skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
* What do you do?
Software engineer working on the machine learning side of the company. I help research scientists build working large-scale systems that can actually be used in production. Working on production, user-facing applications makes it easy to justify why your salary should be high: if I can show a 20% improvement in performance, I can save the company $X00,000/year in costs. It's also important to work in the area of the company they care about. Your managers (and their managers) will have more power and influence. Working on plumbing doesn't get you paid as much as user-facing.

* What is your job title?
Senior software engineer

* What is your total comp?
- 150k base salary
- ~30k bonus / year
- ~100k stock / year (at current stock price)
- [not counted in the above] 60k one-time signing bonus

* Who do you work for?
FAANG, don't want to be more specific

* Where do you live (assuming you don't work from home)?
Live and work in SF

* How long did it take you to get here?
- Undergrad BS in 2009 at top-4 CS school, hired directly into top company at 110k total compensation. Worked on maintaining a large distributed system. Was paid "less" than I could have but the work was technically difficult and I learned a ton. Economy was down and getting a job wasn't as easy.
- Switched jobs and company in 2011 and started making 140k total compensation. Now working a more standard software engineer role on a user-facing application.
- Switched jobs and company again in 2013 and made 150k total compensation at a startup in the AI space (hire #~10). Company did well for the first year, then started to do not so great. I left before it failed to do a one-year MS in AI.
- Went back to school for one-year MS 2015-2016. Didn't learn as much as I hoped, and cost me a chunk of change, but networking and the diploma was critical in landing my current job.
- Hired as a senior software engineer at 240k in 2016. Have stayed with this company and got a salary bump last year (and the stock is now worth more).

* How did you get here (networking/raw technical skill/job board/dumb luck, etc.)?
All of the above. Well-off parents to help me get to a top undergrad school who could pay for my education so I could focus on classes. Was always top-20% of class, but never top-5%. Went to lots of job fairs, negotiated my first offer. Always look for new hard problems. Switch jobs often for a higher salary. Work in whichever area the company cares about.
It's a very small component actually. "Value contributed over nominal employee" might be a better way to think about it. Compensation is set almost exclusively on "What must we pay you to keep you from leaving and doing the same thing for the company that is the same distance from where you chose to live. If there ISN'T another company, its vastly less. If the thing you do is something that everyone can do, it's vastly less.
Keep in mind that the US has been shipping plastic to Asia for recycling for years. China just put a stop to it, and now the plastic is piling up in the US. It's a serious crisis, the most serious perhaps, but only if we don't do anything.

#boycottplastic
Sorry to break it to you, but having live both in EU, and now in the US, I still got more email spam from France.

Laws like this are broad and overreaching, but they are rarely enforced.
Did you have any issues with bugs or technical issues while in production?

Or are you simply moving away for the sake of simplicity/cost?
> light benchmarking

Thanks for this!

Do you know of any more longer term, less light Py2/3 benchmarking?
Tax (federal + state) in California is close to 50%
300k gross income at 50% income tax is $150k net.
They did break all C extensions in py3k -- not so bad you can't work around it with some preprocessor magic but break it they did.

And they continued to break them within the py3k lifetime, mostly unicode related stuff from what I can remember. Probably still break stuff but I haven't had time for my toy python projects in a while so haven't been messing with the C-API lately.
> Which CEO would be more likely to get you to make personal sacrifices:

The thing is, the sacrifices demanded of employees by their employers are often non-negotiable, so it doesn't really matter either way. If you're a factory floor worker, you are not "tremendously valuable to the future of the company," your value to the company is specified to the penny and it's likely much less than the value of the equipment you're operating.

The billionaire who can destroy your livelihood on a whim sleeping on the factory floor doesn't really change anything for you the worker.

Are the workers' salaries competitive? How good is their insurance? Will they be expected to put in arbitrary blocks of six day, twelve hour shifts or can they reasonably have a life outside work? How accommodating is the company with school, maternity leave, lateral training? What is the company's history of harassment, OSHA violations, etc? These things matter. Pointless shows of solidarity and "empathy" really don't.
DNS Sinkhole Setup: Your defense against Bot net controllers
That's a great summary, but I'll add one point. You could argue (and many people do) that strong genetic correlation (of one gene / mutation with disease) paired with in vitro / animal elucidation of causation is the second highest "level of evidence", second only to clinical trials. This is the core thesis of "precision medicine" and has radically improved success rates of science, drugs and startups

One of the most widely used methods of "target validation" (determining a molecules / genes causal role in disease) is the knockout mouse model. Basically delete the gene of interest in the mouse and see what happens. This is great for determining causality if a gene. However, mice are different than humans.

