skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I came here to say this exactly. I'm only a hobbyist programmer even though I'm pretty darn good in my niche technical (non-programming) field. But almost every time I jump into the comments section my self-worth goes down a bit and I feel just a bit worse because really this is a community of programmers. And even though I'm not a programmer, I do write computer programs occasionally, and quite often I see people calling out my style of programming as the worst thing in the world.

I have a side business, but I haven't created fifteen startups with successful exits, so I feel less important than a lot of people here.

I don't have a Dell XPS 13 Developers Edition running Arch, so I'm not as pure as a lot of people here.

I use Facebook and not Mastodon, so I'm a sheep contributing to the downfall of society.

I live in the Midwest, where nothing happens and land is worthless and colleges are even worse and we don't even have the Internet here do we?

If you think Facebook or Snapchat or Instagram are damaging to the self-worth of its consumers, try being someone who doesn't live in SV and 10x some Phoenix/Elixir at an AI-owned biomed non-profit stealth-mode VC-backed startup collective. I've never even wheeled a suitcase into Paul Graham's office! I'm basically worthless.
It’s a direct observation I made from being in a relationship with an individual diagnosed with severe ADHD for ~2 years. It’s not a superficial observation extrapolated from a few encounters. I’m not drawing the conclusion that individuals with ASD feel no fear, either.

I was constantly struck by how she didn’t seem to fear any sort of physical risk. It may well be the stimulus/risk seeking nature of ADHD, or just her personality - I’m honestly not sure.
Insightful comment overall, but I disagree with your implication that the formula for pay raises is generally "current market value minus the cost of switching jobs right now".

First of all, what "cost of switching jobs" are you referring to?

If I live in SF, "switching jobs" likely means getting off at a different BART station. Hell, I might be able to walk to my next job.

I think the well-known fact that pay raises fail to keep up with market wages in tech - isn't some brilliantly efficient calculation like "current market value minus the cost of switching jobs right now" as you suggest.

It's clearly not working very well, since job hopping in the valley is crazy high, and everyone knows that's done because of pay. To wit, the longer you work for the same company, the farther your market comp will drift away from you, and the only way to catch up with the runaway comp-train is to hop jobs.

I think it's simply the traditional American 2-3% raise model clashing with a booming tech reality where your market wage will likely increase much higher. Plus, the traditional model itself never worked very well for well-performing employees:

> It used to be that jumping ship meant landing a salary 10 percent to 20 percent higher than your previous one. While increases of that size aren’t as widespread as they used to be, switching jobs is still the most common path to the best pay raise.

> If you stay at the same organization, your annual increases may be restricted by your current base salary because companies have a narrow percentage range within which they can boost your pay.

https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/09041...

Simply stated: employers were never very efficient at raising comp for good performers. Even decades ago, in industries nowhere near the growth rate of current tech, top performers were much better off job-hopping. Tech just made it even more lucrative.
I’ve been on the hiring side working with recruiters. We tell them the range up front.

If they don’t tell you or they don’t know, stay away from them. They don’t have a direct relationship with the company.

Any recruiter that you tell what your range is and they still try to steer you below the range stay away from them. That’s like dealing with real estate agents who try to steer you above your range or your expressed preferences.
> The researchers, who published their analysis in Genome Biology, say the issue can be fixed by formatting Excel columns as text and remaining vigilant—or switching to Google Sheets, where gene names are stored exactly as they’re entered

I doubt that. I fight with Google Sheets every day because it thinks some of my text values are dates.
I said something in the lines of "Hi, <roommate name> gave me your email" then 2 lines about what I'm looking for and 2 lines about my previous/relevant experience.

Recruiters are always very eager to talk to any lead, so nothing crazy has to get into this email except "I'm an engineer and I want to talk to you"
>Is it about code that isn't thread-safe? That relies on undefined behavior? That doesn't scale? That has race conditions?

It can be any of those. Not a blog post, but one example that immediately comes to mind as something you shouldn't use in production is the [Redis KEYS command](https://redis.io/commands/keys).
I don't think it's America specifically, I think it's just all newer parts of cities. Old parts of cities are nice because the ugly parts have been torn down and only the nice buildings remain. The ugly parts of otherwise nice cities tend to be the stuff from the past century that hasn't died off yet.

America is pretty young and grew a ton in the past century, so there's still a ton of 50's era mass-produced architecture and car-centric civic designs. They're not old enough to need replacing yet. I don't think those will stand the test of time, but there's still some gems in there that I hope to see persist. I think we just need more time for the cities to evolve.
Ask HN: What are your favorite resources for learning iOS development?
I know there are some resources from Apple, but my experience with their online getting started wasn't the best. Overall, the way it was written didn't fit with me. It was a dry, step-by-step instruction cookbook with little explanation behind deeper concepts (presumably to make the getting started fast).

