skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
2-year update to 'Spreading a little Xmas job-hunting hope'
2 yrs ago, I wrote this:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8795321

TL;DR After a few solo-startup failures, I had a few years' worth of acute job-hunting struggles and finally landed a respectable, but low-paying job at a univ.

Update, short version: Job went well and I polished my engineering fundamentals, but I quit after about 6 mo due to the bureaucracy. Built an emerging tech side project over the next 6 mo (relevant below), then landed a job as an integration engineer at a maturing startup at at 2.5x salary... and I'm killing it. Perfect fit.

Lessons:

1. The skills from the univ job are critical to my success in this new one. Sometimes taking a step back allows you to take 2 steps forward. Corollary: A smart, hardworking person with sufficient foundation and maybe a few rough edges can be brought up to speed quickly.

2. A job hopper is only a job hopper until they find their forever home. I hope to be here until something major changes.

3. Hiring mgrs at BigCo have to cover their own ass. You may be, in theory, everything they want. But they seem to get cold feet when it comes to hiring someone with an unorthodox resume because they have to justify, up the chain, why. By contrast, my hiring mgr was high-up enough to say "Fuck it. This is my guy." He was esp. impressed by the project I'd just built between jobs.

4. Just because someone is unemployed or job hunting doesn't make them a bad engineer. Tsk tsk, Joel Spolsky. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/09/06/finding-great-developers-2/

5. Interviews are so random you might as well relax and be yourself. I've now seen ppl rejected for illogical, vague reasons from the other side. Job-hunting = sales. You make cold calls, get a lot of rejections, then land one. You don't have that much control over which ones fit and which ones don't, so just go with it.

For me, 2016 was a great year. Here's to 2017 being even better!

GL to all the job hunters!
I think this really depends on what your background is and what your personal expansion of "understand" is. Assuming a cold start (which would never actually be case), with your approach it would take seven years to get through eg. Assembly, C, Java, Haskell, Prolog, Factor and and J. Obviously you would have a better understanding of each paradigm and their strengths, weaknesses and tradeoffs after seven years of study than someone who tries to get through all seven in 2017. But that person will have a much better understanding of all seven paradigms in one year, whereas you will have no basis to compare the single language you've learned in that year to anything else.
How many people have works that can be called at 03:00 and lives are at risk? . I guess they pay you for being next to the phone if not they are abusing of you, your boss should have someone for answering at those times if that can be that dangerous..
Of course we want. But to see why, you can't imagine it as a car, like everybody insist. It's will be a vehicle, but not a plane, a drone or a car. They will not compete with these.

We definitely need for example a faster way to transport rich people than cars, but cheaper than planes in short distances.

We definitely need a better way to transport patients between hospitals than ambulances and helicopters.

We need to see the future here, not the past (the outdated idea of 'flying cars')
> 2) you might be the only person knowing this part of the product or tech, and all is required could be just a quick yes/no answer.

Then you can pay me for the answer. This doesn't make it impossible to provide timely customer service, just makes it so that you don't get to transfer the cost of doing so onto your employees.
Roughly understanding every language is admirable, but very different than being highly productive in a language. If I have to google syntax and packages to do every little thing like writing a for loop, I wont exactly be productive. He is very correct though - subtle differences in syntax often translate well to other languages and learning the general paradigms are the key point.

So yes, have a general knowledge of programming that applies to different languages with ease, but focus on getting very productive with the language that you use all the time. For me, my focus is dictated by my work: primarily VBA, Matlab.
Should have down the presentation either before or after the conference, but should have charged the GSMA for the presentation to recover costs, and profit from the work effort as well, just like any highly paid consultant does. If asked to sign a NDA/secrecy agreement of sorts, thats down to the individual.
On the one hand the GSMA might be interested in patching security risks just like bug bounties exist in other IT area's but there again if its only to come up with spin for their defence or a PR effort to appear to be fiddling whilst Rome burns then thats a different matter.
At the same time the GSMA dont know if its anything new to them which is a risk for them paying out lots to the individual, but what if their members are not interested in developing new solutions. Big business has a nasty habit of milking the cow until its dry, or flogging a horse until its dead. Its what MBA's like to call part of the maximising return on investment, which is not in the interest of the consumer, and in some cases, these security loop holes are very lucrative when complying with court orders and fleecing the taxpayer indirectly. The Amazon Echo court order will be an interesting one to watch, but the days of big business rolling out any old insecure rubbish seems to be drawing to an end when considering the massive costs to a countries economy when considering the massive cyber attack using IoT devices on the US and to a lessor extent Europe back in Oct. These cyber attacks are only going to get bigger and with Xmas just out of the way, I would not be surprised to see another big one in Jan/Feb/March as more devices get added to the hackers arsenal!
A giant wave of store closures is about to hit the US
The NHS is very highly regarded in the UK as one of their greatest accomplishment. Brits are proud of their healthcare :)
Somerville is more accessible to both Cambridge and downtownish Boston where a lot of the professional jobs are than somewhere like Mattapan. But to your broader point, yes, there are certainly parts of the City of Boston that are considerably cheaper albeit less desirable from housing stock, safety, environment, etc. perspectives.
Yes, this is a critical observation.