Genomics allows us to observe "human knockouts / knockins ". This provides very strong evidence that a gene is implicated in disease. Apoe4 is an example, but the canonical example is pcsk9
Maybe? Certainly, lots of people expect app upgrades that handle new phone models and OS upgrades. Subscriptions probably do have a more explicit ongoing support relationship though.
Down. Damn, of all the people, I wouldn’t have expected that this happens to Fred.
Unfortunately for startups, I think that the only solution is to make it too expensive and complicated for the businesses to collect any unnecessary data. Like dealing with credit cards, no devs in their right mind would want to process CCs by themselves because it's such a huge risk and pain in the ass to be fully PCI compliant. We all outsource that part of the work to 3rd party processors because of the regulations. Why not do the same for the personal data, make it a very high risk for the business to process it directly and the majority will avoid dealing with anything that is not absolutely needed by their business model.
> 150k of Facebook stock seems much more desirable vs 150k of Uber stock because at least with Facebook stock you could liquidate it on the public market? Or am I missing something?

If you're fresh out of school and need to cover the student loan and the rent - sure. If your previous employment includes significant time spent at GOOG, FB, AMZN, NFLX, AAPL, WhatsApp, Instagram, YouTube, NVDA or even YHOO or AMD or TWTR, your everyday cashflow situation is likely taken care of, and what you're looking for is potential growth.
You can't prove it, but you can persuade a reasonable person that they probably did. You could do this by showing them your processes, the UI as the user would saw it, the code that ends up storing that in the database. Also, if your complaint rates are low, they will probably assume that the issue is not on your side.
If env vars didn't exist, the people who do the awful things described in TFA would still do those awful things. In fact the problems described there mostly took place when env vars were overridden by command line flags and unauthenticated web server requests.
Are you including contractors? My understanding is that tech contracting in London is where the money is at. You can make £400 a day or ~£84,000 a year. This is with a lower all-in tax rate so your take-home pay is higher if you take it as a dividend.

I used to be a software engineer but changed to finance (asset management) to get paid more. I went from £23k a year to £50k.
That's true.

To me the bigger issue though is the 45% of eligible voters who didn't bother to show up (or were prevented from showing up).
His goal is not to be an effective worker, but to be an inspiring leader. By sleeping at the factory he shows everyone there that he views this as a truly high priority issue.
One step after another, you have to start somewhere.
This cannot be stressed enough. Often I see managers talk about Sharepoint or some wiki type tool within the company but then the culture of documentation is missing.

The best case scenario I found was in a bank. Each line of code was documented and rationale explained in plain english. This way hypothetically even a newbie could run the system.

While different places have different issues, I found that the quality of documentation was inversely proportional to people's insecurity about their job. More insecure they were about their job. More resistance to documentation was found.
Team drive is a gsuite feature one found handy. It has to be turned on in older gsuites as it's a newer feature but it is on automatically in newer ones.

It is good for defining structure and permissions at an org level for files and folders and solves that pesky problem of documents not being accessible if the Creator of them has their account shut down.
I'd like to consider the general atrophy on a macro scale of the manufacturing capabilities in the US. My theory is that because we outsourced the making of so many things to so many other places (China), we generally lost the skills necessary to make things. Not to say that really advanced things aren't actually made in the US. It is more to say that the general population of able bodied workers do not have the skills and knowledge their ancestors did when it came to working in a factory. It is that actual work - the day in day out grind - that fosters innovation. Other comments point out that the Tesla factory is generally staffed with ex-Toyota folks. Why is that? Because Toyota has been pushing the envelope in Japan making all kinds of interesting things and developing a mentality of manufacturing innovation all along the way.

Thoughts?
And the guardian is pissed that the dunks weren't fierce enough I guess. I'm not sure what they expected, I thought it was like every congressional hearing ever.
I’m not sure what you’re complaining about here. Those applications will still work.
> So let's assume you live in the Bay Area (California). New Federal income tax is 35% for that salary range then add 13% coming from beautiful and sunny California. We're at a 48 % tax rate. Let's round that up to 50% to simplify our maths.

What's unclear about that? 35% + 13% = 48% = about 50%. After that, it's just a matter of removing 50% from 300k to arrive at 150k.
There are a few well funded startups targeting apoe4 and other genetic markers of neurodegen disease. Exciting field
That's an american way of seing things (and is only a thing in very few countries), because all your letters are on the num pad. But 555-فودكا is not going to work.

And what next, do you accept exotic unicode numbers ? Letters that you casefold to something that can make to a number ?

Again, you draw the line somewhere. There is no right place for the line, it depends of your business, but there is always a line of what you accept as a user input.

Being offended won't help you on HN, and calling out people names either.
> Those are style guide / app architecture concerns that are going to be specific to each team.

Exactly, but it's Redux's fault that it actively adds like 5 new styleguide/app architecture concerns to worry about in your project! That is a bad thing about its fundamental design.

For crying out loud, just put redux-thunk back in the core library. Nobody doesn't have async actions! One less thing to make a decision about.

