skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Super cool. Thank you!
Maybe their assumptions are flawed?
Yes and often startups are the ones taking a risk to solve more challenging problems with technology versus the FAANG like companies who operate in large or multiple markets that have predictable money in them for example ads or e-commerce. The pay and overall wealth in tech are tied to some ethically questionable problems and the fact startups can't pull top talent to solve hard problems that are still potentially vastly profitable is worrying. I expect things in the startup world to be even more uphill at least with tech talent in the next decade unless there is a major shift in incentives, this however, will require either restructuring the average equity agreements or early investments with larger money for larger salary for key early employees.
> If google finds a way to run itself with 5k developers instead of 30k, that's a scary change

Google has a lot more than this, FWIW.
It is about supply and demand in the labor market, full stop. People aren't paid based on the value they create. They are paid based on how hard it is to find other people who can do the same thing.
Based on what I'm seeing living in Vietnam for the last 4 years, the tech salaries here are increasing YoY as developers realize they can make as much as those 'bay area' people. They increasingly have the same level of talents, or better, so why not? Not only that, but the cost of living is increasing in the larger cities like HCMC, so the argument that it is cheaper living is starting to lose weight.
Cantor called, he wants his hotel room numbers back
Ask HN: How do you manage your personal health history?
I am looking for ways to properly manage list of tests I have done, test results, suggested actions, actions taken etc. The simplest way is to do with cloud docs and drive. Any recommendations?
The Dril Turing Test
> less than "doctors and lawyers"

I didn't say it's the same quantity of work, if you read my comment carefully. Nor is that the main argument at all. I said it requires special traits, which it does. People who skip any formal education and are still great developers are very rare, and those people definitely have special skills and talents (e.g. you can't point out >99th percentile gifted kids in music or math and claim that it's "easy").
> While both of those categories worked hard too, it's still an order of magnitude less than "doctors and lawyers".

Having been to law school, I'd argue that's more about regulatory barriers than inherent complexity. Coming from a family of doctors, I also suspect that medicine is the same, though I couldn't say so first-hand.

That's not to say that regulation is unnecessary. If a bootcamp grad makes a snafu, a widget might not render correctly on a website. If it's a lawyer or a doctor, someone could die or get screwed out of their life-savings. Regulation is there to verify that they've all met the threshold. I don't really have a problem with that. But I recognize that it doesn't make one "harder" than the other.
> So you can be old and crippled finally going on the vacation you dreamed of?

No, so you can retire early, as in your 40s. It's stated clearly in the article and not easy to misinterpret.
I was coincidentally looking for exactly this through the stores (online or otherwise) in Australia that should in theory stock this, and the only one that was remotely close was Kogan's rebranded bargain-basement LCDs that had middling reviews.

Are there any particular brands I should be looking for?
Can't blame them. If I owned a software company I wouldn't touch politics with a mile long pole.
My tires will have to be replaced in the spring but maintenance costs other than that are about $120 for oil change and filter once per season. What other costs are you getting?
Yes very common among people considered "bookworms" as children. Learning vocabulary through reading not hearing. Can sometimes be embarrassing but it's better to know what a word means and pronounce it wrong than to not know the meaning at all.
But... we understand EXACTLY why developers are paid so well. Economics (the same reason EVERY profession is paid the way they are). There are two factors that come into play for employee pay- 1. Supply/demand: When demand outstrips supply, prices rise. The demand for software so vastly outstrips the ability to produce it that salaries are being driven very high because 2. The marginal value that an employee can produce. This is a hard cap on the salary that any profession can charge, and is the primary driver for demand. So long as 2 is higher than the prevailing salary, demand will continue to rise, which will apply upwards pressure on salaries.

Of course, high salaries will attract more supply over time, which will put pressure back down on salaries. The current dynamic is SO out of whack though- there is a ton of slack in the system.

This isn't a boom/bust thing either. There is SO MUCH business value that could be had if there were programmers available to build the software. I don't think we're even scratching the surface of everything that could be profitably built yet. I think betting on a big bust in software engineer salaries would be a bad move.
A collapse in wages seems unreasonable. Wages are almost always sticky and so wages will go down at most at the rate of inflation.

Also this line:

> Compensation appears to be proportional to the level of sacrifice

Is a doozy and not at all how modern economies work.

