skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In the handful of cases where the company was OK with my non-answer about salary, and I went on to get all the way to a job offer, the salary ended up being entirely miscalibrated to a candidate of my skill and experience, and the overall interview process (which usually included some technical screens, programming tests, take-home tests, and long on-site technical interviews) was a massive waste of my time, not to mention extremely stressful.

Places where I experienced this gross miscalibration: a large U.S. food retailer's digital analytics team; a small pharmaceutical research software company; a 25-year-old multinational scientific computing and supercomputing consulting firm; and an FFRDC research lab attached to a university.

In one of these places they even went on at length about how much the hiring manager liked me, how I fit all the skills they were seeking, and many team members remarked that I would "mesh instantly" with the team, and so forth. I had walked away from those interviews knowing that I had done a good job and feeling very confident.

Then they made a job offer than was around 75% of what I had been making before in a similar job in a similar cost of living area, and the new job's other benefits were far worse.

When I told them what I was making before, they just said, "it just looks like there's a bit of a gap here that we are unable to make up, but we think you'll be very happy on this team so we hope you'll consider our offer despite that." The people interviewing me in that company had even gone on at length about how successful their business unit had been recently, signing a new important contract, and how their biggest challenge was recruiting good people and staffing up to support some projects that had important deadlines looming towards the end of 2016.

I still continue to avoid sharing salary info, because I'm not convinced that sharing it would be better.

But I think what you might not be accounting for is that almost every single candidate in the tech world does share salary, freely and openly, from the very first minute they are asked, without even realizing it might have any side effects.

A lot of corporate recruiters are conditioned to expect this, and the minute someone fails to share salary, they flag them as "not a dope, can't hire them cheaply" and they just move on. Constraint number one, above any and all talent requirements, is that they must be cheap to hire ... for a lot of firms.
> Your ancestors came here for the same reason as him, and with far less scrutiny, same as mine, and were provided many benefits not recieved today, including land grants.

There has been a dramatic change in economic and social climate in the Americas. Our vague "ancestors" entered Canada and the US in times where it might not have been so magnificent to immigrate, and as such they were presented with incentives to immigrate and contribute to a growing economy. Never mind that some of our ancestors came in as refugees fleeing war and communism.

Today, both Canada and the US have the right to protect their national interests and prioritize the development of their own citizens above the interests of foreign nationals. All countries do this, even those perceived as the most accepting.
To use your phrasing, literally millions of Americans don't even meet the minimum quality bar to even qualify for a TN/H1B if they were to do it from scratch.

Maybe Americans will be well served to understand that the current visa regime is severely dysfunctional, and that it serves to boost egos of more incompetent and uneducated Trump-ians, and less the interests of US in obtaining talent and even less in giving brilliant minds all over the world an equal playing field.
> $@ obeys all the same rules as all other variables.

That's hardy the case. Most other variables do not represent the positional parameters, and don't have the logic of "$@" which effectively produces "$1" "$2" "$3" ...
Just adding not all Googlers make that much. I have 7 years in industry, L4, and make 117 base with 40k of stock a year in San Francisco (was 30k at grant time). If you can convince Google you're worth more they will pay it but not all Googlers are making crazy cash (btw wish I was in Seattle given CoL difference).
Ex Amazonian but I was an SDE1 ~1 year of experience before joining. I worked in Seattle

Salary: $100k
Bonus: $25k
Stock: I forget but it was not much
Laziness is a virtue
You mentioned previously YC is after bio-tech startups. What traits would a bio-tech team need for YC consideration? And, what is an ideal stage for a bio-tech crew (long-term vision) to raise capital?

Thanks!
Victor
A company does not have to give reason to fire in an at-will state. If they don't say 'we fired you because you were discussing pay', then there is no means to prove that was the case.
But if it is actually an exponential than the upswing is aberrational.
To be fair, soft. eng. salaries in canada are much lower as well (even without taking the exchange rate into account).
Yes, people seem sure it only benefits the employer but I have a feeling others benefit from it too. There have been times when I didn't really want my coworkers to know what I made.
Maybe 40-50% outright failing? Much below that and it would feel like we weren't making enough risky bets.

No, it's pretty inaccurate.
Are you taking stock into consideration? When stock is included, my total compensation for 2016 comes to $130K.

Are you still at Amazon? If so, what is your current salary?
AMD behind yet another VR headset
You didn't answer the question. I'll take that as a "no".

My point is that the properties of each paperclip are unique. Trying to make the sort of extrapolations between paperclips that you tend towards (misery poker) is not an exercise that leads to improvement for anyone.
I fully agree freedoms will help.

At least some of the restrictions are going away, and some weren't really enforced in later years (e.g. officially no-one can trade on their own and the so-called "black market" is illegal, but in practice this wasn't enforced because otherwise people wouldn't be able to live their lives at all).