> While I sort of understand the concern in your last paragraph, I'm again not sure what sort of "guidance Redux could offer" in this case.

I find that response pretty obtuse. I just told you what I told my developers in their code reviews, how about some language like that? Developers don't realize that connect() is just dependency injection for props, and those props should at least make sense from a dumb-component standpoint before Redux is involved.

Or how about including a render-prop version of connect in the library, so developers don't go making a bunch of useless props in the first place? The HOC version is what is leading them towards poor design decisions.

If your library is too easy for average devs to use poorly and my biggest headache during code reviews, to me that points to some issue with the library. This is why there is often "backlash" type sentiments around Redux being so popular.
> …too slow…

No language implementation is "too slow" if performance doesn't matter.

> … Numpy is apparently not far of C in terms of performance

As-fast-as C when it is C (or Fortran or assembler…) :-)
If Russian(user_IP) && Russianness(user_comments) > 1922
Block All Domains That Serve Ads, Tracking Scripts and Malware 🧐
I've occasionally wondered why we (programmers) don't take greater advantage of ASCII control codes[1] for structuring data -- many of the pain points of CSV/TSV could be addressed by using US (unit separator) or RS (record separator) bytes instead. You'd still have to handle binary values, but that's a problem shared with CSV/TSV.

[1]: https://ascii.cl/control-characters.htm
Spirit and practice of digital homecoming
Equating what Obama/Clinton did with what Cambridge Analytica did is a false equivalence. The data Obama/Clinton collected was given voluntarily with users understanding more or less what it was going to be used for through apps that were overtly connected to their campaigns. The data Cambridge Analytica collected was collected by tricking users into giving it to them with fake quizzes with users having no idea what the data was going to be used for.
Does it normalize -- will you get granted more shares at the lower share price? In which case the only risk is when the share price drops during the time it takes to vest. Certainly a bummer for that year (or years) they're in a down trend, but seems less likely that a "plummet" kind of slope would happen year over year.
How many 20 year old pieces of copyrighted work you know where the copyright holder would be willing to pay 130 Million USD in taxes to keep the copyright one more year? I can't think of a single one.
Duke University to focus on powering campus with pig waste biogas
I don't recall the exact figure it was significant, but the majority of human garbage is single use plastic (e.g., water bottles, plastic forks, etc.).

The problem isn't plastic. It's human nature. We're lazy and default to convenience over respect for Mother Nature.
I think the change in the publics’ perception on the harm of plastic will happen in stages. This will just be a first step. In the U.S. I don’t think people are ready for major changes due to the politicization of environmental issues.
I don’t think links to obviously pornographic content get auto-blackholed. See for example: https://www.pornhub.com/
> Sure, but do you know them?

Google documented pros/cons and reasons for their decisions in their style guide, which is public [1]. Whether or not Google's final decision is applicable to you, reading the pros and cons is informative. For example, their reason for not using exceptions is specific to their existing code base [2], but the discussion is informative.

[1] https://google.github.io/styleguide/cppguide.html

[2] https://google.github.io/styleguide/cppguide.html#Exceptions
The CG industry (atleast for vfx) is moving to python 3 starting next year. Python 3 is part of the cy2019 reference platform.
Where are you pulling the five weeks figure from? It's more like 20ish days, after that if your employer is ok with it you can "borrow" vacation and pay it back by not generating more vacation days while you work or pay when you quit your job.

Retirement funds, I don't know about the rest of EU, but in my country are basically a scam - here you are forced to pay 10% of your gross salary per month into the fund and you can start getting pension after 35yrs of work (provided you are older than 70yo), that means I'm paying money I will NEVER get back, since median age is going up and employement down, no one will be around to pay my pension like I'm paying my parents' with my salary.

Sick days are on the company only for the first 3 days, after that the healthcare system pays you (80% of your rate, iirc)
I have not heard the consent decree mentioned.
Sure, but when vetting a baseball player you check the batting average; when handicapping a horse you check the races they've lost for conditions they can't handle as well; when comparing Halo player stats you check the kill/death ratio.

Vetting a VC only by wins is missing quite a bit of information, presumably. It can at the very least tell you about potential blind spots and some idea how much actual skill may be involved versus luck or even "a broken clock is right twice a day" scattershot portfolios.
You can easily make £400+ a day with tech contracting in London, yep. I've been doing it for years and I'm defiantly middle of the road.

If you're a niche expert (MUMPS, KDB, etc.), you can probably make double that.
Ripple Invests $25M in Blockchain Capital’s $150M Venture Fund
Don't they float the plastic out? Our composter is starting to accept plastic bags and I think while reading about the process, I saw the plastic gets skimmed of somehow.
Alzheimer's drugs have not been successful, but in general it is the best time ever to start a biotech company. Returns in biotech VC the last 5 years are better than tech, more IPO and big M&A (three $8-12B startup acq in last 4-6 months) even with 1/5 the funding of software, tons of great science out there, massive amounts of capital ($4B venture funding to startups in Q1)
I don't plan to retire. I had a nice half year break after selling my company. It's not that great. Productive engineer = happy engineer.

