
HN statistics - nhoss2
http://labs.im/hnstat
======
csomar
Your labs.im pitch is probably going to send you the worst freelance jobs
you'll ever have. Nobody gives a shit about your situation, and your
University tuition fees. Actually, this signals a red flag for serious
clients: You might drop their project as soon as you get some financing.

Promote yourself as a young, intelligent and enthusiast developer with coding
and design skills. Price your hourly rate at $80-100/hour; and get your
tuition paid in the next couple weeks.

Edit: Quite a discussion here. I'd like to add that an important part of doing
business is _trust_. Clients are going to throw lots of money that's going to
evaporate on HTML and JavaScript code. They want to be sure that you are the
guy who is going to give them the right result.

Tip: Make a decent lab page. Look at design agencies in sortfolio and copy
them (not their design, their strategy). Build a couple more projects, and
open source them on Github. Send emails to design agencies, and try to build a
network.

Finally, decide if you want to do this for a living or concentrate on EE. The
overhead to get a single project is the same to get a constant stream of
projects.

~~~
devcpp
$80-100/hour? Is this feasible?

~~~
breckinloggins
Yes. Yes yes yes!

Did I mention "Yes"?

Look, I used to be you. And lately I've been missing me so I thought it would
be fun to sit down with me and advise me on what I didn't have the guts to do
years ago.

You're very worth it. Your site alone shows a combination of the following:

\- The ability to program something more than just "hello world", a linked
list, or the fibonacci sequence. You'd be surprised how many so-called
computer science "graduates" I've interviewed who can barely do that, and if
so, ONLY that. Don't underestimate the ability to actually program. Contrary
to the impression you might get from Hacker News and Proggit, where it seems
like everyone and his mayor is learning to code, MOST people in this world
can't. There are great people in this world who don't or can't program. They
may be smart, but they aren't programmers.

\- Experience with modern Javascript, web apps, HTML5 (whatever THAT is), and
all the deployment logistics that go along with those things. There are great
programmers in this world who can write compilers but who never really groked
the web or how to put stuff on it, let alone cool dynamic stuff that works.
They may be programmers, but they aren't developers.

\- You seem to be able to make it all LOOK good. This is something I still
struggle with and, even if all you did was copy something from somewhere else,
your site still shows that you care about aesthetics. In this brave new world
where geeky toys (read: programs) have become seen in the mainstream as actual
"products" (thanks, Apple), people - even geeks - are starting to demand more
from their software. They demand that it be friendly, intuitive, and look
nice. This is a great advance in our industry. It finally denies us all the
permission we've been giving ourselves to produce crappy-looking and crappy-
acting software and then hide behind how hard it was to get it working at all.
There are great developers in this world who grok the web and apps and all
that and still for the life of them can't make something that looks nice. They
may be developers, but they aren't designers.

\- Your site and HN submission show an aptitude for - or at the least more
than a passing awareness of - the necessity, power, and effectiveness of
marketing. There are great programmers, developers, and designers in this
world whose creations never see the light of day. They may be all those
things, but they aren't marketers.

So go back again and take stock of your marketable inventory. You seem to be
a:

\- Smart

\- Programmer

\- Who likes to develop "products" as well as cool programs

\- Knowing it's important that they look as good as they work

\- And realizes that none of it matters unless people know about it

And you don't think you're worth a measly $80-$100/hour?

You know what that is? It's our traditional economic and academic systems
infesting your mind with some of its most anachronistic and worthless beliefs.
In days gone by, that piece of paper was a requirement to get anyone to even
LOOK at you. But now?

No.

You're in the right place already at Hacker News. Here we have people who need
good talent. They know it when they see it. They know how much more important
a Github and app portfolio are than a "To all whom these presents come
greeting..." poster on your wall. In short, they aren't pointy-haired bosses.
And you don't want to work for those anyway.

So do me a favor, me: demand what you're worth, and do it before you begin to
BELIEVE you're not worth it. Because then you won't be.

~~~
true_religion
My thoughts....

He's just a second year student and the only project I've seen is something
that any competent student at my almma matter could produce.

Now look at the marketplace. For $40/hour you can currently get an experienced
developer living anywhere that isn't San Francisco or NYC.

$100/hour is $4000 a week and $16,000 a month. Now certainly someone,
somewhere can command this price but lets not pretend that it is the natural
fit for a student.

If you're willing to pay $16,000 then your rate is comprable to what
Google/Facebook pay their summer interns for 3 months whom I assure you have
just as much skill and passion as you see here.

~~~
bigiain
What're you suggesting you can get for $40/hour?

