skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One of the interesting trends of the past 10 years is the degree to which "big tech" has replaced "big finance" as the place for the elite to go to collect huge paychecks for relatively "nice" white collar work.

It makes total sense for top SV engineers to get paid well, IMO. But I am afraid working for these big tech firms is starting to have that feeling of "elite pedigree" that pervades complacent industries, like finance.

In 2002-2006, one could have written a similar article, but about top staff at Goldman, Morgan, UBS, etc. There were plenty of $300k-$500k salaries being paid for maintenance work for profitable business lines.

Options and RSUs are an interesting twist in Silicon Valley. To compete with the stock option packages given out by startups to early employees, Google and Facebook grant RSUs (and similar) instead. In Wall Street, the "golden handcuffs" used to be a near-guarantee of a year-on-year raise, an end-of-year cash bonus, and a track toward promotions that had built-in pay increases. No one wanted to throw away their time invested in a single firm. SV firms are different in that turnover is high, so vesting acts to counteract that. They have such fast-growing stock values, the stock grants can also be used in lieu of bonuses. Plus, to management, it really is "funny money" that does not actually increase operating expense.

Anyway, though the mechanics are different, it seems the net result is the same. "Golden handcuffs" are as real in tech as they are in finance.

The saddest reflection I have on reading this article is on how capitalism seems to value different professions wrongly.

These salaries are bigger than top specialist physician salaries. And physicians need 12-17 years of post-undergrad training, as well as often requiring $200k of medical school student loan debt.

It just seems like if Google and Facebook can afford to pay this price for engineers (who add leveraged value via their software contributions), capitalism should figure out how to pay doctors more, as well.

And go down the list of other "non-BS, but comparatively underpaid" professions like teachers, firefighters, etc. They could all use a compensation upgrade.

But what is the exact mechanism that is making it so finance and tech are among the only fields where labor compensation is commensurate with leveraged value-add?
Where I live it's law that a workplace with a certain number of workers must have a resting room where you can take a nap.

Sure enough my workplace has one. There was a big thing when it was discovered that another branch, smaller but still above the threshold of employees, did not have a resting room. Not sure how that played out but essentially you have an "employee safety officer" that handles the case with the union until the requirement is met.

I go in there around 15:00 and nap for about 30 minutes, apologize to no one. It's nice and dark, you put a note on the door so no one disturbs you.
90% of graduates from law schools and medical schools are also men, so it's safe to assume there are some fundamental biological sex differences at work here. Oh wait, it's not 1970 anymore, and law and med grads are half women nowadays. Golly humans evolve quickly.
The point about ratios is that tech is where a lot of the money, and thus a lot of the power, is. If there's a perception that it's more difficult to access that power because of your presented gender, then there will be outrage.
Office Space, after salaries and employer taxes is our biggest per employee cost.
It wasn't unintentional that I used select. The dsl actually abstracted over network operations first and I only later added queues to the abstraction.
Hammocks?
If I "nap", it's either staying awake or going full sleep for hours. I found that just laying down for 15 minutes still provides a good rest. The body still rests a bit and the mind is more fresh.
I tend to believe they're highly interrelated.

The belief in the superiority of a gender could very well lead to the belief in the superiority of both their abilities and the value of said abilities.

We live in a capitalist society, where both value and power is expressed through money. If you are to tell me that midwives and nannies are worth more than they are paid, what is your explanation for that?

It's all the same thing.
I worked at another FFRDC, and had a similar experience. MTS-A (the equivalent of 'Principal' at JPL, I assume) was basically reserved for lifers. Likewise, the promotion requirements for engineers was the same for that of researchers (i.e. published white papers, presentations at academic conferences, etc.) - and was not particularly well mapped to any actual day to day work done by engineers.
Thanks for testing ;) The documentation is still very basic. I made a quick screencast just now and put it on
https://a9t9.com/kantu/web-automation/chrome#video

In Chrome, you first navigate to the page that you want to automate/test, and then start record.

For use with the Firefox Selenium IDE, use the "HTML" export (not JSON). Then, in the Firefox IDE, you can import these macros simply via the "Open" menu.
Between BitchX and Eggdrop development, I'd say that TCL was my most-used language circa 1998-1999. Had totally forgotten about it until seeing this post (for better or for worse!)
I worked in a New Zealand shop that had a "quiet room" .. not everyone knew about it. You get a buddy on day one to take you around the building and not everyone covers it (don't think it was on the sheet). It had two recliner chairs a single mattress and .. a sink for some reason (We think it may have been a dentist's office once from the layout).

Other places I've sometimes found places under stairwells on bottom floors or used one of the phone rooms. 10 ~ 15 min is all you need really. Then just inject yourself with two more cups of coffee, put on your headphones and code monkey away.

