dfraser992

There is no way to DM on HN, as far as I am aware. I would be interested in talking - I have some Ml/NLP based ideas and some free time... See my profile info for my website/email

Interesting idea.... I have been idly working on an web crawler / indexing / organizing system that uses NLP etc to sort of solve the OP's problem(s) - if you don't mind, could you send me an email about your needs? See my HN account for contact info.

I have been collecting bookmarks for some time now as well - all unsorted... Doing it manually would be a nightmare so I have been thinking about making a SaaS - webcrawler + AI (NLP + clustering)

It would at least accomplish a preliminary sort/grouping; manual cleanup or fine tuning would always be needed, I think, but at least the bulk of the work could be done in an automated fashion to give the user a head start.

Would anyone else want such a SaaS? I thought about how to charge for it, but ideally it is a one-time operation, so charging anything more than $1 to $5 doesn't seem reasonable. And the privacy issues ... bunch of practical problems, so I may just write some OSS.

Given you already have a few years of experience which is a bit more important than just a degree (IMO), I would not worry so much. "Computing" is not "IT support" (no one gets a degree in that) and those are good unis you mention, so why in the world would they be offering a silly degree in "IT support"? I have never heard of such a thing actually.

If the company (manager / HR people) you are interviewing with actually think like what you worry about, you do not want to be working there because that is a sign of a bad company that knows nothing of IT or respects developers. We are not mere plumbers (I am from the US and the UK attitude towards developers has been a bit annoying over the years, but it does seem to be changing). Although it'd be nice to be paid as much as plumbers...

My M.Sc. from Edinburgh was in "Informatics" because that is what they call Computer Science, and my M.Sc from UEA was in "Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining" aka AI/Machine Learning. I would assume you will have to do a final-year project, so a line in your CV describing that ought to be enough to show you are a developer and not a help desk jockey. (along with your previous work experience)

But I wouldn't call it "Computer Science" though - if some jobsworth actually decides to validate the contents of your CV (they usually don't and you do have work experience), the renaming of the degree might influence their opinion of you etc... e.g. "did they actually go to ICL?"

Between this and FTX, I am really starting to think the death penalty ought to be applicable for financial crimes beyond a certain magnitude. The intangible cost to society / peoples' lives is incalculable, but given the fundamental hypocrisy of the West anymore, the only thing that truly matters is money, especially rich people's money and thus grifters and con artists like SBF and Trump are allowed to skate by with a slap on the wrist. 11 years (no way is she serving that) is a slap on the wrist.

Be very explicit, from the beginning, that you do not do fixed price contracts (which is essentially really what clients always want) unless the job is obviously trivial enough to estimate properly - and even then, there is always a chance something might occur.

Make better estimates to account for such unknowns like having to install packages because you're dealing with a codebase someone else developed - be very detailed in these estimates you provide as well and provide not a single number but a range.

If they still grumble about the cost, then maybe offer to reduce the cost of trivial work like setting up the necessary environment by 1/3 or something (only if the client is a decent one and just needs a bit of education...)

Provide good info about the reasons for extra time - you're trying to get the client to ultimately trust you, that you know what you're doing, and are focused on trying to not spend as much of their money as you'd like. So keep them in the loop as much as possible w/o being annoying about what is going on. A daily or weekly update? A heads-up before diving into something time consuming? E.g. if the code you're dealing with is garbage, explain that in a professional way (and clearly, but not too much detail) so they understand the issue (to the extent they need to understand it)

So basically it's a process of educating the client, over time or however efficiently enough, about the true nature of IT work. Metaphorically, you're a plumber or a general contractor, or a carpenter, not a factory worker. Everyone knows that sort of work always involves more time than expected sometimes. If they still complain, then they're a bad client and let them go find someone on Upwork instead.

Why hasn't anyone mentioned IR35?????

I am in the UK - it seems the company you are working for is in violation of the IR35 regulations (but I'm not entirely sure of what nuances there are given you are in another country). i.e. you are a contractor, but are being treated as a full time employee with none of the benefits of such. e.g. they 'should' be paying the government for National Insurance etc.

I have been contracting for 10+ years so know something of IR35 but have always made sure the contracts I sign are quite clear about me not being an employee etc - no long term contracts etc. So I'm not an expert here.

If they are violating IR35, which I really think they are, then you have quite a lot of power at your disposal if you can play things right. You can either get them to start respecting you (but it doesn't sound like that is the best idea because staying is a __bad idea__) or sue them or just turn them over to HMRC.

In any case, you should talk to a solicitor - get everything you can documented and well organized, then any good employment lawyer can tell you the cost/benefits of turning them over to HMRC / the authorities. Google IR35 and employment law / solicitors ... pick one that has a well designed website. Talking to them ought to be free for the first 1/2 hour (I would think) or you should be able to send an email with a good summary of the situation w/o incurring any costs.

An upvote for you (if I could). I'm American but have lived in the UK for near 20 years. My great-whatever grandfather signed the Declaration of Independence so I'm hardly a royalist... So WTF am I doing living in the UK??? (the NHS etc...)

My general sense is that of respect for the Queen as a symbol. She did it right and wasn't a useless numpty like ... oh... all of the rest of them. Primarily nothing but B list celebrities. William and Kate seem fine enough, Harry and Meghan are .. irrelevant except to the nonces who have no actual lives, and let's not discuss Andrew...

Hopefully Charles will use the "soft power" he supposedly has to corral the professional sociopaths destroying this country (e.g. wind and solar power, given his supposed environmental leanings) but I don't know.... it very well may be all downhill from now. England (and by extension all of the UK) is destined to become a failed state.

Which is why I am looking hard at moving to Scotland (soon to be independent!) or even the EU to get the F out of here ASAP. It really is a transitional point.

I might have such a thing, though it has been over a decade since I did any webdev; not sure I still have the code. I was doing the backend for a project while the frontend work was being done by a guy in SF (I was in London). So remote working, all those issues, etc.

He kept delaying on giving me code until the client (and I) got upset enough. The code he gave me was garbage despite his claims of really knowing Javascript (very good interviewer...). It was horribly slow, unfinished and I spent two weeks trying to comprehend it so I could make a decision as to throw it all out or patch it.

One of the biggest problems turned out to be a function or something (details are fuzzy) that was generating a object that corresponded to the data/information the user would see in the UI. His code was not tracking whether a specific object had already been generated (i.e. no need to generate a new copy if the data was already been shown) so in the end, far too many copies of these little objects were being created - and kept around.

So it was a memory leak, but the memory wasn't getting lost, just forgotten about (if that makes sense). Enough time and the browser would get really slow, etc. Thank god for infinite RAM! (not)

Fortunately I learned my trade fixing problems with Borland's heap management (don't ask me for any details, that was 30 years ago) so I had the leet skills and patience to track down every last byte of RAM... This was before any fancy tools from Chrome were available, AFAI remember.

Never used Valgrind or know what the current state of the art is in regard to web dev / Javascript, but keeping track of RAM usage in Javascript (or Python or ...) is always a necessary task to pay attention to.

Pattern recognition

I print the webpage to a PDF and store it that way, then fix up the metadata as I see fit. And that is a good feature - make a request on the Github repo and see if the lead developer responds.