rnprince

7 ms·

1.
by rnprince 9y ago
I wish I had this advice sooner. The new part for me here, beyond merely keeping a paper trail, is to make sure that everyone knows about your consistently kept paper trail, so that it wards off bad behavior before it starts.
2.
by rnprince 9y ago
I've been told that opportunities are easier to spot in areas where you don't spend a lot of time. I'm guessing that this is because you haven't already accepted the status quo in those areas, and because people with you
3.
by rnprince 9y ago
Yes, it does. I missed that. :-)
4.
by rnprince 9y ago
Edit: there's a correction on this in the child comments. The math on this is misleading. $10k invested for 30 years to become $1M implies an interest rate of 16.6%. Even as a nominal interest rate in the US, that would be an extremely
5.
by rnprince 9y ago
Yeah, I've been intrigued by this cognitive dissonance for a while. Are we going to visit, or would contaminating the planet be a disaster for science and our understanding of the nature of life?
6.
by rnprince 9y ago
Yes, like MS, type 1 diabetes is considered to be an autoimmune disease. It's surprising to me as someone who hasn't studied medicine how related to each other autoimmune issues seem to be. Rheumatoid arthritis and latitude is ano
7.
by rnprince 9y ago
This reminds me of autoimmune disease like MS. They are more common in higher latitudes (where there happens to be less sunlight), and there is a connection to low Vitamin D that isn't understood. While attempting to understand the lin
8.
by rnprince 9y ago
But could we please make "Software Artist" happen?
9.
by rnprince 9y ago
Very cool interview, but I'm struggling to understand it. Consider tweaking the acoustics of your recording space to reduce reverb.
10.
by rnprince 9y ago
Agreed about the confusion and that this is cool.
11.
by rnprince 9y ago
I'm not really sure about this metaphor, but I love what Schoenberg had to say in Harmonielehre about choosing voice registers in the parts you write. It never occurred to me how much art went into something seemingly subtle until I re
12.
by rnprince 9y ago
I once joined a successful, for-profit, private company, because I liked its mission, despite being offered lower compensation and benefits than I could have accepted elsewhere. This was very naive of me, and didn't turn out how I had
13.
by rnprince 9y ago
It depends on how they enforce it. One of my former employers would pay out unused vacation days under vaguely defined terms of being in good standing with the company, which I understood to mean that you have to give them the full notice p
14.
by rnprince 9y ago
Thanks! This is good, practical advice.
15.
by rnprince 9y ago
Three months is aggressive and not standard. This is a red flag in my book. To me it means that very ugly situations come up in the company, and they feel the need to lessen your ability to respond appropriately to them. There is no good re
16.
by rnprince 9y ago
Could you explain why you think six months is good? Is the goal to get investors within that six months? Or revenue?
17.
by rnprince 9y ago
That is not a lot of runway. What happened to make it work for you? Did you get investors or revenue within those three months?
18.
by rnprince 9y ago
Hey everyone, thank you for these replies! All of them were helpful. I came up with these takeaways: - Frame your services as creating solutions to business problems, rather than trying to sell developer skills. This explains the value in t
19.
by rnprince 9y ago
Hey, thanks for your reply. Would you say that this low bar means that for an actually good contractor, there's a lot of opportunity for word-of-mouth references, repeat business relationships, or high hourly rates?
20.
Ask HN: How will I know when I'm ready for contract work?
14 points by rnprince 9y ago|17 comments
21.
by rnprince 9y ago
Some languages don't have first-class functions that you would pass into a map or reduce function, which makes writing loops unavoidable. But even if you do use map/reduce all the time instead of loops, you're just saying the
22.
by rnprince 9y ago
Reminds me of undergrad class registration, when everything satisfying a general education requirement would fill up and the server would crash the instant it started. I didn't choose to take History and Religion of Ancient Israel, but
23.
by rnprince 9y ago
By the time you've memorized all the cases where a binary tree does and doesn't make sense, you might as well have just learned how they work.
24.
by rnprince 9y ago
I mean, I keep writing for-loops even though I've written many of them before.
25.
by rnprince 9y ago
Dijkstra spent a lot of his research effort on ways to prove that programs are correct. "Today a usual technique is to make a program and then to test it. But: program testing can be a very effective way to show the presence of bugs, b
26.
by rnprince 9y ago
"One moral of the above story is, of course, that we must be very careful when we give advice to younger people: sometimes they follow it!" Cute line.
27.
by rnprince 9y ago
I wondered for a moment if this could incentive developers to introduce bugs for their friends to "find," but then I remembered that hackers are already incentivized a lot more to sneak vulnerabilities into FOSS.
28.
by rnprince 9y ago
As a musician I've wondered what generating actually good music would mean. Music is such a cultural experience, tied in with a sense of being part of a social group, that I don't think we would ever let computers completely repla
29.
by rnprince 9y ago
Thanks for writing this. I got a lot out of reading it.
30.
by rnprince 9y ago
Could you elaborate on defining the intellectual property in your contracts? I've had questions about how to do this correctly recently while negotiating one of my first independent contractor agreements.

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