I realize the IT field is kinda unique in that people can get away with this, at least with good managers who care more about your output and deliverables than the amount of time you're at your desk.
I really don't understand why that would be. In fact, given that most people are not software developers, we can be sure that the people making those high impact things are very non-representative of the population. Moreover, people can provide good services and understand others' problems without having to experience them themselves. Otherwise we wouldn't have male gynecologists for example. Sometimes, the distance is useful or even preferred.
My experience is that it isn't, because of the performance review process. If someone could "optimize" their evaluation-- including peer evaluation, evaluation from other teams, stack ranking, etc-- then I guess they could work less. But I really don't see how they could do this.
I agree with this (though not some of the earlier things, e.g. that Greece is less indebted than the Netherlands).

Two observations:

1. If they started buying their own debt back en-masse the price would probably go up (as with any other good where demand increases).

2. The problem of Greece, and other poor countries, is that they have trouble mustering resources. Raising 18% of GDP from a poor population isn't that easy. If Greece was a wealthy country they probably wouldn't have the debt they have.
>Early on computers were marketed to men,

>, and I would be shocked if there isn't a strong correlation between interest in video games and computers in general.

Video games are marketed more to males but that didn't stop females from participating in large numbers.[1]

Why would "male marketing" dissuade females from computer programming but at the same time, it doesn't affect computer gaming?

https://www.google.com/search?q=more+women+play+video+games+...
We have a quiet room with a hammock. I've napped on it many a time.
We have an unofficial napping area at work which consists of a beanbag under a staircase next to a warm window. I think a comfortable seat (i.e sofa/beanbag) is enough to encourage and support power napping.
Although this may be true and effective. 80% of the folks reading this are just going to use it as an excuse to be more lazy.
Health insurance is by far the largest, but I generally consider that part of salary when I'm thinking about costs.

After that it's hosting (we have no on-prem infrastructure), AWS is probably 85% of that cost.
First mistake-- need to take a nap to live in the dream world
I'm not a physician but something that has worked shockingly well for me is 200mg of 5-HTP and 500mg of L-Tryptophan before bed. I used to have terrible insomnia (only sleeping for 2 hours some nights) and every time I take these two together I am out like a light within 30 minutes, and usually don't wake up at all until 4-6AM (I used to wake up fully at the end of every 90 minute sleep cycle and have to go through the whole process of falling asleep again). It gives you that warm fuzzy feeling (capillary dilation in the extremities) that you get just before you fall asleep. I've been taking it every night for five years now and I swear by it. YMMV of course. I've always been skeptical of supplements and I had taken tryptophan before to minor effect, but the two of them together are way beyond anything that could be blamed on placebo.
Is that news to anyone? Sussman and Steele showed that tail recursive functions are equivalent to for loops over 40 years ago. Map, reduce, et al can be built on top of either of them, and they're just as useful built on top of either. They're factoring out common patterns, the same way printf, strlen, and memcpy do.
Yet high-paid managerial and control jobs are dominated by men.
This is not noteworthy.
> There’s a new thing happening at my workplace where men use their phones while at the urinal.

I wonder if it will ever become socially unacceptable to hand your phone to someone else, to show a photo or whatever.
This was Microsoft's strategy post-dotcom implosion. "We have more money than everyone. Hire all the smart people even if we don't have anything for them to do." It worked until...Google.
AI Predictions from Prof. Tony Walsh
From what I have seen and read, the biggest barrier to a 50:50 split is that we all have a tendency to define groups that we belong to and others that we do not.

Imagine a event that you enjoy doing (concert, conference, what have you). Now say that you find out that 95% of the participants is going to be part of a group that you do very clearly not self-identify as being part of. Would you feel equally confident going there if 95% of people were part of a group you did identify with? Many will ask "Why is my members of the group that I self-identifying with choosing not to go there?", while having the opposite effect when ones own group is a strong majority. Even if you had two equal choices to go to a place with 50:50 and one with 90:10, the reduce doubt will softly bias people towards the 90:10 if one self-identify with the 90% (exception naturally exist as with any soft bias).

I have seen some data on this from reports. A university student that fail an exam will be several times more likely to switch program if they belong to the minority gender in their class. The same effect can be observed for women in IT program as with men in education programs.

Basically, it is extremely hard (if not impossible) to get a 50:50 equilibrium without some form of homogenization where the unique identifies of the groups get merged into a single group. The one good thing is that as a matter of ability, people can belong to multiple groups and it can be enough to belong to one common group and have a perceived 50:50 splits based on other groups.
Because some folks are from North Korea yet aren't currently living there now. Searching from a North Korean start will affect the results you get as well as the language.

