skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I recently got a raise by asking for it and it was the first time I did something like that. It was a great exercise and a good learning experience. A few things I figured out:

Rather than stating that you have another offer, you can research what people in your field are making. When I asked for a raise, I put together charts and graphs of what people are making in the industry in order to justify the raise.

Instead of saying you would like 150k per year, ask for a very specific amount such as 152,400 so that it seems like you've really calculated this number.

Ask for a range rather than a single number, such as 152,400-161,100. They will likely offer something at the lower end of the range but next to the higher number, the lower number look a lot lower than it would alone.

Be prepared to ask for intangibles if you don't get the monetary compensation. You can ask for your own office, more vacation time, to work from home, etc. But don't ask for these until after they have respond to your request for more money or they may default to this instead of more money.

Understand the mindset. Even if you don't get a raise right now when you ask for it, you are doing yourself a great service by asking for more. You are showing that you feel you are worth it, which translates to a lot of respect from management. Even if you don't immediately get the raise, there is a good chance you'll get a lot more of a raise at your next review just because you indicated that you aren't afraid to ask for more and you have confidence in
your own ability and value.

Management would rather have a good employee ask for a raise than just go out and find another job without giving them the opportunity to discuss it.
We should form a committee that will help him decide what to carry throughout the day and how to do it. Perhaps the NYC regulation should have included that provision.
The hard thing to remember as engineers, is that it's pretty much always a human that signs the paycheck at the end of the day.
At least 80% of the forms I fill out in Japan will ask for era year. It’s easier for me to say aloud, too: “showa yon jū hachi” versus “sen kyū hyaku nana jū san nen”.
The problem with finding a new job, as a programmer, is that you'll have to read and become familiar with a new codebase. Most programmers I know love coding, but hate reading other people's code.
You have to closely monitor the suspect once you've identified them to be a credible threat.

How do you track their whereabouts and communication channels if everything is encrypted?
Last week's Brexit indicative votes were widely reported as a failure, but I think that's unfair. The idea was always to indicate which directions might have support, not to magically resolve the dispute. For example, the SNP, Lib Dems and Independent Group all abstained on the "soft Brexit" options, because they prefer a second referendum, but they'd clearly prefer a soft Brexit over no deal.

I made a spreadsheet that interprets the indicative votes as preferences, Aye / Abstain / No → 1st / 2nd / 3rd, and compares all the motions head-to-head against each other.

It turns out that “customs union” is the clear winner, beating every other motion head to head. “Public vote” is narrowly second, and there's a clear rank ordering of the remaining options -- no rock-paper-scissors cycles.

I think this shows that last week's indicated votes were useful, and we could see some real progress in the second round of voting this evening, as long as MPs are willing to make reasonable compromises.
Google "hyena birth"... I do not recommend doing this at work, or during lunch.
Top Free Project Management Software Solutions to Get Things Done
Valve is a well-known company that works like this. People who've left say that hierarchy and power structure still exist, but is informal and hidden.
What's Wrong with Landing Pages
It's time again for me to recommend Measuring and Managing Performance in Organizations by Austin[0].

Don't let the underwhelming title fool you: it's largely a book on why it can't be done. Austin takes classical principal-agent models and extends it to add a third participant: the client. He then shows that difficult-to-observe work at first improves and then worsens under any metrics regime.

No single metric can be found that will give the desired performance. The basket of metrics that can successfully create the desired outcome is one where the principal has total visibility into the agent's work -- which contradicts the original problem of difficult-to-observe work (ie, anything requiring skill).

[0] http://www.dorsethouse.com/books/mmpo.html
Why would it be unprofessional to say the number out loud?

I’d say the most dangerous part of the approach you’re recommending is that it doesn’t provide any context for why the raise is justified to the company.

This is only an emotional subject for the person getting the paycheck; it’s not emotional for the business, and it’s only emotional for the employee because of years of ingrained stigma about salary.
Sounds a bit like wildlife Conservancies found dotted across the developing world[0]. While the rules and some funding come from centralised authorities, the land that is put aside for wildlife conservation is done so by local peoples at their own discretion, and the management and work in each conservancy are conducted by the locals. I guess Conservancies in the developing world contrast with the organised national parks and state run conservation areas of countries like the USA and New Zealand.

But both forms of organsation can work together. If you look at the map of Namibia in this reference [1], you can see how conservancies offer a buffer zone to that country's national parks.

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communal_Wildlife_Conservancie...
1. http://www.met.gov.na/services/conservancies/193/
Re: the animal analogy... If you want to extend the sales-lingo, the term is "rats and mice" not mice and flies.