I think they are relying on the instant forking of a working app to save users. The idea being that even if you don't understand all the concepts, most people can muddle through and modify and enhance based on seeing what's going on inside an already working code base.

It's true that starting to code from a working example is a tremendous advantage. However it's also true you have to eventually grasp the concepts and node has never been the easiest backend to grasp.
Its a width vs depth argument. I think If you wanted to start digging deeper in any of the languages you learned in 2016 you could do so faster than having one language to consider. For instance, you've probably noticed that Clojure borrows ideas from other languages (go channels for instance), so learning how Clojure deals with that abstraction will help you compare/contrast it with how Go's abstraction works.

The more languages you know (lots of width), the more you can compare to others as you learn (gaining depth), and the faster you can assimilate new ideas as you go. Analogously, its as if while digging into one language you discover a cave-tunnel that connects you back up to another language you are familiar with. This saves you from having to dig all of the tunnels yourself because you can see how deep concepts in one language can be connected across your broad familiarity (width).

IMHO, I hate approaching tasks with a rigid mindset, whether its "LEARN EVERYTHING" or "LEARN ONE THING". I think its better to just encourage yourself to investigate something because you're interested in it, and then see where it leads you.

For instance, I'm digging into Clojure right now myself, and after watching a Rich Hickey talk about immutability and concurrency, I became curious about how GPU's work, and if they could be used with immutable data structures. Now somehow I've gotten into learning about OpenCL and CUDA and am having my mind blown about the possibilities of using a GPU as a massively parallel processor (concurrency isn't possible on GPU's though). If I were strict, I would've blocked myself from diverging from the Clojure path, and I would not have learned anything about the wonders of the emerging field of Heterogeneous Computing Languages.
Unpacking the election results using bayesian regression
Calorie is new MRP for packaged food
Probably the United States of America.

http://thehill.com/policy/transportation/263782-obama-high-s...

"His stimulus offer was rebuffed by Republican governors in states including Ohio, Wisconsin and Florida, who rejected the money."
A New Year's Live Stream for Developers, by Developers
Likewise I've learned to use every carpentry tool. Unfortunately many of 'em tend to shatter when I hammer a nail with it...
Managers manage people. If they are working, they require other people working to do their job.

Basically if they business isn't onboard with the idea of not working after hours, it won't happen and those that try to force it risk being replaced with people that 'fit the company culture.'
> That seemed pretty absurd

...why?
> For salaried employees, there are going to be times you need to work late, weekends, check email at home, whatever. It comes with the job.

Explain this to me. Nothing "comes with the job". Your job is your job and if you are working, say, 40 hours a week, it's more or less 8 hours a day. After 8 hours working, you go home and enjoy YOUR time. If companies want people to do company work while they are awake, they should basically double payrolls and pay for 16 hours, not just 8. Actually, not even in that case should it be OK.

People are people and need to have their life and leisure time. If they don't have it, they start to feel overworked, stressed, depressed. In the end, it's not a net positive for the company either.

THIS is precisely the attitude that leads some abusive bosses to believe that it's OK to expect people to sacrifice their free time. This should be a major offense, and should not be tolerated AT ALL in my opinion.
I mean... I work for a related company (as mentioned in the post)... sorry for being excited about something they're working on?

I just felt the need to comment because a lot of the comments remind me of my first impression of the product before I really gave it a chance.

I was so angry they were working on it, they started working on it after a quiet period following the Fog Creek / Trello split and my first impression was they were merely looking for something to waste their time doing, it just didn't make sense. But, I tried it, and damn I love it.

You can go look through my 5 years worth of HN comments if you'd like, when I like something I am always this excited about it.
They are just arbitrary placeholders for any operator.
$200k is the 94th percentile of income.
This is a view that will lead to a highly dysfunctional society.

First off, you are dismissive of the issue with that bit of exaggeration. It is not as if this group wants all the good things in life that only a tech salary afford. Perhaps a dignified life would be sufficient.

You also place NYC, SF, Boston, DC, etc. into a category of city that is naturally not available to the middle class. Is NYC a luxury like a 3500 sq ft house and boat? Housing scarcity and the resulting price inflation is actually a situation that residents of cities accidentally created, something highly unnatural.

