I like hnsearch a lot, but I'd like us to take a second to thank whoever was running SearchYC, which for the past couple years has been practically indispensable in keeping up with this community.

Absolutely. Just make a point of never competing with the $10/hr crowd.

Take a minute and read a few of those cheap bids. Do they inspire confidence? If you were an employer, would you honestly believe that the person who wrote that bid is capable of building the thing you're trying to build? Of course not. They all sound like a bunch of desperate children trying to get away with something. If you want to take work from them, all you need to do is not sound like a desperate child trying to get away with something.

Take 10 minutes and write a good proposal, with a summary of the project, your basic approach to solving it, and what you think it would realistically take to do the job. Quote your full rate, and don't worry even for a second that your bid is ten times higher than the next highest one. You're sending a message that "I can actually pull this off", and the best way to do that is to distance yourself as far as possible from the herd.

If you succeed, the project owner will end up looking at two stacks of bids. One stack will have 150 flaky looking quotes to do the whole project for $300, none of which stand out as inspiring much confidence. The other stack will have a single well written proposal, quoting a bit more than he'd expected to pay, but clearly from a guy who has done this before and can do it again.

His choice is now: Sift through that rubbish pile and hope I get lucky, or go with the expensive guy.

That's a pretty good place to be.

It has hellbanning, and, apart from, obviously, pg, I don't know a single person who thinks it's a good idea. Since I have showdead on I've seen numerous comments by people who have been hellbanned for years and still don't realise. The really horrible thing is, most of their comments are perfectly legit - sometimes all of their comments.

I remember reading a science fiction story where the punishment for certain crimes was that you got a special tag which meant that everyone would simply ignore you and refuse to acknowledge your existence, for a year. You became "invisible". Other "invisible" people also had to ignore you, iirc, otherwise their sentence would be extended. It was painted quite vividly as an extremely cruel form of punishment.

Personally, I find it extremely distasteful, for the sake of not dealing with people complaining about being banned, to simply make them invisible.

> Karim, a member of an FBI-related website, was willing to give us money and inside info in order to destroy his opponents in the whitehat world.

It is worth highlighting that there is a whole ecosystem of bottom feeders in the world of government contracted 'whitehat hackers' & 'consultants'. They know as much about security as one can pick from 'Hacking Exposed IV' kind of book from your local book store. Some of them are just fakes who just have the right connection within the agencies (many are just ex-employees, friends of friends, college buddies and cousins). Then they need to know how to navigate the red tape of proposals and bids. So this all amounts to a lot of waste, stupidity (at best) and down-right maliciousness (at worst). We saw some of this with HBGary and this Karim guy, and this is just the tip of the iceberg.

If you have the right connections and know how to handle the red-tape (you might have to hire a full-time professional for it), you can make quite a bit of money bullshitting the govt and selling them crap.

I think that perhaps you're not grokking Groupon, the customers of Groupon have never been the bargain hunters, they've always been the merchants. The bargain hunters are the product Groupon sells.

You can then look at the model and realize Groupon have been screwing their own customers.

It's a shame as I think the core concept of the business is pretty sound in my book, but I was astounded when I found out the Groupon were taking 50-100% of deals. Just seemed like short term gain for long term loss. I thought that at least they'd be making crazy profits, but it turns out they're making a loss! That was what truly astonished me. They don't even have any physical good, they're selling other people's products for free and they're making a loss. Jeezus, what a royal screwup.

The discussion of the model here this last day has explained how/why they dug themselves into this terrible hole.

If, and tbh it's still an if, groupon unravels, it'll be quite a few years before this model will surface again. Which is a shame as done in moderation it seems a sound one to me and a win for all involved.

Will you move the search box to the top right hand corner? Perhaps just below my username?

I could write a book on my experience going from $12/hr to $85/hr on odesk. It's been quite an experience.

I get plenty of invitations for projects at a rate slightly above $60/hr. I haven't bid on a project in many months, and I even hid my profile for a while when things got too busy at my day job.

There are a few things you need to do to be successful on odesk. I've never done a project on another site, so I don't know if these tips translate, but some of them should.

1) Get some feedback as soon as possible. Find a small project to get your feet wet and bid a low rate to get the job.

2) Answer requests from the prospective client as soon as possible.

3) Use your best grammar. I find it helps me to speak to the prospective client on the phone. YMMV.

4) When you apply to a project, read the project and ask questions. Don't just make some generic cover letter and spam the clients.

5) When you apply to the project, if you are particularly interested in the project, have past experience with the project, or have some interesting piece of information to share with the client, make that clear. It helps you stand out.

6) Take the English test on odesk and do well on it.

7) Fill out your profile. Put relevant projects (even those you didn't do on odesk) in your portfolio. Provide links to your work.

8) Do good work. Make your clients happy. Get good feedback.

9) Remember that price is a signal. Many US clients will assume that you must be good to charge such a high rate.

I used to post on HN as briancooley, but I added one too many zeros to my noproc setting and put myself on about a 694-day hiatus instead of a 69.4-day hiatus. oops Can't say that I miss posting much, but I thought I would offer some suggestions. At least for mobile development, the market seems crazy to me.