How did you learn native-iOS coding? What would you recommend to a developer who wants to get into iOS dev? (i.e. resources presuming previous dev knowledge of loops, control flow, OOP, collections, etc. are OK, even preferable).
As an inexperienced developer I'd just like to add that if you're going to have inexperienced developers.... JUST hiring an experienced developer is not an automatic solution.

You need someone who can bring other developers along, teach with purpose, and etc. Experience developing alone does NOT automatically provide that.

There are experienced developers who are ok, some are amazing, and some who for all their skills straight up can't lead / help other developers for any number of reasons. For those who can't / don't want to that doesn't make them bad or anything, just not suited for helping others.
> For the rest of us, it's perfectly normal to be asked how much we currently make.

Of course. At which point you lie.

It is unlikely that you will be caught unless you ask for something really outrageous.

And if they demand pay stubs, well then they are crazy and you don't want to work there anyway.

I can assure you that the employers are engaging in much worse practices than this.
Healthcare is an abomination. If the will existed, the situation could be radically different, but it never seems to change. "Obamacare" was just another (effective) tax increase in disguise, like adding the fees for a new thing, but never actually changing the thing itself. Sheeple one and all.

Backwards paper systems serving the moneyed interests.
If it takes you leagues longer to penetrate the prose, they elevate exposure and raise returns. ;- )
Basic formula:
0) All companies are now software companies. See https://blogs.thomsonreuters.com/answerson/all-companies-are... etc.
1) Pick a well-established, non-high-tech industry, with poor technological adoption, which is not being dominated by a FAANG. Many options exist: banking, industry, food service, construction, transport, hotels, etc.
2) Start a small, local competitor. Differentiate through better technical service, using better dev process to respond quicker to market conditions.
3) Use that technical differentiation to ease scaling and enable growth. Ad infinitum.

Many enterprises are still stuck in effectively yearly release cycles, not to mention the number of enterprises still encumbered by legacy systems e.g. mainframes etc. Pick a "target" by making some phone calls, doing some networking, find a business which is encumbered this way, and start a competitor. It should not be difficult to steal business from a competitor which a) will take a year to release a response b) whose response will be handicapped by needing to support internal legacy systems with its response.

If you think easy targets like that don't exist, you need to get out of SV and spend some time with the rest of the world.
> There is an ongoing discussion about China weaponizing tourism

And America tried the same tatic with Cuba and many other countries. It's an effective tatic. China isn't doing anything new that hasn't been done before.
But property rights do help people avoid many problems that homeless people have to deal with.
Ask HN: How to deal with GDPR / cookie notices in the context of a crawler?
To comply with the new European legislation many websites put a GDPR / cookie consent notice in front of their websites. There are different implementations of this. While some are only implemented as modal covering the website or bar on the bottom of the screens (in both cases right next to the original content), other implementations redirect the user to a totally different (sub-)domain or even hijack the request and show the consent form instead of the requested content (on the same URL with a 200 status code).

The latter ones present a issue to my crawler. I cannot access the content of the page without accepting those notices.

Things I'm considering to bypass those notices:

* US IP address (easy to implement, but some websites also display those notices to US IP's)

* Heuristics to detect those notices and accept them programatically (takes some time to implement - while a couple of vendors (i.e. OneTrust) offer off-the-shelf solutions which are easy to identify and automate, there are also many custom made solutions, so the system would need understand the concept of a consent form and how to bypass it - some forms only require the press of the right button, others involve checkboxes/radio buttons). To collect test data one solution might be to visit a set of websites once with an US IP, once with an EU IP and/or with different user agents (browser or googlebot).

Do you have any ideas how to approach this problem? Or are you even utilizing some techniques already and are willing to share them?
Yeah, no. If you're not going to put in the effort, then why should anyone else?
Show HN: Maven plugin to verify PGP signatures on downloaded artifacts
Heh. I love EasyPost's product and documentation, but I had some odd account management interactions with them early on. I later learned via LinkedIn that the emails I assumed were from a customer service rep were actually from the CEO. Go figure.

I don't work with them anymore due to a job change, but towards the end they were doing better on the account side of things, and I still recommend them. Great product.
Looks fascinating - I’ve added it to the list. Thanks for the recommendation.
> If someone checks all the boxes from the points raised in this article I would really hope that that sort of behavior never gets normalized because these traits are the exact opposite of what people should strive for in their lives.

I don't see any cause for concern. Putting aside Hollywood nonsense there doesn't seem to be any reason why psychopaths would inherently engage in destructive behavior. In reality psychopaths are quite probably among the most interesting and charming and entertaining people you will ever meet.

