skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't know about Facebook, or about this particular job opening. But at Google, many of the "sysadmin" positions are really SREs, or "Site Reliability Engineers." These positions have some pretty hard-core requirements, including a solid CS background _and_ serious sysadmin experience.

So if you're applying as a sysadmin at Google/Facebook/Amazon, pay very careful attention to the position description.

For more background, see this exchange on the SAGE lists:

http://131.106.3.205/lists/sage-members-archive/2005/msg0292...

> I still think they're looking for math geniuses who can write hundreds of lines of extremely complex code in their heads for every position, even what should be a sysadmin/engineer/architecture job that doesn't need it. Me, with a good 12-15 years of experience, might be qualified for a junior sysadmin job in one of their NOCs somewhere.

http://131.106.3.205/lists/sage-members-archive/2005/msg0293...

> A good proportion of the "sysadmin" positions which we (Google) advertise are for the group we call "Site Reliability Engineering". The people in this group are part sysadmins, part development engineers. Their function is to keep the Google web properties up and running, highly available, and performant. A solid foundation in systems administration is essential for this role, but the SRE group
are not primarily sysadmins - they are application admins, which is quite a different thing. Any given Google application may have hundreds or even thousands of actual servers associated with it, so the kind of "system administration" with which most people here are familiar is not necessarily pertinent. Yes, sysadmin skills are essential here, however we also require a very strong skillset in development, automation, high-level systems architecture, networking, statistics and general problem-solving. This is why the SRE candidates are grilled so mercilessly.
That's a fair criticism indeed. I'm counting on being as honest with them, saying that I don't have a really strong background but I can grok the principles very easily. I'm fortunate enough to be able to understand this stuff but unfortunate in that I chose the wrong major :)
I got a beautiful puppy :) Actually more than killing time I'm finding out that training a puppy is pretty much a full-time, so now in my free time I work.
This should get you started:

http://laughingmeme.org/2003/07/28/text-summarization/

http://stevehanov.ca/blog/index.php?id=52

http://libots.sourceforge.net/
Interesting. I love hearing success and failure stories from other entrepreneurs as it puts into light a lot of the similar feelings and thoughts that I have on a daily basis. Really great read and something I have been considering writing (with regard to my own startup).

Contrary to a lot of the comments thus far, I felt less excited and more stressed throughout the journey. I dont think this is a bad thing because it is one of the best parts about being a startup founder (IMHO). The roller coaster ride that is bootstrapping is so addictive that I have heard myself on a number of occasions say that I could do this forever (hopefully with some luck).

My question to the community (or the author), is why not negotiate better terms with one of the offers for 51%? Surely, if an entity was interested enough to want 51% there might be terms where something more favorable to the founders could exist, no?

I know faced with the opportunity myself, I have no idea what I would do, but it seemed as though one of those deals or relationships could have spring-boarded the business.
So how about seeing the results?
@dh I haven't looked over the product in 3 months or so, but there was some issue at the time that we felt we could do better in our own code we layed on top of paypal api.
I'd say ~$180k is the highest you can expect to get in a job that you (or at least I) would actually want as a non-managing programmer. The jobs that pay significantly more (such as hard core finance) tend to pay a lot more because the work is life-shortening, specialized, and reputation-based.
Thank you for the reply;

I haven't used indeed in so long, I wasn't even aware that there was a salary range option - I've relied far too much on recruiter presented opportunities (even though I am aware that that is generally a poor decision).

I am avoiding the financial sector as well as larger institutions like the plague - I want to continue to stay on the top of my game and not get bogged down by business politics - even the agency lifestyle seems to do that.

I would love to go off on my own, and willing to take a pay cut (once my wife enters the work force and we are able to do so), but I am sadly not sure how I would eventually do that. Freelancing failed for me, and starting my own business is something that would require more business skills than I have. Sadly, procrastination is also my enemy.

I think I am good enough to be earning my salary, and even believe I could be earning more - my primary concern is that I will be too expensive for the jobs that I want.
Amen. Stuff that doesn't work is "AI". Stuff that does work is "math".

An algorithm to predict which humans are trustworthy enough to keep their promises to their creditors, which murders the performance of human beings, enabling billions of dollars of commerce which was previously economically unfeasible? AI. FICO? Oh, that is just some number crunching on a big source of data. Big deal. Come back when you get a chatbot working.
Your second point is valid, and even your first point, but I do try to be honest in the choosing the headline. It's the original headline, with "The Big Picture:" added at the beginning and in this case there's plenty of pictures on the Big Picture page that don't necessarily represent a "bust."

