skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>Sincere question: have you ever worked at a larger company?

The largest tech company I've worked for was around 100 people, but I've also worked for a (no tech) organisation of about 20000, and have done projects for businesses with IT departments in the 1000 people range.

That said, not sure what unique insight it would give me. As a programmer I can kinda evaluate the work behind Twitter. And I've seen companies that have done equally or much more impressive stuff, technology wise, with 1/10 or 1/50 the resources. Nothing about Twitter, including the scaling, is rocket science.

That's why I brought up WhatsApp -- itself is an example of this very thing.

I've read this (1), (2), (3). Fail to see why you'd need > 500 people total for all of those, plus sales and support.
I've often wondered if there were a slightly more expensive LED candle with remote control.

They cost $13.78 on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Flameless-Candles-Remote-Control-Pill...
Yep, I'm already planning my eventual switch to full time linux. In previous releases there has been at least one thing I look forward to, but this one has nothing. Just features that I would rather not have included.

I was recalling the other day that I switched from Windows to Mac as my primary operating system because Windows kept popping up notifications for things I didn't need to see. Now OS X is doing the same thing with all the automatic update notifications that need user input to dismiss.
Programmers and teachers are not really paid well in the UK !
I took an ethics course a few years ago and we had many discussions on what were the pragmatic options for improving ethics around the world. One of the most popular was "public shaming" both for governments and corporations. My problem with this was the fact that governments and corporations are always made by people and a public shaming campaign would always end up as a witch hunt of a particular person. When an individual witch hunt is combined with a relatively misinformed mass of people the outcome is often unjust and can lead to violence, that because it was 'approved' by the masses, is deemed ok. I don't think it is.

Now in this case the public shaming seems tame and does not seem to have devolved to individual witch hunts. But look no further then 'dongle gate' where a single twitter post led to two relatively innocent people being fired (neither intended the consequences of their actions IMO) and you can see where public shaming in general gets us.
Yes, depending on the level of benefits offered and local taxes, you are looking at 20%+ cost on top of salary to employ someone.
Interesting. I'll have to look into whether it's improved, or has Android specific bugs. Most of my multi-device experiences have included android, and that's reliably been the worst situation.
Yes, there is a lot of competition in this space. I know because I am an advanced user who often has to sift through them to find an answer. I don't know that there is a ton of money here.

That said, I think that the best way to be successful at this is to make a niche site (or sites) that address certain user communities. I work with a lot of physicists who use Excel for general data analysis (yes, I know, R or Matlab are better, nevertheless it does get used), and their questions are completely different from say, accountants. A site like "Excel for [insert profession here]" is likely to be a good way to get attention from that community and differentiate yourself from the general Excel help sites.

Best of luck with your projects
I guess we're arguing semantics at this point. For me "make it work" means that I'm able to write a piece of code that takes the input I want and returns the output I want eventually, doesn't matter if it takes a week instead of a minute to run. Before I get to that point then any optimization I do is probably not the best use of my time. Also if I can't get to that point then it means I really don't understand the underlying problem and I'm probably not in a position to start reasoning about making it fast.

Generally speaking I find it much easier to take slow, working code and making fast, as opposed to fast, broken code and making it work.
Ask HN: Any distributed-db has redis-like custom c modules/data-types?
Since redis is in-memory and single threaded.
Check out the Riemann sphere https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riemann_sphere

I thought it was cool when I first saw it. Infinity in the complex plane is one of the poles.
I honestly have no idea.

I don't want to go back to a dumbphone. I like having a computer in my hand. But what with privacy, the unsafety of apps, the crapware … what's the point anymore?
The initial article says they contacted AJ over multiple channels but got no resolving replies and then went public.
A friend of mine has a 2011 or so MacBook Pro with a brushed/matte screen and it undeniably has less glare than the Retina screens. In fact it almost has no glare at all. No idea why Apple discontinued that.
Yes, but it will break Cmd-V as "Paste" on apps that don't have a "Paste and Match Style" option. :(
BitFunnel: A fast open source search engine
It's a pervasive element, though. Which to me means two things. First, I wonder if there isn't a way of adding it (really) transparently into a language. Basically, whenever there's a possibility that a value is a function of old values, chances are that a previously used result is still available. Second, strategies can have massive time and space implications, but that's exactly why being explicit about them in the application's code in any way should be avoided at all costs: they shouldn't change the semantics, only pragmatics. Given that compilers already do this with simpler things (are my local variables actually on stack or are they kept in registers?), one has to wonder if this isn't one of those things that computers could perhaps figure out on their own in the future, just like we don't allocate registers by hand anymore either. In a similar way that, say, ATLAS finds out by trial and error the best way to perform FP linear algebra within a system of parametric code solutions. I think the "here's what I mean, give me a piece of code that does this" approach could have massive impact in the future. Transparent caching, glue code/plumbing, automatic algorithm selection based on result constraints etc. all seem like possible applications.
Senior Software Engineer
www.vvisions.com
What I want is not possible without legislation. I want you to charge your rate and the insurance companies not be able to negotiate other than walking away. The only way the insurance company can save money then is to not cover the full amount and pass the rest on to the patient. Now you have to compete with others like you, and insurance companies have to compete with others like them. The super-awesome doctors can charge whatever they like and only take cash because insurance companies won't cover their services, and that's fine too - I know of a couple guys like that already and they are awesome at what they do.
Complaining about that is insane.