You might get an "experienced developer" for $40/hr on a fulltime employed
basis where that means "$80k/year". You certainly won't get the same level of
talent on a contract or freelance basis at that rate.

For a freelancer, "$100/hr" is much more likely to mean $2000/week than
$4000/week. Even consultants at the top consulting firms can't (legitimately)
bill 100% of a 40hr week consistently.

I'm inclined to agree with other posters - if this site pitched him as a
dedicated freelance web dev, I'd quite likely consider hiring him at a $100/hr
rate based on the skill demonstrated in the HN Stats site. As a "please buy me
some ramen and help pay my tuition" plea - I'd pass him over completely even
if I needed pretty much exactly what he's demoing. Its all about perceptions
and implications of trust.

~~~
true_religion
I think we're using different definitions for experienced.

Junior developers are still very much more experienced than a student, and
won't be making 80k/year anywhere except DC/NYC/LA.

But I find that salary comparisons quickly go downhill on HN because of the
bubble that we live in here, so I'm just going to let this conversation go.

~~~
csomar
Huh, so you measured his skills by his level of education? Even worse, he's an
EE student; so Web Dev is really not his game.

------
mootothemax
A quick story regarding your frelance work. When I first moved to Poland, I
had the mindset that since I was living in a cheap country, I should price my
freelance work low as well. I'll hasten to add that this was my first attempt
at freelancing, and for a PHP developer with over 10 years of experience, I
was charging between $20 and $30/hour. Absurdly low prices.

Anyway, this was meant to be temporary, and I got a job for a year, before
deciding to return to freelancing. This time, however, I figured that I had
little to lose by attempting to charge _what I wanted to get paid_. I also
switched to charging on a per-day basis.

What happened? In terms of work available, very little - there's lots of work
out there. I found that I was able to spend longer on the initial discussion
phase, as the cost of doing so was minimal compared to my overall day rate,
and it led to happier clients - everyone wins.

My rates have continued to rise ever since, and I'm on the verge of hiring
other programmers to take some of the load off me alone. I could go on and on
about the charge-by-the-day option, and how everyone wins with it: clients
don't worry about whether having a conversation with me will be charged - _of
course it won't!_ \- and it gives me the freedom to create huge amounts of
client satisfaction if I do a ten-minute fix for free.

So, charge good rates, in daily increments, and do so happy in the knowledge
that you're charging a fair rate for valuable skills.

------
andreasklinger
@nhoss2 Slightly offtopic:

Love the honesty on your <http://labs.im/> page. But you might be underselling
yourself. You are saying you are willing to work cheaply because you are young
and a risk.

You are capable of using node.js, you use phantomJS, you seem to have good
product and ux thinking and you are able to use github. Just the last one
alone puts you on the upper 50% of the worldwide freelance market. Not to
speak of the first three things i mentioned.

As somebody living in UK i appreciate your modesty and i wish you all the best
for your jobhunt. Projects like this are genius thing to do, continue until
you find something :)

~~~
DavidChouinard
I agree, this is top-notch work. I would drop the beatup negative attitude,
it's a big turnoff. You could _easily_ get a remote part-time job in the
Valley for 100+$/hour — think of it, that's only 40 hours of work to pay off
your tuition.

~~~
e12e
Really? Easily? I've yet to see anyone willing to hire someone to do off site
work with a US company, in the Valley or elsewhere. At least not development
work, or anything in the range of 100 USD/hour.

I've always found that a bit strange, but maybe you know something I don't?

For the record I'm based in Norway, and English is my second, not first
language -- but even if it was just to recommend friends and acquaintances
that are in a similar position as op -- I would really like to hear how you
would suggest going about looking for such work?

~~~
btilly
$100/hour is indeed very doable.

Stop and think. Suppose that you have have a $120k full-time dev. (This is by
no means the top of the dev market.) Once you get through benefits, office
space, HR, etc, at a typical company you cost 2x your salary, so that dev is
costing you $240k/year. If that person works 50 weeks a year, 5 days a week, 6
hours a day (just because a person is present 8 hours does not mean that they
worked 8 hours) the cost of that full-time dev is $160/hour. Day in. Day out.

Contractors avoid many of those costs in return for higher direct pay. And you
only hire that contractor when there is a good fit between what you need and
what that contractor can do. A smart contractor who knows what to ask for is
therefore able to get surprisingly good rates.

And step #1 is knowing what you are worth. Step #2 is knowing how to
negotiate. There are a lot of good books you can pick up on the topic. I
personally picked up _Start With No_ and _Bargaining For Advantage_ a few
years back. A 2 digit investment in materials, and a 2 digit expenditure in
hours has easily been worth over 6 figures to my bank account. I expect it to
have paid off 7 figures before I retire. Can you think of anything else with
an equivalent ROI?