It seems that, if I accept your first point, I also have to accept that HN is becoming more sensationalistic, and I (and I suspect, others), are unhappy about that.
5% speedup by padding bytes to your $PATH; Effect of OVB on Eval of optimization
Sorry for mentioning $PATH instead of Environment, I thought this would sound more catchy.
That is my greatest fear - going in to on hands management, or full on management. Hard core finance is more my nightmare and I won't even consider that :)
What you describe is not the American system of government, nor the government as instituted by the constitution. The constitution is explicitly written such that every individual, "random" or not, is expected to enforce it. It is not a document that creates a government which is free to "interpret" it as is convenient to said government. The entire point of the revolution, and the extreme set of limitations put forth in the document was to prevent the government from having the power to interpret the document itself.

The constitution does not give the supreme court the power to amend it via ruling or "precedent". The methods for amending the constitution are laid out in the document itself.

Since the document does not give the federal government any power to regulate employment, these laws are unconstitutional. It doesn't matter what the supreme court says, as the supreme court is a group of political appointees beholden to the political establishment.

IF the constitution is not a functioning legal document, then then it has no power. If it is a functioning legal document, then all these unconstitutional laws are actually null and void (as ruled in Maybury v. Madison) and anyone enforcing them is committing a crime.

If it is your position that the existing government is not bound by the limitations of the constitution whenever it decides that it shouldn't be, then the government in question is not a constitutional government, and is, in fact, an occupying force with no legitimate authority. (not that the constitution was anything other than the result of an illegitimate coup in the first place, but for purposes of discussion, I'm granting that the constitution is legitimate.)
There is never enough time to do all the things I love to do, so, I don't get bored on the weekends. My first pick when the weather is nice is rock climbing. Just ran up 5 pitches of trad on Beacon rock today.

Gardening takes up some time, and it is now end of year, so I spent 18 hours this weekend cooking tomatoes into sauce and salsa.
At the risk fanning a flame war between the value of having a degree vs. not, I think one of the big advantages of having a technical degree in the field of something you're applying for is having a lower value on the crackpot index[1] from the get-go.

Whether you're an expert or not is irrelevant. Its that statistically you're probably more likely to be humble about what you don't know, so that way you can go and hunt down the solution if you need to when those problem situations occur.

[1] http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/crackpot.html
Funny how that which is right in front of your face can be so elusive. Are we so busy amongst the trees that we can't see the forest?

One of my mentors once gave me a list a obvious things to check when stuff doesn't work. Funny, years later I still need this list:

1. It worked. No one touched it but you. It doesn't work. It's probably something you did.

2. It worked. You made one change. It doesn't work. It's probably the change you made.

3. It worked. You promoted it. It doesn't work. Your testing environment probably isn't the same as your production environment.

4. It worked for these 10 cases. It didn't work for the 11th case. It was probably never right in the first place.

5. It worked perfectly for 10 years. Today it didn't work. Something probably changed.
Agreed. I'm 27 and was making more than $110k/year working for a top company in the valley. And I was a middle of the road engineer compared to some of the geniuses there.
One of the problems with Journalism (capital J) as it's practiced is that the stories are created at the editor's desk and a reporter is simply dispatched to the scene to provide supporting evidence. There is room for a certain level of conflicting reports but for the most part everything will plug in to a predefined narrative.

Lazy journalism, as lazy writing, as most lazy expressions of an idea is called a cliché. The same tired shots of Detroit (and other rust-belt cities) is now a cliché for the decline of American industry. What is happening today is not the same as what happened 30 years ago, maybe they should be photographing the empty strip-malls that liter this country.

And the west coast may have their streets paved with gold, but I've never seen so many people from an area complain about not being able to get laid.
Yeah, I do think there are not many Hamiltonian libertarians. But there seems to be a subset that, at least as a matter of tactics, and perhaps even long-term strategy, sees federal constitutional rights being enforced against the states as a major way of advancing libertarian ideas, which cuts somewhat against a more conservative "states' rights" sort of view. And some are willing to do so even when as a matter of textualism or originalism it's a bit of a stretch. Hence folks like Randy Barnett and David Bernstein advocate a revival of Lochner to preempt state employment regulations, despite the fact that many other libertarians think that "substantive due process" is a huge federal power-grab.

I suppose some other areas are less controversial, e.g. even most pro-decentralization libertarians are perfectly happy for courts to rule that the Second Amendment preempts state and local firearms laws, or that the First Amendment throws out state blasphemy laws.
Ambulances inspired Twitter - Video
I disagree, after seeing a video of him give a talk in front of a medium size crowd. He came across as excited, informed, innovative, an excellent communicator and a great guy. I think he's in the best-of-TED bracket already.
The author/candidate may have ten years' experience, but he still sounds a little naive:

(1) He seems to have (twice) gone into intensive studying mode without first doing research on what questions facebook was likely to ask him at that stage. He seems to have instead guessed at what they were going to want to talk about.