To put it in perspective, almost any Fortune 500 is paying $200k for a contract Level-2 helpdesk analyst.
> Is there any proof of this?

The idea of proof, in the empirical sense in which term is used in dealing with any statements about phenomena, presumes this about all phenomena. It is itself unprovable (for any phenomenon), as it is the axiomatic underpinning on which all "proof" of anything about phenomena rests.
> To everyone complaining about the $250K (see edit, it's actually 200K) per person in salary

I don't think people are _complaining_ about it, just expressing surprise/shock. It's one thing to read the anonymous "I know a guy who's brother's roommate makes $300K at Google" comments that you have to take with a grain of salt, but another thing to see an actual company's data. Eye opening for sure.
> I mean real, tangible, short term solutions to dealing with 20%+ unemployment? In a country that can't even get behind something like universal healthcare ...

We'll do the same thing we did in the 30s when unemployment threatened to become socially destabilizing: we'll create work for those people. Either in the form of some WPA-ish scheme, or mandatory military/national service, perhaps. In the US it will likely be the former, because there's a sort of social collective memory of the concept in the context of the Depression. Having done it once basically greases the skids involved in doing it again.

What I think people don't really appreciate is how mild recent "depressions" have been relative to the 1930s; we haven't seen 20+% unemployment in this country since WWII, so lots of things seem politically impossible. They aren't; it's just that the necessary conditions for them don't exist right now. But if we were facing the same set of problems again, there's no reason to think that we wouldn't reach for the same set of solutions.

Though personally, I don't see any of the automation technologies that are on the horizon right now leading to 20% unemployment. Most automation technologies have typically underperformed expectations in terms of headcount reduction, with niche exceptions in certain industries. I suspect automation will follow that pattern: you'll see a few industries or job functions get decimated (long-haul truck drivers, potentially), a bunch of new jobs get invented (remote backup driver, automation systems technician, etc.), and a bunch of other jobs get reshuffled, expanding or contracting based on costs (lower transportation costs might lead to more shipments, more need for loading/unloading workers, supply chain management types, etc.). Plus, the time horizon on many of these systems is approaching a significant fraction of a person's career. Someone in middle age, driving an OTR truck today, probably won't have too many problems riding that particular horse all the way into the sunset of their retirement (although at the end of their career they might feel a bit like John Henry, looking for those particular jobs that the machines have a hard time with). Someone who's 18 and looking for a career ought to beware, though. And it would be fair to ensure that public funds for education and job training are matched to expected job availability in the future -- it seems too often that we train young people for jobs that are on the verge of disappearance, and then blame them for taking the bait. That obviously shouldn't happen.
> We did notice you took some creative license and manually removed our copyright notices and replaced them with your own

looking at the story that was copied[1] I don't see a copyright notice anywhere. What gives?

[1] https://verhalen.volkskrant.nl/anti-armoe-aubergine#2220
I fully endorse Let's Encrypt right to hire people solely from SF, but if you think high caliber people don't live in low cost of living places, you're either uneducated or purposely disingenuous.