Some degree of "off the record" trade is allowed... one example that comes to mind right now are the unofficial restaurants called "paladares", hosted in private apartments; everyone knows they exist and where they are located, and they don't get closed down by the police.
7500 / 15 = 500. 500 units times $99 is $50K. With that kind of budget (that's everything, not just dev time) you can't hire a top-line developer.
If your most successful founders did go to top schools, why don't you select for that?
This is great news, I didn't know, thank you!
Cringley is not a single journalist, it's a persona, kind of like the Dread Pirate Roberts.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_X._Cringely
They have not become a citizen just because they have a work visa. If they become a citizen, of course they shouldn't be second class. They've been given a visa for a specific purpose, and in the eyes of the law are not "first class citizens".

If your argument is that we should grant citizenship to anyone that wants it: OK, vote for it.
I work in Google SF. 7 years in Industry since I got my CS degree. I'm at L4 and I'm at 117 base plus 40k stock a year (30k at grant time).
People in prison would likely take issue with a lot of things unreasonably, which is likely why they're in prison to begin with.
Slightly off-topic, but I recommend the "Twitter Link Expander" Firefox extension that expands short links to the original URL when reading tweets, so you know where you will be clicking:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/twitter-link-...
Not right now--there are many things that might be interesting for us to do that we have to say no to so that we stay focused. This is one of them.
>Because China has a veto.

Veto power is one of the big design successes of the UN. It guarantees major global powers, the ones you actually want to participate, actually participate and not ignore, or worse, pull-out and delegitimize the UN.
It's only up to $200 but still that's an extra $200 break if you're doing a lot of open source work. I contribute to other projects when I find an issue but I mostly work on my own project (msngr) and it would be pretty awesome to write off some of the time and money I spend on it.

Hell if it expands beyond $200 I could see myself contributing to more open source. Though this could be easily be abused as well.

Maybe I shouldn't be excited. Maybe I should be complaining and wanting a more simple tax code. But it's cool when anyone in the government recognizes open source.
Code for the planet with Sierra Club
My anecdotal evidence ties with yours, to a greater degree. Not specifically generating code to run, but I certainly wrote plenty of self-modifying code when coding games on the C64, although it was never a trick I personally used on the NES - two reasons: by default your code runs from ROM anyhow (so there's just less of a tendency to consider self-mod code in the first place), plus the RAM on the NES is so very limited.
For senior+ engineers this means a first-year signing bonus of more than six figures. Is Amazon really willing to pony up this sort of cash up front?
Do you keep up with any recent academic research? (If so, how? If not, do you wish you did?)
They're shipping out units that cost more than what the kickstarter brought in. Presumably it's coming out of Cringley's pocket.
But it would make it even more incomprehensible for potential and new Twitter users. Twitter already has a big problem with attracting and retaining new users. Creating two types of messages, short ones and long ones, only adds to the confusion. Just be like Facebook (JBLF): one text box fits all. Ditch the 140 char limit, it's 2016.
What's one piece of advice you could give to a recent graduate?
That's a decent compromise design. People already attach images of text to bypass the 140 char limit. It makes sense to "pave the cow paths" that users have found useful.
I have this trouble too.

For me, performance arts, music and theater "activated" that emotional sense. At first, I could not process it all, and I raged. Then, being used to it, I find each emotion clear.

But, others often confuse them! Disregard, or anger being classified with hate, for example. I feel their anger or loathing, but they express hate to me, and it's all frustrating and painful at times. I feel most people aren't emotionally honest, or just not that capable. Maybe it overwhelms them, or they just don't seem to look at it very deeply.

I don't know.

Aside from that disconnect, I have learned to manage empathy. It's a strong thing, and it can drain me as much, sometimes more than the person I'm sharing emotion with.

An upside is doing things like mentoring or coaching kid sports. When the good, powerful emotions happen, they happen big, and I can share that, amplify it...

Those times are very rewarding. People can be so damn beautiful and intoxicating, just as they can be painful and draining.
If you're an executive pulling in over $500k, sure stock should absolutely be compensation and motivation. If you're rank and file and need $120k/yr to even afford to live, have kids, save for retirement, etc. in the area, then no stock should absolutely not be the primary means of compensation.
Thanks. There are plenty of others trying to apply the YC model in other more niche areas (Mach37 comes to mind here in DC), so it's neat seeing the direction you and the team will continue to take.
But the People's Republic of China is already a member, so surely the membership of Chinese Taipei would be somewhat redundant? It's not like each and every U.S. state have their own separate U.N. memberships.
Hi DilipKumar,

Some unsolicited advice. Starting company = solving lots of problems (product, market, tech, hiring etc etc.) See Immigration as just one of these.