Psychopaths can be very manipulative but there's no inherent malicious intent behind this manipulation. They need to be manipulative because all human relations are based on manipulation and so to get anything done they have no choice but to "play the game."

Again, psychopaths are just people who don't get jealous. There are so many stories (really, all of them, from the Bible to virtually every pop song) about jealousy, where jealousy plays a central motivation for virtually all the characters, but to a psychopath, reading stories about characters motivated by jealousy is like reading stories about aliens. Abstractly it makes sense as a motivation but there's no actual 'there' there. Saying "I did X because I was jealous" is like saying "I did X because the voices told me to."

The problem for psychopaths is that virtually all human relations are motivated by jealousy. All of the politicking, the status games, the in-group/out-group and intrapersonal power dynamics that define so much human experience come down to this. And so psychopaths, out of pure necessity in order to participate in such relations, will quickly learn to fake jealousy, to deliberately inspire it in others or carefully suppress it in those they care about it. This is no different from everybody else does, really, they're just doing it for different reasons and are perhaps a bit more deliberate about it.

At this point it's also important to understand the difference between psychopaths and sociopaths. This comment [1] lays it out well. Note the end result here: both psychopaths and sociopaths end up being manipulative of those around them but while sociopaths are often consumed by jealousy and paranoia and will do anything to ensure they "win", psychopaths, more often than not, are seeking a generally optimal or neutral solution, they have little real interest in hurting or helping you in any given encounter.

[1] http://www.thecut.com/_pages/cjkmuv88b00500xy6u0morj7n@publi...
The problem is that the numbers obsession is what drives KPI. Without the "internet points" people wouldn't spend as much time on those sites grinding points, leading to less ad revenue. The economics are fully aligned with the user behavior we see now, and many psychologists and others warned about this over the years
>Statistically, you’re probably not a special snowflake. Everyone thinks that they are and deserve way above what the local market is paying. You probably don’t.

This is a very fiscal conservative thing to say (smacks of "know your place, cog"), so here's what I believe the fiscal conservative answer to be:

"Is the market bearing it? Yes? Then you deserve it."

Bearing in mind "market average" is not what a company is going to quote you off the bat. You should ask for more for that reason.

Bearing in mind that if you ask for more, you'll probably get more. That's just raw dumb game theory, so you should ask for more.

Also, what is this "don't deserve?" Don't deserve? I'm getting an emotional reaction to this! Don't deserve, because we should keep our head down? Chug along, dare not ask for more? What kind of dystopic corporate hell? We talk morals we should talk profit margins corporations pull in and disperse to upper management or CEO. Thank goodness many founders have realized they have to share the pie with equity to get the goods out of the best engineers. But since we're talking about bigger companies, soulless entities that will actually sell your 401k out from under you for a profit, I believe the "right" and "moral" thing to do is to suck every penny out of them as possible, because they'll fuck you in the end if it's profitable.
Yeah, but if I'm already making the market number, then any company that wants me to leave has to provide a reason why I'd want to jump ship. Usually that reason can be more money.
Sounds like the basis for a good novel/movie. Even suggests a title:"Turing Incomplete".
I am a Taiwanese millienial and I am deeply offended by this comment. Why would you say that the claim is understandable? ? Taiwan has been an independent democratic country with its own military, economy, culture, government, rules of law, and international relations for over 50 years. The current Chinese government has never ruled over the island.

Not to mention most Taiwanese currently support independence, especially the young generations. Recent polls have come in around 70-80% of Taiwanese people believing they are 'taiwanese' and in no way associated with China.

China is a big bully and a disgusting entity which keeps trying to write Taiwan off the international stage, via threats to businesses. Recently they were so petty, that when the president visited a bakery (85 degrees) in LA, they were so furious that they wanted the Taiwanese bakery to say that they are 'Taiwan, China'. So fucking ridiculous. Good thing they won't be able to take Taiwan militarily for a long long time. It's a heavily fortified island preparing for such an invasion for 50 years, and history has shown that rarely has any island invasion been successful, especially since China has such a weak military that has never seen real actions.

The world is starting to see the ugly sides of China. And thank god. The Chinese government is horrible and needs to be reduced to irrelevance in the world stage.
Buying an adjustable headrest for my aeron chair solved the problem for me. Also: exercise and proper corrective lenses.
/me wonders how many base pairs are still intact in that pollen. That would be one really nice heirloom seed to have.
I’d agree with the ‘combination’ option.

I was the second person in the team, and the one who hired me was very good. I’d learned discipline at my first job where I worked on (and later solely owned/ran) two systems that handled money. If something went wrong you could trivially figure out how much your screw up just cost the company. So you had to be very careful, which was a great lesson.