EDIT: Source: I work on a fully remote team (>50 people) with teammates around the world who are high caliber people.
Why? What fundamental reason is there to reject the untestable and the unfalsifiable? At worst, these claims fall into an epistemological netherworld where they can neither be ascribed truth nor falsity -- at best they may be useful tools.
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I'm surprised that there remains so much disbelief regarding these figures. There are a plenty of people at large software companies in Silicon Valley who are paid well north of $300k.

https://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Google-Senior-Staff-Softwar...
https://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Dropbox-Engineer-Salaries-E...
https://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Facebook-Staff-Software-Eng...
Well, consider COBOL. Once the be-all-end-all of programming languages; now mostly forgotten, but still lurks out there: in production, yet largely out of sight.
Maybe I am not understanding your post, but aren't you just declaring a winner after N trials, even if that is not significant? That seems to be a critical distinction here.
They like to be snarky, and then whine about being excluded from press events by firms they've been snarky about. See their reporters rant about Apple PR after spending years slagging on Apple PR folks all the way back to 2007. After They hammer on Elon Musk, post odd photos and captions, they will be incredulous that they don't get a press credential to the next Tesla event.
I'm pretty sure Mountain Lion no longer gets security patches. They're kind of vague about it. Basically, they only really support the previous release of OSX (macOS) and that's it.
I miss Siracusa's review.

Not to diminish the current author at all. But it was as old as OS X itself. The style, depth, hidden jokes and all, kind of a tradition. Something I would look forward to almost as much as the upgrade itself
Some HIPAA regulations that pre-date the rise of shared virtual servers in "the cloud" are quite outdated and cause quite a bit of trouble for no real benefit.
You could always upgrade to Linux. Debian + stumpwm + emacs + Firefox: why use anything else?
I like to read books in hard-copy format and take notes on stuff I liked. Usually my notes are not more than two pages per book and sometimes refer these notes when needed. I try to read one book per month.
I could see this becoming super popular in some twitter circles, though.
Offering an alternative viewpoint. Many seem to be focused on the cost/FTE. The alternative view is that if this was a business then $3m a year to run it is "peanuts" for the services provided. In fact I prefer the for profit model. I'd like them to charge for each account/cert to cover their costs.
Top Countries with Highest Salaries
> Well, consider COBOL. Once the be-all-end-all of programming languages

No, it was once dominant in a particular niche -- it was enterprise's Java long before Java was -- but it was never the "be-all-end-all" of programming languages.
Classic Japanese weird.
Just cmd+shift+v pastes without formatting ... which is often just whatever is in the target. The explicit 'with formatting' paste is hard to remember though.
Well, Macs have a larger software base: If you want a Unix with app support, and Wine won't cut it, OS X does a neat job. But I'm running Arch myself, so I'm not one to talk.
>Once I reach "normalcy", procrastination and self indulgence kick in unless I see a point behind a long term goal.

Greeeeat point. Productivity is incredible while you're in survival mode. However, is there a time when stagnation is the goal? I often thought, "If I got rich, I'd do nothing. Sit, enjoy life, travel." But would that lead to the depression you speak of?
Thanks for the tip - unfortunately that mapping changes too many other things on the keyboard at the same time.
Yes, exactly. Remote is incidentally a way to save some money on salaries, but mostly it is a great way access a much larger pool of talent.
I've been actively looking for a MBP-quality laptop that shows up on my doorstep running Fedora for about 2 years, but at this point all I'd need is a significant uptick in hardware to justify starting fresh.

I'd also point out how frustrating it is that Linux laptops tend to be on the cheap side (on par with a 13" Air), or generally massive, plastic, and loud.
Windows Information Rights Management: Print Screen Fails
Many unfortunately.

It isn't that PPTP is very good or even at all secure. It is just that it is completely painless to set up and almost universally supported.

L2TP/IPsec by contrast doesn't traverse NATs well, requires several ports open, and is harder to diagnose when things do go wrong (since it can be on different layers).

OpenVPN is likely the best replacement for PPTP, it just still lacks native support on most major platforms (Windows, MacOS, iOS, Android, etc). You need to install a custom client which adds extra friction to getting it setup.

If Microsoft, Apple, and Google all added native OpenVPN support then PPTP would likely die off much faster than it is.
You mean something like Oberon?
In the UK is there a material difference from an employee perspective? In the US, if you are fired with cause, the company can fight you on paying out unemployment. If you are terminated without cause, it typically doesn't matter what the reason was behind it--you're still eligible for unemployment.
Also worth pointing out that Dart can do tree shaking at compile time, to eliminate library code that is never called
I understand giving to charity is great and all but what about employees 10, 35, 97? So someone works hard at a start-up but they weren't among the first dozen or so to join then they likely get next to nothing from an exit. So how about, instead of a pledge to give to charity, founders pledge to give more equity to later employees so only a small handful are not the only ones to profit.

Everyone takes a risk joining a start-up. Many times employees use the equity as part of their compensation (right or wrong many do this). If you're joining a start-up that has taken this pledge then you know going in you're likely not going to get as much as another start-up.