Jests aside, I like this kind of abstract strategic thinking process. It reminds me of the "1000 true fans" writeup from the last decade. But, it's important to remember this is scaffolding for thinking strategically, not a blueprint. Often, the winning tactic is to break such "rules." But, thinking within a framework like this can focus the mind. It's useful to realize you're breaking a rule when trying to break it.

For example:

"1,000 enterprise customers paying you $100k+ per year each"

There are lots of examples of sub-enterprise sized companies (even small businesses where everyone can still fit in a jumbo taxi) paying this much... for something.

A big example is advertising. Plenty of businesses spend 10% or more of their budget on advertising. How many software startups pay google/fb most of the money they raise from VCs? This applies to lots of businesses from SAAS apps to dental clinics. There are ad-management apps that charge 5% of ad spending. Services that charge 15%-20%.

Another example is "franchises." Mcdonalds corporate's business model is to make $100k+ from small-medium businesses. It's not a very startup-ey example but an example nonetheless. The uber-of-x business model is kind of a reverse example of franchising. Uber charges the customer, and cuts the driver their share. If the customer were to pay drivers and the and the drivers paid uber... you have the mcdonalds model. It's debateable whether this counts as "selling to consumers" or "selling to businesses," but there're specific examples in both camps.

So, it's possible to sell 100k software to a $1m-$10m businesses... But it is very useful to realize that this is rulebreaking. An enterpirse pays $100k+ for lots of things. A small business will only pay that much if it's absolutely core to their business model. Usually this means it's absolutely indispensible to gettng customers.
Thanks! I didn't really have any big ideas starting out other than "I don't know what my computer is doing 99% of the time, what if I could drastically change that number?"
I'm a lot more worried about digital terrorism than analogue. Analogue terrorist attacks have limited scale and impact, but a digital terrorist attack can have a country wide or even global impact. Secure and encrypted communications are just as important to thwart digital terrorism as they are to preserve an individuals privacy, security and rights.
The American math curriculum is embarassing to even explain to most europeans. An “advanced” high school senior in the US might be taking Calculus 1. Most students graduate barely able to explain what a linear function or a quadratic equation is.
> Now on the issue of people gaming metrics, that is a real concern and I typically address it with "counter metrics" intended to protect against gaming.

From the article:

> In an attempt to staunch the flow of faulty metrics through gaming, cheating and goal diversion, organisations often institute a cascade of rules, even as complying with them further slows down the institution’s functioning and diminishes its efficiency.
The aim is to get the standards low enough for everyone to pass. It’s equations with variables.
Your comments are helpful and it is aligned with my observations as well.

I have been on both sides of the hiring table, and while the engineer in me wants to give constructive feedback so that the rejected candidate can better themselves for their next interview, the corporate management in me is telling to do something else.

It has been a conflicting point of view in my head ever since I got involve in hiring.
I never understood what is the motivation for keeping the salaries in industry secret. It seems to reward precisely the wrong kind of behavior!
I was thinking about, but the practical value of sequence diagrams is somewhat questionable for me. Will add it to the list.
I would strongly recommend against the "I have another offer, can you matched" strategy. For starters, you've just revealed your cards: that you are talking to competitors or that you don't have much interest in working in your current spot.

If you want a raise, ask for a meeting with your manager and layout a few good reasons why you need a raise: you've worked there without a raise for a year+, you've tackled on more responsibilities and executed.

Generally, to get a raise you need to meet some sort of expectation or goal. Sometimes managers are bad at setting those goals - so do it for them. Don't tie those goals to money beforehand. Wait til the goal is reached then review your performance. Most managers will find it hard to turn you down.
Facebook removes coordinated inauthentic behavior from India and Pakistan
Reminds me of Goodheart's law[1].

We have known this for a long time, but it is hard to have an alternative system which scales well with huge organizations. For startups and small companies, I could see an informal system working pretty well, but as the company grows to hundreds or thousands of employees, it becomes necessary to standardize and have some kind of metrics used for reporting and evaluations. This will inevitably shift the company's culture towards gaming those metrics.

Somewhat like grading systems in education. High grades don't necessarily mean you will be capable of generating more value to society than average grades or even low grades. And students often become good at improving their grades without that actually adding much value. But there is a correlation. And we don't have many better (non-experimental) alternatives that I'm aware of.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
OK - so its quite clear then - you need to decide between getting a raise and staying in your comfort zone.

