dood

There are a lot of cities in the world where you could wander around with "developer for hire" written on your T-shirt and get job offers.

TIL https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biopsychosocial_model thanks.

Check out jobserve.com, 369 developer contracts paying => £500/day posted in the last 7 days, 11 of which paying => £800/day

> The average developer salary in Germany isn't that much different from the average in the US as a whole.

I think you'd be surprised. Can't find a good source now, but last time I checked US average is roughly double Germany & UK.

> The ridiculously low rates programmers get in the financial industry in London

The finance industry in London is one of the few markets outside US that are comparable with US in salary, particularly contractors - £800/day is not uncommon for finance devs.

Ironic that the author didn't just get a decent washer-dryer. They exist, I own one, it wasn't expensive.

Where do your potential customers hang out?

So it's a tool which other SaaS' can embed so their users can pay to get video-chat assistance from freelancers?

I enjoyed the post, but think I would've gotten more out of it if the title was more congruent with the content. I was expecting a lament or postmortem (which hooked me in), but the story was more like an exultation. Congrats on your success, I hope your upcoming book will help more people fruitfully pursue their dreams.

Interesting read but the title is unnecessarily clickbaity since the conclusion is, "If you are looking for security or reassurance, I do not recommend this line of work" - which everybody knew already. In fact, contrary to the title, he does recommend it so long as you aren't looking for security and reassurance.

Without getting into the old and terribly complicated film vs digital argument, I think it's widely agreed that 35mm and 4k are at least in the same ballpark of resolution, and that IMAX exceeds 4k, so I maintain that shooting 4k does not present any new issues around closeups or quick cuts.

4k is less resolution than 35mm film, which was used very successfully for most of the history of cinema. Chris Nolan shot Interstellar & his Batman films on 70mm, which exceeds 8k resolution.

So I think you're quite wrong about 4k being "too much resolution for closeups" or being "incompatible with... shorter shot lengths".

What you describe is the most natural, effortless way to use Slack. Conversely the design makes it very cumbersome to compose thoughtful, well-formatted responses. And the more people use the former style, the less value the latter has. So users tend toward spewing out crap rather than having considered discussion, because Slack's system design strongly encourages it.

It takes so much cultural pressure, moaning and nagging to use Slack in a high signal-to-noise manner that I'm quite bearish on it's long-term prospects, and applaud OP's effort at building a system designed more for collaboration than shitposting.

It is true that Slack allows multi-line posts and discrete conversations, but both go totally against the grain of the system design.

Expecting people to use Slack in a way it wasn't designed for can only result in failure or constant friction.

You don't have to make a big decision right away, but those are certainly signals that the decision may be made for you in the next few months if you are unlucky.

I'd certainly start the usual job-hunting process: updating my CV, mentioning to friends that I may be open to a new position, breaking out the ol' whiteboard for algorithm interview practice, going to meetups etc.

Also, prepare yourself for being laid-off, financially and mentally. It sucks, but it's the reality of startup life.

Don't worry about questioning the founders - it's their job to be upbeat and optimistic to get the best result for their startup, but it's your responsibility to look after your career. But that doesn't necessarily mean giving up the day job - hope for the best, prepare for the worst.

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14527124

In the early days, Delicious and Reddit were often talked about as being in the "social bookmarking" space since they both centered around sharing links with other people. Remember Reddit didn't even have comments for a long time! The distinction was in Delicious you tagged links, in Reddit you voted on links. I visited both regularly to get my social link fix.

I'm sure from your POV Reddit has always been an entirely different beast, but (and at the risk of teaching my grandmother how to suck eggs) as an early user of both I saw them as have a lot of similarity, both forging a similar and exciting new future of people collectively making the web more discoverable.

I actually tried to build a product which attempted to combine the best of both: a tool for communities to organize links. I still think there is room for something like that, but countless people have tried and none have taken off, so it seem it is way harder to get something like that to catch on than it seemed in those heady days of web 2.0.