I don't know this just feels like a way to neuter the company making it less attractive to future employees. How about, instead of counting our chickens before they hatch, we get founders who had a big exit to donate money to charity?
Ask HN: Recommend an IDaaS/Login provider?
I've been using Mozilla Persona to manage logins for letscodejavascript.com since 2012. But Persona is reaching end-of-life in November.

I could replace it with my own code, but managing email queues, worrying about password security, and maintaining it all is work I'd rather not do. It's not core to my business.

I'm looking for a simple login provider that will be around for the long term. I'm just looking for the basics:

* Login. Ask for the user's email and password, confirm that they're correct, and give me the user's email address.

* Signup and email verification: Get a new user's password and send a confirmation mail to their email address.

* Lost password: Send a password reset email to the user's email address.

Any recommendations or experiences to share?
My short experience with AWS API gateway is that you can't configure it by hand even to expose a single GET request. I was putting it in front of an AWS Lambda function. It took about 10 curl calls bouncing long ids and tokens from one to the other and it didn't work. My fault for sure, I made some mistakes. Then I automated the process using one of the several tools that were born out of necessity, I suppose, and it worked. Amazon should take care of the developers of those tools or deliver their own convention over configuration tool to make the deployment at least as easy as writing a Rails route file, or a Flask / Sinatra one.
$200K per person staffing budget isn't $200K per person salary. Benefits, employer share of payroll taxes, and other things that don't show up in top-line salary are in there. You are a lot bigger cost to your employer than your gross salary.
I still don't see what that has to do with additionally having a 401k, though. Where is the stipulation that having a 401k affects your phase-out for Traditional IRA deductions?
Hydro storage is cheap at scale if used daily. Modern wind farms are 40-50% capacity factor in good areas and even better in terms of minimum vs median output. Yes, you will end up wasting some 'extra' power, but without fuel costs that not a significant issue.

PS: UK lists 24% capacity factor (av 3.4GW or 9.3% of UK electrical production), which is very usually low and may relate to fudged numbers for installed capacity. Your link also ignores 30% of UK wind production.
> You are probably assuming that employees are definitely under compensated..

Seems like that would be pretty typical. Start-up companies, especially YC start-ups, pay under the average for engineers. At least that's been my experience shopping around for a job. So I would expect them to all be under compensated.
Why we love web frameworks like AngularJS
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I call it "the reverse case of ZX-80".
I think $200K/person is fine, but I do quibble with this:

> They are in Silicon Valley and have to compete with everyone else in Silicon Valley

Why? Why compete for talent in Silicon Valley when there are people all over the country who'd love to work on something like this? I can get why they might prefer not to do remote teams (it's a challenge), but there are cities like Seattle, Boston, Denver, Dallas, Kansas City, Houston — all of which have folks quite capable of building this.

In fact, for some folks not being located in SV is a huge plus!
Maybe SV is not the best place then. Especially when they are working remotely. One thing is to make money and pay salary as you want, and another one is "we want such salaries, please donate".

But don't get me wrong, I'm going to subscribe for monthly donation to them. They save a lot of my time monthly.
Came here to say the same thing. Donating to charities is great but why not donate and invest into your employees who may also happen to be your neighbors.
> But they do it anyway because we need them to. Its hard work and they don't get enough recognition for it (aside from the few that make it on TV).

They certainly don't do it because "we need them to". That's not how theoretical physicists and mathematicians think. It's more of a quest for the holy grail for some and more of an interesting puzzle to solve for the others. That's why some of them just can't stop, even if it's overwhelmingly clear that we have no way to create and probe the extreme conditions where something new and unexpected that would guide the theory could happen. Just because the math is hard does not mean they should get more recognition for it - one should look at the fruits of the work for that. It's not wrong to get occupied with solving famous puzzles, but everything in proportion.
Feds announce unprecedented autonomous vehicle guidelines
I definitely want to look into mobx now. Just thought I would throw out there that I've been using Nuclear-js/Immutable.js and it has a lot of the benefits you mentioned. All the data manipulation logic is encapsulated nicely, and merely appears as state to your components. You can observe memoized transforms in your components so that they only need to listen for the data they need, rather than a single change event on an entire store.
but you chose the highest bidder on a year-to-year basis. Not an day-to-day basis. You're guaranteed a monthly (bi-weekly) salary, but, you can't quit today to do a more lucrative offer and then get your job back the day after.