The people hired after me were generally quite good (to excellent), but even without much experience they came into an environment where production was very stable and we were careful to keep it that way.

If the people weren’t good enough they wouldn’t have been capable of keeping up that standard. Some didn’t cut it.

I really lucked into a lot of opportunity and fantastic lessons at my first jobs and had great bosses who did good mentoring. I know that’s hard/impossible to replicate on demand.

I agree about negative value. Having seen so much through my jobs I can clearly see bad decisions that make the product less reliable being made, or at least horrible problems being ignored because customers aren’t complaining so let’s make tiny feature X instead.

It seems like most people in the job just have no idea how to manage software development for the long term and can’t see past short term goals/ideas.

That’s probably common across all types of projects/industries, I just wonder if it’s even worse in our industry.
Yep. In many ways the "competency" of a person or group comes down to whether there was a designated person whose job it was to ensure they were following good processes. DJB does it himself, but most people don't do it for themselves.
>My wife's MacBookPro sometimes fails to wake from sleep, gets incredibly hot under load and doesn't support my displayport MST monitors, but I wouldn't claim that Mac laptops universally "sucked".

That's because some Mac laptops do those things and others don't (it's a combo of OS version, graphics card, chipset, model, and so on).

Whereas the problems I'm talking about regarding Linux are integral to the OS and ecosystem (and occur for everybody, regardless of setup).

Now, some of those problems might be non-issues for others since they never do X or Y things with their Linux laptops. But for me, that need to do X and Y those are problems. X and Y being for example heavy professional video and music editing.

But there are also lotsa things that are genuine problems in desktop Linux use, regardless of use cases. Having problem with a laptop sleep or getting the 3D acceleration / compositor to play properly etc, for example is not just some rare case on the wrong production run / OS combo, but a constant across distros and laptop brands, and usually the solution is to just carefully research and get a support combo (or just be lucky).
I think one’s self worth is intrinsically linked to acceptance, with or without Facebook, especially in younger people. FB (and others like it) just exploited the weakness.
> we're in a extreme situation where employers need people but aren't willing to move salaries upward to get it

This line nails it and is true for so many companies now it's painful. Just a few weeks ago I was trying to help a hiring manager fix his candidate pipeline for qualified people and when I dug in, his target salary was the same as it was in 2010.

I think the fundamental problem is that outside of tech, companies are completely unwilling to potentially sacrifice corporate profits to raise wages. Instead, they'll explore every possible alternative from outsourcing to "contract-to-hire" (spoiler: they'll never hire) to underpaid H1B to piling more responsibilities onto fewer people before even considering bumping pay up. The second chart in [1] summarizes the situation nicely.

[1] https://www.wealthdaily.com/articles/the-real-culprit/6276
Great site, ask.metafilter.com as well
As someone who way too many times have had to try to wrangle data sent as excel sheets into useful shape, this doesn’t surprise me even a little bit.
Opportunity Rover on Mars Still Silent 2 Months into Epic Dust Storm
There aren't that many people willing to go to a skate park next to an airport, it's way too far.
Your argument is well-phrased, and theoretically correct, but in reality recruiters often work with a large subset of the job market in their area. The market is tight right now, and hiring managers have no reason to only work with one recruiter. On the contrary: they will cast the widest net, talk to any viable recruiter, and typically disclose comp information to that recruiter.

I agree it's not perfect information, but in reality if you job hop, work closely with several recruiters, and negotiate well - you'll get a pretty good idea of your market value, imho.

Employees who have the least idea of their market value are those who stayed in the same job for a long time, and haven't interviewed or talked to recruiters in years.

I completely agree with your earlier assertion that it's quite possible that entire sectors of the tech industry are underpaid, but the employers' frantic and often limited efforts to keep comp data secret are just one reason for that.
Recurring meetings are bad. Most people come unprepared and since it is recurring unless you have made any progress, you are wasting time just for the sake of it.

Publishing agenda before meeting is a must. There is no point in starting a meeting on a blank note.

Many meetings can just be conducted over threads on slack or Microsoft team. What I mean by this is, the type of meeting where you want to confirm or come to an agreement over something, that chat thread can help flush out details before you waste everyones time over it.

In short, move most of your meeting and emails to your collaboration tool.
Voilà!
I was there with Ticketmaster. It was hilarious. We went back and forth for a good five minutes (that's a long time in a phone call) with our entire arsenal of canned responses. I was a recruiter in the past so I could just hear her going down the list. It got to the point where I don't think she realized I was looking for an out by saying things like "it's ok if we can't reach an agreement, we don't have to proceed with employment discussions." I had to eventually hard end the call with something like "I'm no longer interested in the opportunity."

Still goes down as my favorite recruitment call. No better way to practice "never give a number."