~~~
e12e
This is exactly why I've thought it was so strange so few companies seemed
interested in this kind of collaboration, in practice.

But just a brief look at the August HN hiring thread makes me a little more
hopeful :-)

------
Void_
You're a great designer. You could get a job just as a designer.

Then you know D3. You can sell yourself as a package that can create beautiful
visualizations.

Then you made it to the top of HN. This is no coincidence. You got here on
purpose. You studied previous post and knew exactly what to make that would
interest this crowd.

All that makes you a smart person, way above average. Go charge a lot of
money.

Having said that, you're not too much of a marketer.

------
adam-_-
You should put the hire me call to action further up the page!

~~~
vhf
Yep. You deserve it !

------
suhastech
A bit off topic:

I think I'm pretty much in the same situation as Nafis. I'm majoring in
Electronics and have a passion for computers.

Only difference is, tuition is quite cheap here in India (around $5000 for 4
years). So, small freelancing projects help me sustain.

Though the quality of education here is questionable. One year into college,
all I have learnt is * Stuff as much portions you can during the term * Write
the exact things from the textbook on your exam * Forget or vaguely remember
it in the holidays

That's not really what I hoped for. Hopefully, it gets better over the
years...

~~~
slurgfest
Your education is in your hands. Identify the resources which are available to
you in college for improving your skills. Don't just coast along in your
classes and complain about how they aren't doing a great job, that is normal.
Put in extra time outside of your coursework or you will not have an education
to match your degree. Keep doing it for 4 years and you will have a great
education no matter what kind of backwater you are in.

Also, be sure to pursue internships and if you have opportunities to
network/get connected in areas that relate to your professional specialty,
take them.

Unfortunately this thread shows very clearly that whether you get good grades
or bad, and whether you learn a lot or a little, your actual (even vividly
demonstrated!) capabilities are comparatively much less important than the
emotional tone and images you use to market yourself. So start also to think
about those things.

~~~
suhastech
I'm doing all of that probably more than most of my peers but that makes me
question the core values of a college education.

Low Cost, Connections, Visa stuff are a few reasons I'm still sticking on to
it. All of them are not core to college. I think this is something that needs
to be fixed before people lose faith.

At times, I feel I'm wasting time on coursework (around 9 hours a day) but I
somehow convince myself that I'm not experienced enough to judge.

~~~
slurgfest
It will feel like less of a waste, and be less of a waste, when you are doing
more of the steering and putting in your creative energies rather than
floating along. But it is natural to float along more at the beginning. And if
you don't know what you are doing then it is still better to follow the rails
than to just drift for years.

Please do question what you are told are the 'core values' because they are
probably nothing but marketing. Just let those ideals be questionable and plan
for yourself, it's no use being upset about it.

However, college does provide a specific set of goods, even if they aren't the
purported ones. Here is one way to think about your level of engagement with
your education:

Level 1: They make you go somewhere, decide what to study, then give a basic
schedule and incentives so you will actually do something. Meet a few friendly
people, even if you have little in common. At the end you have social proof
that you have a brain and did not only just smoke pot for years, know a few
things, can conform, are in a certain social class. All you have to do is
reliably show up and work.

Level 2: academic and social context to spark your interests and make it
easier to develop them. You have to find the interesting parts and put in a
little extra work above assignments to cultivate those interests and learn
more. When you leave you'll find this context missing. It gets harder to start
in a new field and not so effortless to meet people.

Level 3: facilities like a good library, labs, subject matter experts actively
engaged in their fields, maybe some smart peers. You can make yourself what
you need to be by directly engaging with the subject matter. Having access to
a good adviser who believes in what you are doing is very helpful. But you
have to know what you need to be and have strong motivation. You don't have to
be a genius in school in order to make yourself a good emulation of one down
the line.

Almost any college makes all of these possible. I think the differences are in
that 'level 2'.

At a relatively bad school, you will not be very encouraged by the context,
you will constantly realize that the coursework is a joke and your peers don't
care, the school may take an active interest in pounding students down into
conformity and just making them slog through. so most will only engage at
level 1 without ever realizing there is more, and many will quit since it
seems pointless. While level 3 types will make themselves excellent using
available tools others do not use, regardless of what the school prescribes.
And won't necessarily be noticed because they are focused on ideas.

