jayshahtx

This is true, but in a lot of instances ignoring variable dependence still produces meaningful results. For example, Naive Bayes on text classification usually performs really well even though words occurrences are dependent on each other. From my experience, if you are attempting to classify on a large number of observations (E.g. a large number of words), the algorithm performs well.

It's nice to see this make the headlines, I was at Microsoft M&A group in 2012 when the acquisition became public. Satya has received a lot of praise for the direction Microsoft has been going in, but I still feel that some of the groundwork was laid by Steve. PPI is a good example with the acquisition becoming public in summer of 2012.

When most people today talk about Steve, they often make it sound like he was aloof to the needs of the industry, the fact that Microsoft needed to be re-organized, etc. I don't feel like he didn't know these things, but more-so that it took a change of leadership to rally the company with different goals. [edited to add more commentary]

I worked for a very early stage startup that ended up getting press from WSJ, TechCrunch, etc but I had no visibility into the process. Can someone who has received similar press comment on how they managed it? Is it similar to OP's article or did you have connections?

I agree with you, but when we are discussing "price", we are not discussing it as a function of profile. We are discussing it as a function of raw skill. If two people (one experienced and one in-experienced) were asked for a proposal on the same specs, the experienced one would demand a much higher rate, even if the final output would be the exact same. Using the word "underpriced" from the lens of competency makes sense. Your ability to gain trust/respect from a client? Different story..

> pass on the cheap, low-value projects. Hold out for the clients that have budgets and value your time. Every second you spend with clients that don’t have money and don’t value your time is another second you have wasted.

I just finished my first 8 months of consulting work and while this is true, it is so difficult to actualize. When we had zero projects, I would take any meetings I could get. A part of me would hope that during the meeting, the client would realize where I could add value and increase their willingness to pay. In reality, however, it was the client who tried to push down our rate time after time. A hard lesson for a novice, but I lost hundreds of hours to clients that I knew, deep down, didn't have the budget.

With that being said, this is dangerous advice to internalize pre-maturely. Without underpricing yourself in the beginning, it's difficult to derive self-worth (IE: confidence) and increase your rate later on. And the last thing you want is an early freelancer to turn down work because they think they are worth more.

TLDR; Underpaid work might just be a rite of passage in freelancing. It was for me.

This is an excellent article - many of my mentors have guided me not to pursue funding for as long as possible, until I'm cash flow positive, etc and its great to see a discussion on HN reinforcing this sentiment. In a day and age when so much can be accomplished with just a laptop (git push heroku master), I am surprised bootstrapping is not a bigger topic of conversation.

This reminds me of a study I did on CEOs who came to speak to my university. I found that investing in a company if their CEO was visiting college campuses averaged an annual return of ~20%. The logic was that CEOs of poor performing companies didn't have time to visit schools.

For a disclaimer, the portfolio was also more volatile than most benchmark indexes, so looking at the Sharpe ratio in both instances (mine and OP's) is important.

Hey Caser,

Very interested in applying - are you still accepting applications? I saw the first trip starts this month.