Working class and middle class people are critical to the economy and wider culture of cities. Teachers. Police officers. Artists. The guy who makes your coffee. The gal not from a wealthy family who wants to start a business.

It is not enough that a certain group can just live somewhere in America. Critical workers must live within a reasonable commute to their jobs.

There should be plenty of places in each city for them to live in, and there should plenty of infrastructure in place to move them about.
I got the 5 second timeouts too. Not sure about the viability of the whole game concept. I kinda like the other idea in this thread of giving both players a fixed amount of time, minute or 2, and whoever comes up with the shortest regex that solves it wins. Then you could probably populate it with random words, and let people skip ones they didn't think they could solve. You'd probably get some interesting solutions that way.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obsolescence
Our rent went up 7% this year in LA, but our income didn't. The writing is on the wall I think.
> I think they crapped over those tools, because these tools got the abstraction wrong.

If you identify a problem in a useful tool, the correct response isn't "throw it into the garbage and never make a tool anything like it ever again!" The solution is to research and iterate and try to fix the problem. The Wright Flyer didn't have much range. The Wright's solution wasn't "let's give up on creating airplanes forever!"

We'll never know if Access could be made better, because development on it stopped.

And in any case, for the point I'm making, it doesn't matter if Access is a perfect, or even a good tool. The point I'm making is that he developers of Access had a clear vision of how to make software development easier for the average person that now no longer exists. Maybe they weren't good at achieving that vision, but they had it. Modern software developers, by-and-large, do not. (HyperCard's a far better example, since it had the same vision and also more successfully executed on it.)

> The problem git solves is just non-trivial, so git itself has some learning curve.

Microsoft Word solves the same problem Git does with its "Track Changes" feature and is far easier to use. I'm not saying that "Track Changes" is sufficient for software development purposes, but it certainly points to a few obvious ideas that could make source control software far better.

But of course Git has none of that. It doesn't even try. It's simply bad software.

EDIT: BTW, the problem with Git isn't that it's too complex, the problem is that it's far too simple. It implements a few abstractions, then forces the user to deal with them even though those abstractions don't resemble human thought processes even slightly.

And for the record, Subversion solved the exact same problem and was far more usable. It also had more features. And was much easier to create GUIs for. Basically, it was better than Git in every measure that matters to me. And it was bad software. But it was way better than Git.
I don't know anyone outside of tech or medicine bringing in 200k for the household. It looks like that would put you in the top 5% of income, squarely outside of the norm: http://www.investopedia.com/financial-edge/0912/which-income...
Anil - not sure you're still reading here but the civility with which you've handled a lot of criticism really impresses me.
We don't directly perceive of the phenomenon of EM radiation, but rather only perceive a superficial, low-resolution projection of what is actually going on.

There are many things that are too small, too large, too fast or too slow etc. for us to notice. For example, you miss out all the air eddies you create as you move through the atmosphere. Lots of things are also simply out of sight and our minds construct perhaps 50% of what we perceive by pattern completion. I think what we perceive is mostly right, but in many ways it only corresponds superficially to the computations that are actually going on.

I don't find this distinction very useful either though. Yes, there is an illusion of confidence in the accuracy of what we experience, and a lot of it is tainted by values and false memories, but still, it seems plausible that our experiences correspond very directly to things happening in the universe.

I also don't agree with the claim that mathematics being real in a Platonic sense is an illusion. It all comes down to how you define 'real'. I find a sensible definition is that it is a thought that corresponds to how the world works, to things in the world (future, present or past), but also to how the world hypothetically, but very plausibly works. In the same way as you can plausibly assume that any imaginable thought corresponds to something in a remote region of an infinite universe (or multiverse), you can also assume that our mathematical theorems correspond to some computation somewhere. It makes sense to extend the definition of real by immediacy: The fictitious novel is also real (in some multiverse), but it does not have as much immediate real-ness as mathematics. For mathematics you can find all kinds of correspondences in nature (e.g. 1+1=2), but in the novel you can mostly only find things you've previously taken from nature to write the novel, but if your predictions are very real, then it might at some point be impossible to tell whether it is true or not (just like a computer game that almost looks real).
For someone living in the UK that sounds like a far off utopia. Government recommendations are about 1000sqft for a family of five. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/technical-housing...
I understand what you are saying, and you are right. It's just that I didn't want to focus on management, since it's a whole different dimension. But I agree with what you are saying.
Just saw the news, never heard of his name .. his art had, and still has, a poetry that sings deeply to my mind:

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Tyrus+Wong+art&iar=images&iax=1&ia...
> Then my boss should contract some people that can service that customer during their work hours...

See my pt 2.

> if my boss wants me 24 hour service he/she should pay me for it...