For example, I'm American living in Norway: I use the Norwegian google for things that are local or if I happen to be searching in Norwegian. The US (english) version produces better matching results for many other things.
Meetup.com works ok, but chamber of commerce i find is better because its generally better suited to businesses. Best thing though is to find trade events, whether its conferences or networking events, product launches, whatever. Pick an industry, lets say, car salesmen. Google for Car salesman trade forums, boom, loads of communities there, generally they have events pages, awards shows, etc, create a calendar and start going. Took hardly any time at all. Apply to any industry.
Napped at my desk.
Napped under the desk.
Napped on the couch.
Napped in my car.
Napped in a meeting.
Napped in the nap room.
NYT: 'A Prediction: Bitcoin Is Doomed to Fail' (Nov 2013)
Or maybe they'll entrench their advertising monopoly and perhaps gain a few more in driving cars and so on, and then they'll coast along as rentiers?
I did the work-from-home (wfh) thing for about 5 years across two different jobs. The first job was the worst kind of wfh situation because there simply weren't any boundaries between work and home and day work bled into night into weekends.

The second was the other worst kind, paid very well to do almost nothing, and again day nothing bled into night nothing into weekend nothing. I tried to use it to study things or learn other topics, but every once in a while I'd be needed for a few days, go and put a fire out and be back home doing not much at all. The reason for the situation was a disastrous corporate management. However, the situation was so great in theory (get paid top-10 metro senior pay to do nothing at all) that I actually had a hard time changing jobs because I kept telling myself I actually enjoyed screwing around.

Given a binary choice of one or the other I'd actually choose the second job again, but I'd structure my days very differently and try to be much more productive. The good news is that life isn't binary, and I'm in a place now where I work most days in an office, but can wfh when I need to, and rigorously control my schedule so work and home-life don't intersect. I took a pay cut, but I love this current work much more than either of those two jobs (and my wife is much happier as well) -- lessons learned I guess.
that's actually bullshit, companies would love to sell their product to the other half of the population, it's all about money after all name a company that would turn away half the worlds population for no benefit. indeed many tried to make computers appeal to women especially in the early days of computing before giving up or going bankrupt.
People were constantly predicting Amazon's fall (and that of a ton of other skyrocketing stocks) throughout the whole of the first internet bubble. They were all wrong, until they were right.
This is a critical part of taijiquan practice, laying down meditation. It's amazing how many places your body is in pain and tired but you won't hear it till you lay down and relax into the ground.
That would prohibit trade within North Korea, but wouldn't make it illegal to do business with North Korean private citizens when they are outside of North Korea.

Otherwise, folks that defect couldn't do much of anything until they earned citizenship to their host country.
4.13 is due for release probably this week. Linus cut -rc3 a week ago, which was small, and nothing serious have been heard. Normally only critical fixes would be merged this late which might warrant another rc, but this is Ted T'so, a wizard who has been involved in Linux since before it had networking, so his opinions have merit.
> I've seen no one suggest that the professions have significantly shifted in nature due to an influx of female brains

Here you have it: https://youtu.be/cVaTc15plVs?t=1851

Most people in the video are scientists and work in the topic.
Parallelism in one line
This has been discussed to death already:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14939636

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14937895

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14937778

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14934581
> I changed the positions because the workload was so low

I knew someone who basically took full advantage of this. He was a contractor too, but just added a clause that he'd be allowed to work from home/remotely. So he was doing multiple gigs simultaneously; so instead of making $100/hr (or thereabouts, I'm not sure about the exact numbers), he was making $400/hr. It's probably not legal to do what he was doing, but he sure was livin' large.
> a whole lot of neoliberalism and market-worshipping.

It's funny I read comments like yours and feel the same sense of despair. Humanity is weak and foolish, markets make everything right, and even if they don't they'll crush any aspirations to anything else or better. Don't bother with government, don't bother with humanity. Markets markets markets. Socialism bad. Capitalism good. Also anything the government does is socialism and bad and anything companies do is capitalism and good and inevitable.
You must have a very limited way of expressing your self :)

I can express with a pen using symbols, drawing, spacing, diagrams, flow...

Too many people confuse taking notes with transcription, or forget to take in consideration the cost of context switching.
Comparing to phrenology is completely appropriate. Phrenology was used to justify certain ideology. You don't think in 100 years the standards won't improve and we won't laugh at people who used this research to justify certain ideological views? His logic is flawed because he has a fixed mindset, which I believe is a logical dead end with little evidence to back it up. He is on the wrong side of history, and I make that opinion strongly.
New Orleans doesn't have many chemical plants. The metropolitan area does, and it's always been governed by pro-business conservatives.
Now that async functions are available in node, I'd say you can write some very nice async code with minimal efforts. Before that, many people were using generators to write coroutines (e.g. with the co module), which effectively achieved the same result.