Even within the same organization - a raise would typically entail that you take on new or more responsibilities.
Sometimes that happens. I try not to skip breaks, they are important part of pomodoro. But Emacs ain't my dad - if I feel like skipping a break or taking one before the end of the current cycle - I just do it. There are days when I simply can't maintain discipline of concentrating focus and taking breaks within intervals then I simply don't use org-pomodoro. I would clock-in on a task and work until I'm tired. I'm not a contractor, I don't need to report my "billable hours" yet clocking in helps me to maintain focus on the task and keep notes. There's a way in Emacs to attach a note onto currently clocked-in task without having to navigate to it.
This has been going on for about a year, when someone started posting Ex-Vegan Dokumentations, where people talk about why they aren't vegan anymore.
Then there is Frank Tufano who's been beating on vegans for a while.
It has bred some kind of conspiracy theory where they blame big corp and govt for promoting the vegan lifestyle with the aim to make people stupid and emotinally fragile.
Then, to add to it, big corp seems to be annoyed by more people turning to keto and have been promoting sugar water and fruit smoothies in Germany. (I've seen 2-3 adds where it explicitly says: "ignore keto, eat balanced, dring our sugar water vitamins" or something in that jargon.
RRIT researchers set to help LIGO resume hunt for ripples in space and time
I see you have some experience with this.

It does go one of two ways, not always "when it doesn't work". But many times your salary will indeed be capped in some manner you're not aware of.

Be prepared to lose this negotiation, but don't go in thinking that you will. That will set you up to fail.
Mostly this. I was a hiring manager at a big company where HR made it very clear we cannot give specific feedback to applicants. We also could not give references for the same reason; fear of being sued. But after a while you learn to speak in code for those cases where you really feel you need to provide meaningful information.

The last time I was asked for a reference I was contacted by a hiring manager who said they were about to make an offer and just needed a couple references. It was a previous employee who had been a particularly low performer. My response was "Company policy prevents me from providing any references. However, (pregnant pause) you should always be very careful and selective in your hiring process." The hiring manager asking for the reference was baffled. She must have been new and had not yet learned the code. Later I bumped into her at some industry event and she thanked me profusely because my non-reference prompted her to do more digging and she learned just how bad that candidate was.

Moral of the story: learn the code (strikes me as kinda funny on HN where the usual advice is learn to code)
Rethinking the Battle Against Depression
I don't ask brain-teasers during an interview, but time and time again the value of a simple coding assignment has proven its worth. It is simply amazing to me how many candidates seem to lack the basic ability to code a couple of nested for loops, and weeding those candidates out early streamlines the whole interview process.

I will typically do this on a phone screen, having informed the candidate beforehand that they need to be near a computer with an internet connection during the call. Typically this will be after business hours, so they're at home where they're comfortable, and on their own machine, whatever it is.

I use a site called rextester to administer the test. I've been using it for years, and it's fantastic.

https://rextester.com/runcode

As the tester, you go to the site, choose the language, and click 'live cooperation' at the bottom. Then you email or tell the candiate the link to follow, and both of you click on it to go to the shared coding editor. You can now see the candidate type and talk about how they're solving the problem, editing yourself to give hints/clarity if need be. To save time, you can have some code handy to paste in and pre-seed the problem if you choose (like a list of data to sort, etc.)

This tool has proven immensely useful in my interview process, and beats the hell out of whiteboard coding in person, IMHO.

[edit - spelling]
It’s the kill zone competitive strategy applied to education (competitors to your children) instead of big tech. Make sure nothing can develop that threatens your family’s market position.
And this just illustrates the horror that is the proprietary market place of WordPress plugins. It is annoying because this results in incentives to take away freedom from users and require payment for proprietary code in the guise of a free software project. To expand Word Press functionality beyond the core functions you have to wade through a minefield of freemium plugins that have all been slightly broken to encourage you to shell out money to someone for code you won't have any freedom with and the worst of it possibly demonstrated by code like this. I have built some sites with WordPress but I have always felt stifled by the way the plugins and themes are distributed. On the other hand I understand people like being able to charge money and create businesses from the code they right which can be more challenging if you actually write free as in libre software vs. attempting to extract money from every potential user.
I found it surprisingly comfortable to read :)
I actively say things similar to what you said. For example, if I’m ever asked why I want the job or why I’d be a good match at the company, I will always say I don’t know. I’ll always say I’m not trying to be facetious or dodge the question, but with limited information from a job listing, maybe a few phone calls, and a day of small 1-hour interviews (that are mostly made up of coding questions with no time for me to ask questions), then it’s just not possible to give a sincere answer that has any more depth than a rehearsed answer based on LinkedIn advice listicles or something.
I think that's more due to culture. Java culture, to be precise. The same goes for the dozens of mostly-empty deeply nested directories and other fluff.

You can write C# with far less bloat, and compile it using only the command line, but Visual Studio generates the usual project layout by default.
When you try to understand math education, remember that it’s basically what would happen if foreign language classes were designed and taught by people who only spoke English and had no training in formal language theory.