At a GREAT school ideas become fashionable and fun; it will do the opposite of
pounding you down into conformity. you will come in with a feeling of esprit
de corps, everyone will push you and encourage you, your workload will terrify
you, you will be actively interested in things you never thought about, you
will develop cutting-edge interests related to what your peers and favorite
teachers are interested in (even if they are just dumb humanities stuff), etc.
And you might come out smelling like a rose. But you are still ultimately
carried along by the current. At level 3, where you are already tightly
focused on subject matter, you may not derive that much more advantage from a
good school, except that you will not have to prove as much.

Really excellent specialized people have to engage at that higher level at
some point, whether they went to a bad community college or a top engineering
school.

With this "level 3" concept I am not talking about HN's 1% A-player software
architect rockstars - who often enough are just guys with industry experience
and connections and nice looking blogs and interests in new tools. I am
talking about the few people you will meet in your entire life who are so good
they define a field, like Einstein or John Carmack or something. Those people
get there by being totally focused on subject matter and efficiently improving
their abilities and being absolutely dedicated.

Even if you choose something smaller, if you know what you want and work
toward it single-mindedly out of your own drive then you will get a real
education. And otherwise you will get a sort of crap education.

------
dkroy
If you want your d3 graphs to work in IE8 you might want to use
<https://github.com/shawnbot/aight>

------
Sodaware
Why is activity so much lower on a Friday? Is it because everyone has lots of
work to catch up on and no time for HN, or is it because people are leaving
work earlier on a Friday?

------
yitchelle
Hey there, Great showcase of your skills. It shows great UX, presentation,
some fu with git and getting stuff out in the wild. Shows some great
initiatives!

I would create a CV on <http://labs.im> rather than a text story about your
situation. You should use your knowledge to create a kickass CV page.

I agree the other comments that you are going to be peppered with low paying
freelance offers, you might as well register on odesk.com or similar. But I
believe that your software skills are much better than that.

By the way, Some of the cities (Brisbane, Sydney & Melbourne) in Australia
have a thriving startup scene, you should hit them up.

------
cvursache
A guy with nice skills like you shouldn't have '<div id="sorrow">' in his
source code. Although it is funny.

------
dkroy
I hope you get the money you need to continue your education, you are very
talented.

------
zanny
Just a bug I found: your svg "data_pointer" only points "straight" to the
topmost listed week on the page, and if you select any other option, it points
to the bottom of the div element of the week. Reading that, you might want to
try using the <date> tag instead of divs there, just to make it more html5-ey
:P

It looks like it falls here:

    
    
      offset: $(this).offset().top - $('svg#data_pointer').offset().top + 18
    

I don't know exactly _why_ the offsets are off for all except the topmost
element of the list, but they seem to be off. I don't use firebug much so I
don't know how to live edit the code to figure out the problem, but I just
wanted to let you know!

Note: I am in a vbox of Arch running Firefox Aurora 16, so I also don't know
if it is a browser bug.

------
zevyoura
Very nice, but missing one thing that I think would be more meaningful:
averages across weeks.

------
yread
What is this for? Or is it just a cool way to try new technologies without any
real purpose?

EDIT: I didn't mean it in a bad way. Trying new stuff is a perfectly fine
reason for doing things and this looks quite beautiful. I was just looking for
an answer like "this helps you see whether more karma is given on weekdays or
weekends". Statistics and visualization should answer meaningful questions, I
think.

~~~
danso
Even if it is just a way to try new technologies...it's a _huge mistake_ to
think that aggregation/visualization/analysis, even at this relatively simple
level, is "without any real purpose." Such big picture views can be as
valuable as the datapoints used to compose them.

------
Xcelerate
This confirms my suspicion that the best time to post the articles I find is
on Monday.

~~~
e12e
Oh, no! You're feeding the bias! ;-)

------
alpb
I'm wondering if you could ever discover daily commenting user count or even
maybe monthly active user count somehow and share with us. That would be
awesome.

------
mqzaidi
Now I know why my post on Sunday totally tanked without generating any karma.
I should be posting on Tuesdays/Fridays instead :).

------
adelivet
What could have been interesting is to know when to post on HN to maximize the
chance to be in the top 10 or some insights.

~~~
duck
I think this is what you're looking for: <http://hnpickup.appspot.com/>

------
nwienert
Would be cool to see it index further back.... I'd love to see how my best
ranked post compares to others :)

------
sravfeyn
I am curious where is the data behind these tables being stored inside DOM?

~~~
mrjd
Looks like it's being pulled from separate JSON files.