(2) For a computer geek, the Facebook site/system resembled the UNIX system. And I just love NIX. Wall == wall command on unix. Message == mail. Photo and video viewing permissions was dependent upon groups or individual USER_ID rights. The thousands of external sites using an API to connect to the Facebook internals, reminded me of service ports on a given system.

^ These analogies are not useful from the perspective of actually understanding how facebook works.

Admirably, he has learned from his experience, and is taking steps to correct what he was probably lacking with respect to the position he wanted.
It is fair to say that the Mac team invented the GUI, while Xerox invented the Mouse.
The situation is exactly the same in Canada -- this is an area of provincial responsibility -- but the table entry for Canada mentions that the minimums vary from 10-15 days + 5-10 statutory holidays.

Do individual US states set minimums here? (I assume that if this isn't within the powers of the federal government, it's within the powers of individual state governments, right?)
That's why the time and location of trains is kept a secret and their routes randomized - to prevent the enemy targeting them.
Your smugness disagrees with me. In my personal experience, I covered the basics - analysis of algorithms, graph theory, the usual data structures, operating system architecture, parsing & state automata (DFA, NFA, PDA etc.) - long before I went to college. You risk tarring all autodidacts with the same brush.

And let's not forget, there are plenty of CS graduates who conversely aren't very good at programming.
(posting anonymously for obvious reasons)

Like a recent HN post highlighted, expertise in a disruptive niche is very helpful in breaking down salary barriers. That being said, I would expect mid-100s to be within reach of a strong, senior, non-managing engineer in SF/NYC with no particularly disruptive expertise.

For what it's worth, here's my experience:

I'm on the operations side, and have gained experience building reasonably large-scale, cloud-hosted infrastructure in my past few jobs. I'm in my mid-twenties, and have not completed my college degree.

- mid-2008: 75k (plus options) as a sysadmin (non-managing) for a 30-person startup in a mid-American city

- early 2010: 100k (plus options) as a sysadmin (non-managing) for a 15-person startup in SF

- mid-2010: 160k (plus 70k/yr stock+bonus) as a systems architect (managing a team of two, but this wasn't required) for a public company in the Bay Area (I also turned down an offer for 130k+options at a NYC startup)
Clever! Just don’t tell the baddies our secret about the tracks being immovable, right? :)
How does this get downvoted? I know we're all about good conversation but in bursts, stuff like this completes this forum. This comment was clever and I laughed out loud. If a lighthearted comment is good enough to do that, it's worthy - at very least - of not getting downvoted.

FYI this is a reference to the movie - if you haven't seen it, it won't be funny and is probably worthy in your mind of being downvoted. If you have seen it, you're hitting thumbs up.
Indistinguishable from malice (esr)
Thanks for all the answers folks! I have now applied to a mental health institute and waiting for their answer :)
>There's very little out there that Apple can honestly lay claim to having invented.

Please study computer history before making statements like this. All of your examples are false, and you didn't even scratch the surface of original inventions to come out of Apple.

You may not be familiar with the history of Apple, and may not use Apple products. That's fine. But please refrain from repeating the rationalizations of anti-apple zealots as if they were fact. Like Apple or not, there is no bay area tech company that has invented more in the area of personal computers.
There is no parody of over-security sufficiently over the top and paranoid that it cannot be mistaken for the real thing.
my username is "PStamatiou"
down-voted for what exactly? this seems to be as civil a debate as any other.
Mountain View, CA. GazeHawk. http://www.gazehawk.com/jobs/

Looking for super awesome hire #1.
Rule of thumb in the valley, for a good senior level engineer (6+ years of experience), is about 120-140k salary, plus 10-20k bonus. That's what I think are averages, for GOOD/above average engineers in established companies (not startups). Keep in mind that a good or average engineer in some companies, could be easy a superstar in other companies. They are always outliers for expectational people, but it seems that the places that pay consistently less:

1. Don't care for top talent (they may not really need it).

2. Are not usually worth working for (eg. gaming industry / old finance/ companies that view tech as a cost)

3. Offer some kind of life quality balance and don't expect high outputs from their employees.

If you are not happy with your current salary you can still interview around and find another job. Don't necessary quit, but at least you would know whats out there.
If your think your job is easy/cushy, then 110k is not that bad, but actually good. You can easily go somewhere else, and get a 20k bumb, but find out you have to work twice as hard.
If you are really challenged, and are stressed, and feel underpaid, then you must do something:

1. Ask for a raise.
2. Find another job that pays better.

What I found out, is that no matter how fun the job is, if you feel 'underpaid', over time that will create some feelings of resentment and unhappiness. Also, if you get paid well, but hate the job, then you would still feel unhappy.

The happy medium, is finding something that you really like, and are happy with the salary at the same time (usually when you think you are on the higher range salary compared to your peers).
Of course, since your professional career has been spent at Microsoft working in the Visual Studio group, it is no wonder you would perpetuate this view.