Not saying you should change languages though, especially if you're happy with your existing toolset! But if you feel up to it, you might be surprised upon giving it a try.

I've written a few one-off scrappers without any complaints. It also works well for simple cross-platform scripts.

I don't recall the developer experience when installing python on windows, so maybe it's just as good. With node you only have to download and install the official release, and everything is good to go. Even when some package has native code, it generally "just works".
I use this: https://eu.ostrichpillow.com/ Works quite well :)
In the title, read "and" as "plus". (For a while I thought they meant "logical AND", given the HN context.)
Sorry guys. Traffic killed the site. Booting up a new server
Plus just rolling it over a 2 liter bottle doesn't account for the physical side of what's going on. You can stretch a condom pretty far, but that does not say anything about how it stands up to friction. If a condom is too tight, it will break on you.

I hate talking about this because people just assume I'm lying, but... I've had normal sized condoms break on me a couple times, it's frightening. Magnums do not break on me, and fit much better, so that's what I use (the XLs are too big). I just don't fit safely in a normal sized condom, it doesn't matter one bit that I can fit them over a bottle.
I also have a problem with napping, but for a different reason. If I sleep during the day, my heart starts to beat really hard. Like visibly hard, think it's because my HR drops low? Anyways, it's uncomfortable and makes me avoid it. Most people online seem to have the opposite problem, heart racing after a nap. Never found explanation for what happens to me that makes sense.
Typing on a computer is much easier than by hand
Formatting otoh...
A family member of mine used to take medical malpractice cases from these communities while I was growing up. She was routinely harassed and hassled by whatever (exclusively white) sheriff of whatever town was the brother-in-law of the doctor she was suing. Just driving around in these places trying to drum up support for such a suit would be a risk. They have a way of arresting you for imagined vehicular infractions right after the judges go home for the weekend, then letting you out Monday morning as soon as you're arraigned, where you can pay the bill to let out your impounded car.

If that sort of pressure can be applied to people working cases that affect just one doctor in a community like this, I sure wouldn't want to to see what kind of pressure the chemical companies could bring to bear.
That makes a lot of sense from my perspective as well.

Playing video games and having the desire to make my own was a huge factor for me getting into tech personally. I had a subscription to "Nintendo Power" magazine, and I still remember reading an article in there about a programming school called "Digipen", and just being enthralled by the concept of going there and building my own games.

In retrospect, I'm glad I didn't have the patience to stick with game development. My career is probably better off for it. My real gateway into a tech career was when I got put into a Cisco networking class by accident. I learned there that Linux live-boot usbs were excellent for getting around permissions restrictions on school computers. I also learned that the school firewall could be bypassed by using IPs instead of hostnames. I never looked back from there.
> But people on the autism spectrum make up such a small population of humans and software engineers (we are over-represented compared to other industries, but in my experience we are still very much a minority overall) that it cannot be nearly enough to account for the sex-imbalance numbers we see today.

Imagine a scale that goes from autism to whatever the opposite of autism is, with neurotypical as the middle. The hypothesis is that men are more likely to be on the autism side of dead center, even for people who are still in the neurotypical region. A higher percentage of men being diagnosed with autism is evidence of the hypothesis being true.

> So I guess I'm still firmly in the "Its a pipeline problem" camp.

They're kind of orthogonal. It clearly is the pipeline problem -- you can't hire people who don't get the relevant qualifications. But it's possible that biological differences contribute to the pipeline problem.

In reality anything is affected by everything. So it makes sense to work against the pipeline problem regardless, because some of it is caused by non-biological factors that could be addressed. But some of it may also be caused by biology, which means that even if some progress is attainable, expecting the end result to be a 50/50 split may be unreasonable.
>I'd structure my days very differently

What would your restructured day look like?
You mention people you consider neurotypical who were studying hard science subjects. I wonder whether they might, all the same, be quite field independent -- this is a trait that analytical people often have, without it putting them on an autism spectrum.

The visual test in the blog post is actually a field dependence test: https://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007%2F978-1...

What I'm getting at is that there are broader, non-clinical variations in cognitive style that complicate the notion of neurotypicality. Anyone studying science is unlikely to be at the extreme field dependent end of the scale. So part of the imbalance may rest on real but non-clinically significant cognitive differences.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field_dependence
It's definitely better for me at least. I can pretty much go live anywhere in the world and arrange accommodation in a few clicks - what's not to like?
They've got cash reserves of like 100 billion...