Canada, with much easier immigration policies (Toronto/Vancouver) can be your base to build and validate your prototype and later move to valley.

In the age of Internet, geographical boundaries cannot prevent good ideas/products from happening.
You should do it in Stockholm, we have produced more unicorns per capita than any other city in the world: http://techcrunch.com/2016/01/26/sweden-is-a-tech-superstar-...
How about some naming convention? If a variable contains a word with no spaces, call it $foo_w or something. Shell linting programs can be patched to recognize that and suppress their warnings.

Heck the shell language itself should have a declaration for this!

IMAGINARY FEATURE:

typeset -w foo # foo is not expected to contain spaces

(Or more generally, expansions of foo are not expected to undergo field splitting by IFS regardless of content.)

Now if you have an unquoted $foo that undergoes field-splitting, bash produces an error if that splitting actually breaks the contents of foo into two or more pieces.)

Furthermore, a way could be provided to declare that a variable requires splitting. Maybe "typeset -W". This could even assert into how many pieces "typeset -W3 foo" means that expansions of foo are expected to undergo splitting, and it must be into three fields.

Then there could be a global diagnostic option (similar to set -u and set -e) which diagnoses all unquoted expansions of variables, except for the -W and -w ones. The -w ones are diagnosed if they are subject to splitting, and splitting actually occurs. The -W ones are diagnosed if they quoted, or if they are unquoted and splitting doesn't produce the required number of pieces, if specified.
Good point.

Snarky comment rescinded!
I'd recommend copying any particular CSS transitions they use, and looking at the computed properties of components in order to recreate any particular WinJS components you need. I'd also recommend you evaluate WinJS yourself and see if it fits your needs - but if you suspect you'll be doing anything more that the default then you may not have a fun time.
Agreed. Even if they generalized it to just "debt payments" instead the same issue would be there.

Theoretically a non-debt employee would be able to negotiate a higher salary in exchange for not needing the student loan debt help but in reality since sharing salary information is frowned upon in the US culture you'd probably just never know.
Things are almost never as risky as they seem to a recent graduate. This is one of the best times in your life to take a risk and do what you really want.
Last March, you mentioned on twitter that you are a customer of/financially support Shanley Kane's organization, Model View Culture. Since since then (and before then too), she has made a variety of racially and sexually charged statements, such as, "fire some fuckin white guys to get it done" ( https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:KtAdEv... ). Do you or Y-Combinator still patronize or support Model View Code after these statements? (A pure yes or no is fine, I don't need a big discussion, I just want to know where you and YCombinator stand.)
How does applying with a spouse impact an application?
That's an interesting point. How does the distribution of tweet lengths vary by language?
News in general will make you feel pessimistic and depressed. If not enraged.

Don't do news.
Bad PR
Yes, frequency 0 is direct current.
I see where you're coming from, but environment has many subtle factors that lead to, I believe, missed opportunities if they aren't taken advantage of. For example, what would a Houston Oil startup gain from spending a few months of critical startup time in a city with high rent, drastically different driving culture, little access to oil companies, services, equipment, fields and etc, and a completely different set of laws regarding their practice? Better to be spending their after-hours times mingling with the oil folks in Houston bars than the tech folks in SF bars.
I really hope this doesn't make it through Congress. We need to reform the education funding system, not continue to enable it.

The federal government is already basically putting money in the pockets of universities by subsidizing the loans up-front. Making them tax-free on the back-end will probably have similar unintended consequences.

Edit: if you're a US citizen, make your voice heard: https://emailcongress.us/
Why didn't you do this AMA on /r/programming?
I don't see why it would be more motivating than just getting the current cash value of the stock, in a situation like Amazon's where you _maybe do, maybe don't_ really influence the stock price. Are you saying you write such influential code that you think you will manage to tip things in your favor on such a grand scale?
It's not only "no skin in the game", it's also "in the game to lose". For instance, Democratic victories in the US are really great for GOP fundraising. Given the choice between no job in a Trump administration, and a sinecure complaining about the policies a President Clinton enacts, many of the GOP establishment prefer the latter.

This tends to engender some frustration.

A lot of government policy around things like welfare enrollment, security theater, or certain categories of crime follows similar incentives. "Solve the problem", especially in a cost effective way, and you're out of a job.
That's not the TLDR.. that's not in the article at all. You are correct however that it's unlikely that Uber would commit a large order for a car that doesn't exist yet.