Xcode is far superior to microsoft's development tools. I think you're simply exhibiting stockholm syndrome. Please go back to developing only for windows. Thank you.
Target begins selling Apple's iPad in stores
This is why part-time doesn't work for most of us. When you hit these walls you know (unconsciously at least) that you don't really have to keep going. Giving up is always an option.

So the fix is simple: make it more painful to give up than to keep going. Your inborn human psychology will take care of the rest.

You can try to treat the symptoms, but I think that's the real root of the problem. It's definitely one I've faced myself and know a few people well enough to know it was a problem for them.
Personally, I stopped using Twisted as soon as I realized that I had just written a factory factory. Your mileage may vary.

Have you looked at eventlet or gevent? They're libraries in Python for doing single-threaded networking (like Twisted) but in a very lightweight and pleasant way. They use coroutines, so you can usually write code as if it were blocking, and you can use the standard library networking functions with non-blocking magic sprinkled on top. I've found it to be remarkably straightforward.
I work through my GitHub pull request backlog. On a good weekend I can get back down to the single digits.
You say it is not good advice, but then you say "Of course it's wrong to think that an option as money in the bank." As an employee, would you rather take money in the bank as salary, bonuses, and commission or would you rather risk your hard work on options where there is a very good chance (no matter how hard you work or how much you believe in the company) that the company will never make good on those options, and even if they do, they will have been significantly diluted by investors?

Just because you perhaps made money on options doesn't mean everyone would. I've never talked with a developer that was significantly happy in his/her choice of getting compensated for his/her work in options.
Not sure what you think of Malcolm Gladwell, but I am finally reading Outliers and he casts new light on the many factors of success -- new in the sense that, contrary to mythos, success is not attributable primarily to personal greatness/willpower, but rather having the right-place-right-time + family upbringing + opportunities, etc. (things that are not in the person's direct control).
Great article about the history, but unfortunately, being outside of Detroit, the author has only barely scraped the surface of all of the amazing people that are still in and around Detroit doing real things to make a real difference.

Just take a look at the TEDx Detroit event [1] that I was fortunate enough to attend last week for evidence.

If you haven't seen the amazing difference that everyday people like Chazz Miller [2], or Claire Nelson [3], or Terry Bean [4], or many others are making, then you don't know what's possible for Detroit.

Also, if anyone is interested, I'm excited about a great movie being made about Detroit and what's possible, called Lemonade Detroit [5].

[1] http://www.tedxdetroit.com/

[2] http://www.publicartworkz.org/

[3] http://www.thedindecor.com/2008/06/city-speak-and-interview-...

[4] http://twitter.com/motorcity

[5] http://lemonadedetroit.com/
Hacker claims iPhone apps can freely transmit UDID, pose threat to privacy
This is where I see an odd tension between my quite-left-wing views on gender (at least, fitting with a portion of the left) and the views generally promoted by this portion of the LGBT universe. Since I don't really believe in the gender binary, it's quite strange to even talk about "correct" or "incorrect" genitals, except perhaps as shorthand for "physical sex characteristics that are in greater/lesser conformance to socially constructed gender norms for that sex". I can certainly see why someone who felt they better matched the A gender role but was born with B sex characteristics would want to switch, but I see that as more of a problem with rigid gender roles than with anything else.

It even a little uncomfortably feels like it perpetuates traditional gender/sex views, that there's something incorrect about someone with particular physical characteristics not fitting a particular gender role--- and that they need to correct it by changing their physical characteristics to match. That's certainly a choice people can legitimately make, but phrasing it as correct/incorrect comes uncomforatbly close to stigmatizing people who don't match traditional gender/sex conformance and yet don't feel that there's anything about that that needs "correcting".

(I agree in either case on calling people by whatever gender pronoun they prefer, though.)
Film Version of Zuckerberg Divides Generations
If you can't be who you are now, what hope do you have to be anything else later? And once you become fine with who you are, why do you need to change?
Wow, I was starting to feel a bit underpaid, but now I'm sure of it. I'm making 72 with 5 years and I think my peers think of my chops highly. I live down south so I'd expect the salaries to be less, but not 50%+. I really need to move to a bigger tech hub.
Absolutely not - he has defined a new paradigm in education by force of will. He has proven that one person can make a huge practical difference. Arguably he has achieved more good than facebook. To put it bluntly, the man is a force of nature, if not a god :]

I think part of his magic, is that he didn't wait to polish his presentations to conform to the powerpoint school of banality. He got the content out in an honest me-to-you no-bs way that students can relate to - he seems authentic in a way most teachers are not, and he seems to put no effort into making him self look good, as there is no faculty to impress.

MIT OCW is fantastic content and well presented, but the standards of communication are lower not higher than Sals, imo.
To expand on your point, They aren't looking for people who know the current bleeding edge (in scaling, say). Instead they need people who can continue to define the future bleeding edge.