I think your boss wants result from you, not any random metrics like 24 h/on the job. If you consider that you are underpaid for the result you have been delivering -- have you demanded a raise?
Reading these is always interesting to me. Looking at these sorts of sites and the amount of articles and buzz they gather on Hacker News and other sites, I always assume they must be doing high six-figures in income. Yet the ones that are transparent are generally in the $300k a year or less revenue range.

I've always considered my side projects and businesses failures, but judging by these numbers I've been more successful than I realized. So I feel good about that, but I think I really need to re-evaluate my goals and how I pursue them. Because I've been extremely negative about what are apparently successes.

Perhaps I also need to be more open to hiring a broker next time I sell a project.
Montreal slays. Most underrated city in North America IMO.
The cities skew Democratic, but I wonder if increasing urban migration will create more Democrats. Then the Democratic Party has more of an incentive to build more nice-city.

...Might have worked 8 years ago.
For my job(s) the last 8 years or so, I've had a mix of on-site (10%), travel (40%) and work-from-home (the remainder). There have been very long stretches when I'm neither in the office, nor travelling to meet with customers, however -- sometimes, months. From my standpoint, I can commiserate with the author here. I live out in the hinterlands with my wife and 6 kids, so there's no shortage of social interaction -- however if I've been stuck here for 6 weeks, I begin to get a little stir crazy. I "recharge" by going to trade shows/events/meetups in NYC (which is about an hour and a half away) -- the energy of the city is refreshing, but I wouldn't want to put up with it every day. Just once in a while...
> There are affordable parts of Long Island and Connecticut with great public public schools less than an hour from Manhattan by train.

Nonsense. I'm a New Yorker. You literally CAN'T get to DOWNTOWN Manhattan from any part of Connecticut in under an hour. The first metro-north stop in CT (Greenwich, which, BTW, is NOT affordable to live near) is over 40 minutes from Grand Central at the best of times. And then you have to change to the subway to get downtown. Nuh-uh. An hour each way is not happening.

I'm not sure what your point was about suburban deserts (in the sense of things deserved,) but the point of the article is that even with things like not owning a car priced in, housing (in cities with jobs) is still unobtanium for people in the hole between section 8 and tech salaries, who didn't already buy their homes when they were cheaper. Editorializing a bit, this sucks in the long-term. The upper east side of manhattan west of park, which was expensive before "gentrification" was a word, shows what this leads to: a limestone-clad desert made of vertical money and not much else.
I thought it was a (pretty funny) joke.
I always appreciate blog posts, hn comments and tweets from both Patrick and you, but don't always make the effort to openly appreciate it, and maybe I should to balance the critics and cynics.

So. It seems clear to me that every project/venture that either of you have attempted, whether a mega success or not has clearly taught you both a lot, and both of you make attempts to pass some of that knowledge out. At times publicly, and frequently you'll see posts of people appreciating private feedback/help as well.

I admire specifically that when all three of you set out to do something that would have made you happy and be profitable. Yes, people like to talk of pivot, and changes; but if any of those change entirely what you wanted to build, what is the point? I'm glad you all chose to stop early enough to move on to the next thing, having learned new things along the way.

Your posts and Patrick's posts are always interesting, and insightful. I promise you, some of us lurkers are paying attention very closely.
Whether or not living in Europe or US is more expensive depends entirely on your life situation.

If you're single with no dependents and you're healthy (and don't get an expensive sickness), then I would mostly agree US is better financially.

If, on the other hand, you have kids, and/or some sort of health condition, it becomes pretty much a wash, or in favor of (some) European countries.

Those higher European taxes pay for things that you pay out of pocket in the US. If you're not using those type of services, then you're financially better off in the US.
You seem to believe that "ewaste" is something that can be "properly disposed" - you have no clue about reality or you are a marketing guy that wants to spread his lies. Maybe you are just naive and really believe the things big companies are telling you - a good follower!
I think spacemanmatt might be implying that working in IT has a tendency to make one feel stupid. ("The more you know about IT, the more you realise you don't know about IT.")

This isn't unique to IT. There are many fields where there are always new things to learn. However, a career in (say) selling cars or owning a restaurant would require much less lifetime learning.
This is the case with most such lists of verboten practices. It's good to know the general rules, but it's also important to know when your situation justifies breaking them. Competency is all about good judgment.
C3TV – How do we know our PRNGs work properly?
My top 3 machine learning advancements in 2016
I was speaking of the X1 Carbon - which the article is talking about
Are you in UK?
> I never been to the US, but I imagine it's much more homogeneous than the EU

I'd argue they are mostly the same. IMO, The US is pretty similar in structure to the EU where the US as a whole is comprised of many states, each with their own laws. Yes there are federal laws but for the most part, each state can do whatever they want.

Each state / region has vastly different cultures and standards of living.