It would make more sense if they were ordering their own fleet of standardized, sensor-laden, optimized UI cars. But that's not what this (dubious) news report is about.
Hands-On with Epic's Unreal Editor in VR
• Determination

• Unstoppability

• Ambition

• Clarity of vision/communication

• Intelligence
Are you prepared to miss out on the next billion dollar company because they happen to have a family and a job while they're hacking away on a revolutionary project?
Facebook's Mobilescale London Conference Roundup
Hi Sam

How do you decide between putting a company in the fellowship vs YC core?
Sam, thank you for taking some time to answer our questions. Mark Suster and other VCs have recently expressed distaste for convertible notes and SAFEs. Are you still in favor of SAFEs? In general, what are your thoughts on seeking seed funding for super early stage startups when determining a valuation might be problematic?
Paywall. :(
I'm reading it thinking, "Hmm, do I really hate working for other people that much?" I've run my own companies since I was in my early 20s, and have never taken on more than contract work for others. But, I've very rarely been able to pay myself as much as even modest developer or IT salaries at big companies in major cities.

But, that may mean I just need to stop trying to make a living out of Open Source software. ~20 years of it might be a sign it's time to try some other approach.
HR can find you based on the numbers you gave if you don't fuzz them a little bit.
Who makes the first top-level judgement of "this is very good" or "this is very bad?"
So you are saying I can install a modern Linux distribution, let's say Ubuntu, and run KDE 2 and Gnome 1.0 applications right away, say by copying over the binary? I don't think so. These won't even run with a recompile, unless you can find the appropriate kdelibs or whatever and even then, I'm guessing it will fail hard.

If you're just referring to eg the gnu tools or whatever, then you'll still need to recompile.
Meter Feeder (YC W16) lets you ditch coins and codes, pay for parking with GPS
Ask HN: Do you use Android's capability to connect devices via OTG?
My laptop's hard drive died irrecoverably and it may take a while to get a replacement. Meanwhile, I managed to connect some USB peripherals (a 4-port hub and a keyboard + mouse through it) to my Alcatel OT-5065D smartphone via an OTG adapter and find the experience pretty revolutionizing.

Why? Because when combined with Termux (since the smartphone runs Android 5.1) it gives me the ability to install pretty much all working environment I got used to (NodeJS, gcc, git, SSH, Nano, Python, wget etc) and use all screen space wisely without virtual keyboard. In fact, I'm typing this way right now.

If only I had a Miracast dongle... that would convert the smartphone into a full-featured Linux box with a nice screen resolution.

Do you use this Android functionality to convert your own OTG-enabled devices from content consumption to content production?
We are happy if it takes 10+ years--those are the cases where you make the most money.
Thank you Sam. By the way here is the link to YC's page on Comment https://comment.ws/us/y-combinator
Do the Twitter APIs support direct messages? I imagine that the ecosystem of Twitter clients, libraries, site scrapers, and related database schemas have hardcoded the 140 char limit in many unexpected places. :)
Hi, I’m Jim the CEO of Meter Feeder. We are excited to announce our product and that we are participating in Y Combinator W16. My co-founder and I are passionate about the pains of parking. We want to create a solution that is easy and elegant for everyone. Please let us know if you have any questions.
In all fairness, one can run Spark on a single machine. The key insight and that "single machine" has gotten pretty big these days, the bit shuffling technology may be secondary.
I agree that with your sentiment about it being a privilege, not a right. As an immigrant right now, out of school, even getting an H1-B is so hard, that I'd do anything just for that visa. You can at least join a program like Unshackled or become a Global Entrepreneur in Residence at a University while working for you startup. However, the metaphor about it being a prison isn't so farfetched either. It's likes writing book in prison, vs writing it not in prison. You can still write the book - They are just different scenarios.
Payouts the same as the underlying shares.
That's quite a narrow view to take. Many billion dollar companies built outside the US. Alibaba the best example.
With the Olympics and Presidential elections this year, this might be do or die for Twitter.

They're very relevant, but not in the ways they want to be.

People find out what happened on Twitter yesterday via the news the next day. Not while it's happening (which is how Twitter would like it).
A big part of it is nerve/brain response, in my own personal experience, though sure, a different walking technique makes a difference too.

I started wearing mostly thin soled shoes a few years ago: simple leather moccasins, $5 Chinese canvas shoes, Vibram Five Fingers. (I don’t typically walk around outside barefoot.)

When I first started, if I walked barefoot, stepping on a tiny pebble was painful. Wearing thin-soled shoes itself let me very dramatically feel the ground in a way I didn’t when wearing stiff-bottomoed shoes. Now, a few years later, the effect is much reduced, even though the skin on the bottom of my foot is not noticeably more callused than before. I can notice how the ground feels if I pay careful conscious attention to it, but it’s not constantly in my mind as I walk around.

I think the walking barefoot -> calluses idea is exaggerated in popular imagination. I have a friend who does significant amounts of barefoot trail running, and frequently run barefoot on pavement. His feet are also not obviously more callused than anyone else’s.
I think SAFEs are good. I think uncapped SAFEs/convertible notes are very bad and misalign founders and investors--they punish early investors for helping the company to be worth more.