I'd like to be a kind of tech monk. Someone who goes around on the bare minimum needed to survive, be away from the distractions of society, and polish my skills day after day.

Every now and then I'd leave my monastery to rescue a half billion dollar project somewhere or to take down an evil tech giant with open source. Then I use my loot to continue another few years of peace and solitude.
All of these issues can be solved with pretty straightforward economics. If only there was an impartial, non-corrupt entity that could price externalities, which would then propagate to consumer product prices and therefore minimize this kind of thing.
Ask HN: Founding a Foundation (or Not)
The gist: MIT licensed project, originally made for a still ongoing publicly funded research project, went wild and attracted a lot of attention & started getting some traction[0], with big names from the industry[1] coming on board and implementing my software in their workflows (link in profile). I'm now at a crossroad of choosing and setting out the direction of this endeavour: a for profit or non-profit foundation/org of some sorts, or both.

The dilemma: I think a non-profit most probably will not be able to absorb/attract enough funds to properly finance development, or it will come at a big organisational/political overhead (many small contributions, with high entitlement). A for profit entity may alienate the goodwill gathered so far and pressure fast profits, whereas my industry[1] is a conservative, stingy, legally-scared bunch that don't react well to sudden movements, though are more than happy with "slow and steady" change that they can own[2] first.

What to do? Where to look for advice? What's the best way for forward?

Appendix:
The project is successful because:

- part of the research problem required operating at scale, therefore it's not really write-once, run-once (to the best of my amateurish abilities).

- it's partly a political solution, not just technical. My industry has no significant OSS that it can rely on, using on mostly 1000/yr licensed software developed by a few big companies that strive to rope in more of their data & money.

[0] Traction = 200+ strong slack group that's rather active; interest, contributions & in-house implementations coming in from some of the biggest names in my industry (see [1] below).
[1] Industry = AEC, or architecture, engineering and construction
[2] Own = understand, grok, and potentially not pay for, etc.
Who gave the data (what data?) for free? Facebook? Cambridge Analytical?

Iiuc the whole brouhaha comes from 2 facts.
1. An old app (some survey app) sold it's data against fb's terms of services to an outside group.
2. Fb's access rights used to Grant access to the info not only of the user of the app but also that user's friends and thus ballooned from 700k users to 50+ million.

Now as far as allowing political campaigns to target people for all kinds of criteria I am sure that is still happening and how all advertising works...
Well, let's grant an exception to GPL type licenses, then?
Where does all this come from?

I'm admittedly not the biggest saint on the sustainable living front, but I also don't see how all of this is getting into the oceans? AFAIK, any plastic that comes into my house either ends up in the recycling (where it's presumably recycled or sent to the landfill if it can't be recycled), ends up in the trash (where it's buried in a landfill) or (in the case of plastic grocery bags) gets explicitly taken back to a grocery store for recycling. Exactly 0% ends up in an ocean.

It's easy to blame others for this sort of stuff (and, as I already said, I admit I could do more on this stuff). But I can't help but think that first world countries with relatively advanced recycling/trash systems aren't contributing much to this and can't do much about it by implementing additional regulations...

Am I wrong about that?
man where the fuck do you live to get all of that for only 900£? I pay 750€ish per month rent+bills for a bedroom in a shared apartment
Why Can't Hollywood Make a Good Video Game Movie?
Environment variables are not the problem. It's environment variables with too much power and the possibility to change them remotely.
Agreed. I've long felt that the most effective tool is good curation of the material. You can use a wiki, or folders; I've used both successfully. The most important thing is that the material is organized in a way which allows for findings things efficiently. It can work if everyone knows the rules of said curation, but I've found it works best when one or two individuals are effectively the mods. The mods set the rules (folder naming conventions, hierarchy, maybe leave a README file in the root folder, etc...). If you use a wiki, you still have "folders", and the same rules apply. Otherwise, it becomes a big ball of documentation mud.
> "sleeping in a sleeping bag on the factory floor."

Where did he in this article used the word "sleeping bag"? (I'm assuming you are quoting him?)

And the reasoning for him sleeping at the factory is obvious to me. To create a sense of camaraderie and show that his intention is to push the whole company as opposed to not being sympathetic to the workers hardships and pushing them for the gain of the CEO.

On a separate note. It seems to me that ycombinator's readers are more likely to run with any Tesla related news to put a negative spin on it (no matter what the news) to pursumably show that they are not "fan boys" or that they are smarter and more critical in their thought process than the mainstream Elon admirers. I would rather see unbiased analysis. Not just one that goes against the more prevalent ideology no matter what.