Of course it’s largely a disaster: it’s taught by people who brag about hating the subject!

Algebra education can (and does) safely begin in first grade, with the introduction of workbooks: “4 + [ ] = 7” is a common exercise, and involves the implicit solving of a basic linear equation, where you solve for the value which goes in the box.

That you can teach algebra to first graders, but math education is so abysmal, only speaks to the complete disregard mathematics is given in education.

But what else would you expect when you leave it up to people who hate math?
> Ubuntu 16.04 and I hope nobody needs to use significantly older systems.

Hah, good one.
But your college courses seems to be so high quality. How does a student in the US go from what sounds like quite a limited education in maths at high-school to doing so well in maths at college? What connects the two up?
Please no one do this. No paper or props necessary
Web Developer Monthly – What Happened in March?
Unless you're being sarcastic and I'm just missing it, I think you'r missing the point here.

The author says quite clearly that it's "for fun and education".
If you get told no, it's very important to ask why

Right. Alternatively you can ask "what can I do on my side to make my salary higher". The management tends to get less defensive and now open with such approach.
...and then there are tools used in organisations (like ours) which track how many hours you been on PC (ON PC time) vs Off PC time (So called "Productivity tracking"). More the ON PC time means you are "highly productive". This metric is also usually taken-up during appraisal discussions and questions are put on one's productivity.
That’s… interesting. Stephen King advice for aspiring writers is to read a lot. I’s say same goes for developers. Even if you read a lousy code you can at least anslyse what makes it lousy and how can it be improved. Reading good code will reinforce the understanding what good code is and might give some ideas for the future.
Hating reading other’s code is a sign if the still novice programmer. Imho, of course.
No. It would be authoritarian it was done as in Russia. Like bolsheviks came and declared a few letters from an alphabet deprecated and also they rewrote grammar. A few decades later they released a bugfix for their new grammar.

In France seems they have no authority to change anything. They cannot order to a school teachers to teach new grammar, or to writers to stop using some letters or words.
If I had to interview someone for a programming job, I think I'd try using LeetCode problems, but NOT as coding challenges. I'd pick a few problems that the candidate and I both find somewhat interesting, and then for each do three things.

First, we'd both read the problem, and talk about our understanding of what it is asking for.

Second, we'd talk about algorithms to solve it, probably at a whiteboard. No need for actual code, or even pseudocode. Anything that gets the ideas across would be fine. Somewhere in here we'd also talk about what cases are tricky and what we would need to do to make sure any test input we were to write would cover them. I'd try to let the candidate drive this, but would provide sufficient hints and nudges to get to a solution and not count needing that against them--this is really just setup for the third part, which is the most important part.

Finally, and most importantly, we'd go to the LeetCode discussion area for that problem and look at solutions people have posted and review them together. Many of the solutions will have mistakes, ranging from minor to major, and trying to spot those together and talking about how to fix them would, I think, give good insights into both the candidate's technical abilities and how they work with others.
Wikipedia quotes[1] Rasmus Lerdorf as saying: "I don't know how to stop it, there was never any intent to write a programming language [...] I have absolutely no idea how to write a programming language, I just kept adding the next logical step on the way."

Another relevant quote: "I'm not a real programmer. I throw together things until it works then I move on. The real programmers will say 'Yeah it works but you're leaking memory everywhere. Perhaps we should fix that.' I’ll just restart Apache every 10 requests."

And: "For all the folks getting excited about my quotes. Here is another - Yes, I am a terrible coder, but I am probably still better than you :) "

...which is probably true, but all the more reason to use tools that work properly rather than encouraging me to build more poorly thought-out stuff on top of a broken hack.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PHP#cite_ref-itconversations_1...

[2] https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Rasmus_Lerdorf
Assume you can't.
This is true for large companies. For cash-strapped organizations (like startups) they could really want you to stay but would rather not stretch themselves thin unless they were forced to.
FYI, list formatting works best when you leave an empty line between each item.

1. just

2. like

3. this
Thanks for the clarification on the “implicit license” point, I glossed over a little bit quickly. I should definitely have said “every use that is not explicitly or implicitly allowed is a copyright infringement”.

Your first point doesn't really bring much though, since it falls in the “explicitly allowed” part of my comment.

Overall, my whole point stands still: if anyone went on GitHub, downloaded the project and did anything with it that went beyond fair use, that would be a copyright infringement because neither the author nor GitHub granted you any permission to do so.
France is a white country, so I don't know what's so surprising about having only white people there. The nytimes is trying to apply American standards to everything.