Although it is understandable how someone could make this mistake, mandating redundant reporting is a very bad sign in a startup. It shows the manager does not comprehend the difference between a giant company where such large overheads are necessary, and a tiny startup where nimbleness and intimacy and the very thing that gives the company a chance to succeed.

This will be very familiar to readers of The Systems Bible [1], which expounds in great depth about the above problems and potential mitigation strategies.

The basic takeaway is that these behaviours and forces are natural, intrinsic and inevitable; that a wise systems-manager will seek to carefully manage them rather than oppose or decry them.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systemantics

I'm interested in getting this, but am concerned that it is much less battle-tested than PRK. I'm currently leaning toward PRK since it is so tried-and-tested.

Amazon always reinvests most of their profits into growth, so the PE ratio is somewhat irrelevant, or at best misleading.

Edit on downvotes: this is not a controversial opinion, see this respected analysis from 2014: http://ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2014/9/4/why-amazon-has-n...

Sorry my comment was unclear, I mostly agree with you. In a negotiation the only thing that matters is how much the company values your labour, and how much of that value you can capture. Figuring this out is the hard part.

As developers we are highly in demand right now so don't have to be overly clever in negotiation.

I use a simple and foolproof strategy when asked for my current or expected compensation: "sorry I'm not willing to disclose my current comp, but I am looking for around X", where X is the amount you would need if there are no other bonuses or perks.

Then they can talk you down from there if they want to proceed, you have anchored the conversation appropriately, and demonstrated you are negotiating from a position of strength, not weakness - which is the key to not getting pushed around.

If they push on current comp just stand firm and politely refuse - you likely don't want to work anywhere that won't talk to you if you refuse to disclose your current comp, and there are plenty of other options besides. Save your time and energy for good companies willing to negotiate in good faith, there are lots around.

The only hard part is determining what your labour is really worth - this can take a fair bit of effort, research and soul-searching, but is an absolutely essential prerequisite to negotiation.

I haven't seen any evidence, even anecdotal, that you can _damage_ yourself from too much meditation, in a way analogous to an elite athlete.

Bad technique can lead to problems like depersonalization, and people can get something like an addiction to jhanas - but as far as I know elite meditators simply get more and more "enlightened". In some cases this may lead them to join a monastery or become a hermit, but whether this is problematic depends on your point of view.

Agreed, the claimed direct correlation between strength of enforcement and strength of substance is reaching too far.

But the basic idea that there exist powerful market-forces which incentivize the production and supply of increasingly strong products when a good is prohibited seems quite logical and supported by the evidence cited in the post.

The point is that prohibition increases the mean or median strength, not the maximum available.

One argument I've heard in favour of legalizing cannabis that it would increase the supply of weaker strains, reducing the potential harm to users.

IIRC Lynch did not have final cut on Dune, and was so bitter about it he never made a film he wasn't contractually allowed to edit himself again. If you look at the deleted scenes, they show Lynch was going for a very different tone to the finished product.

Being around people who know things I don't.

My first job I was the only developer (until I got to hire a junior), and learned a lot by trial and error.

But I quickly made a massive leap forward when I moved to a team of a dozen developers, all of whom had knowledge, skills, experiences or ideas I could learn from.

I managed to fix my night-owl schedule - but it took me years.

It was similar to giving up smoking, the first couple of weeks are very easy to relapse, after that it slowly gets better - but you are always at risk of slipping back into bad habits if you aren't careful. I slipped many times, but each time learned some lessons and built some good habits.

It took a lot of time and effort - obeying the alarm, avoiding computers at night, giving up caffeine, etc. etc. - but I think it was worth it to feel awake and alert all day instead of being an exhausted grumpy zombie out of sync with the rest of the world.

With a headline like this I just go straight to the comments, vast majority of the time the signal-to-ratio is far better.

"A change is as good as a rest"