can't read your case studies?

3. It's a bit confusing. The logo kind of looks like a hamburger menu. The hamburger menu dropdown is really in your face, and you take over scrolling when going through the list of projects. So many things that make me cringe, please don't take over my scrolling! Make the information intuitive and easy to access.

I cannot for the life of me rationalize spending so much on a car. The $35,000 just doesn't make sense in New England, so I need to add in AWD. Then I need to add in the autopilot because isn't that the point of owning a Tesla so you don't have to drive your car someday? Now, with government incentives, this car is $50k.

Couldn't you grab a Rav4 Hybrid with Comma AI and basically have an electric car with AWD for $30k less?

Any reason no love for Boston?

> "No one really explains to you taxes and contracts and how to chase a client for that bill that they owe you — like, the nitty-gritty,"

Wait...what?

Before I even broke out into freelance consulting I hired an accountant. When starting your own business, I would think it's base-level knowledge that anything with legal ramifications (and that includes the IRS) should be handled by a professional.

Get an accountant. Get a lawyer (at least for one day to draft up your documents and make sure your business is set up or even use LegalZoom).

And within the first month of breaking out on my own, I must have read like 3 or 4 books on freelancing/consulting, 10+ blog posts, and podcasts.

True - no one is going to act like Clippy and say "Hey looks like you're starting a freelance career. Have you considered an LLC and liability insurance?"

But - do people not try and learn about what they're getting involved with anymore? Starting a business, even if it's a 1-person sole proprietor consulting firm, is a big task. And yes, davidscolgan is right that you should consider all business aspects beyond your primary skill. But it seems almost irresponsible to say that starting a business is going to be a huge shock. No one is going to tell you, but even a cursory search online will give you a torrent of information on freelancing, consulting, and starting your own business.

If I hadn't put in the initial legwork into studying the consulting landscape there is absolutely no way I'd: (A) still be consulting or (B) make nearly as much money. But the answers are out there. And yeah - get an accountant, it will drastically simplify your finances.

As a freelancer and consultant I find this app to be incredibly useful because it essentially puts all of my client work into one app. I basically run this, my terminal, and Sublime and I've got everything I need that is fast and quickly toggle-able. Thank you for putting out a great product!

A few suggestions, after having used it for quite a few months now:

- I have probably 15-16 apps connected and it would be great to get keyboard shortcuts for them all. They stop at 9, but would be great to extend the top row further for app tab movement.

- The notifications bar is dominated by slack and feels redundant. I would like a "do not disturb" for Station only...so I can turn off the redundant notifications that Station sends me without putting my on do not disturb in Slack.

- Zeplin integration is funky. Other apps will move to the correct page (like a pull request in Github) but Zeplin for some reason doesn't move to the correct page of the mockups I want to see. Would love to have this fixed.

Thanks!

I get that, especially for enterprise/B2B businesses. What kills me is that CTOs get paid less than every other major position, too. How can engineers be "more valuable than money" [1] but are the lowest paid in the executive rung?

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2018/09/06/companies-worry-more-about-a...

> The kids are young and share a big room

How will that scale when they are teenagers? Especially if mixed-sexes, I can foresee this being difficult, which I think is part of the reason my wife and I are looking at separate bedrooms.

I'm genuinely curious - how did you manage 1500 sq ft with two kids? I've seen various outlets that state most people need roughly 450 sq ft, and we currently have 900 sq ft for me and my wife and that feels right, maybe even slightly big. I wanted an 1750-1800 sq ft home and my wife wants closer to 2200-2250. So I'm shocked you felt comfortable with 1500 sq ft and wonder what made the house so nice. Was it layout? Efficient use of wall space?

Is anyone aware of a catalogue that houses all of the various forum domains? For example, if you want to seek fashion advice, probably better to head over to StyleForum instead of /r/malefashionadvice (or HypeBeast for streetwear).

I know someone asked on here recently for investing forums and were pointed to Corner of Berkshire and Fairfax (as well as /r/securityanalysis) but that is indeed better than /r/investing or /r/wallstreetbets which are garbage.