I do agree with the general sentiment though. The mechanisms controlling supply and demand of SDEs are not well understood and it is much easier to imagine a shock to SDE supply/demand than doctor supply/demand or lawyer supply/demand. That being said, this would result in a reduction of employment rather than a reduction of wages for those lucky enough to continue being employed.
I agree, however the problem is that it's becoming increasingly difficult to purchase a "non-smart" tv. At my local stores here in Canada I don't think any exist!
They do, they just don't call them TVs. Look up commercial digital displays, exact same brands with the same screens as the consumer model but no tracking and bloatware. Of course, without the subsidies from selling your data, they're going to run you an extra 30-50%
> This person appears to be blowing half of their income on charitable donations every year, though, which is admirable but not a smart financial decision.

Well, duh. Giving money away is always a dumb financial decision. Presumably they don’t particularly care and can survive without it.
How does the video host make enough money to keep afloat? A number of YouTube's controversial decisions have had been prompted, at least in part, with advertiser backlash.
I am embarrassed to say I hadn't considered this actually; and it's a good point. But considering it, no, I don't. She simply doesn't have the mind for it, as far as I can tell.
"The best senior dev on the backend team of a small company is probably a garbage coder compared to the new guy at some Bay Area startup."

Just because someone shows up in the bay area it doesn't make them instantly good coders/developers/programmers. Just because a company is in the bay area it doesn't make the dev team good either. Usually the great devs are at fangs or working at a cool startup. There are a lot of companies with little hope and a lot of teams without solid experience.

The best dev at a small company could be the best in the world or the 5th worst.
From what I have seen is a lot of good developers end up at a small places because of the challenge and/or lifestyle.
what's the actual number? I tried Googling it, and the first few results are giving me numbers from 5+ years ago (around 20k)
And if ageism in the industry is as bad as it seems to be, being able to retire in your 40s might be a pretty important consideration. If nothing else, it gives you a way to turn down work you don't like doing.
About a year ago there is this one... https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/jul/31/first-ever-p...
$120/season for oil change and filter + new tires every 2 years (unsure of the costs here as I've yet to need this on my new bike). Surely this is comparable or less than the average ICE car?
What country would that be?
Thats why i said "western" rural. Although John Day has some fiber out there, and just got the feds or someone to kick down 6M to build out more.
> [privacy] [Plex]

Plex forces centralized Internet authentication for your locally-hosted server, and uses a variety of centralized services that have access to your served files' titles and other metadata. Furthermore Plex collects a variety of usage information statistics. I don't think it's possible to entirely opt out of these services or collection, or indeed use Plex at all without Internet access.

Although Plex claims to "care deeply" about privacy in its privacy policy, there is no blanket statement guaranteeing the privacy of your data and usage habits, or at least none without weasel words.
> The significant quantity of bootcamp graduates also landing jobs does too.

Bootcamp graduates aren't really "software engineers" yet, let alone good ones. They require close mentorship by a software engineer to get to a point they can do useful work unsupervised.

That guy who mentors them did take several years to learn his craft.

These bootcamp graduates may eventually become good engineers, but it will take a few years.

So either way, it takes several years to become a good software engineer, just like GP claims.

Also, I'm not even sure how many "bootcamp graduates" are landing good industry jobs. I mean no disrespect, but generally most jobs that can afford to be selective prefer experienced engineers or graduates of 4 year programs. Finally, I'd love to see some numbers, but I don't see a massive flood of bootcamp graduates landing jobs in the industry. They are relatively rare in all places I've worked at.
Wage isn’t based on the difficulty of the job.

Wage is based on the opportunity cost of the uncaptured labor value incurred due to employment. For software engineering, this is acute since with the same skills needed for employment one can make a competing enterprise to their employer and capture all the value.

Other professions require you to have large capital to do so, so the opportunity cost is either non-existent if you cannot access that capital or further discounted by the financing cost/risk.

Your end SWE wage ends up being the value you would otherwise be able to capture discounted to the expected value w.r.t your risk.

Companies profit on employment by having a lower risk in enterprising, thus a better EV, than their employees in the same enterprise for a given number of reasons—brand, preexisting customer base, speed, proprietary market analytics, etc.
It wouldn't be worth pointing out if:

A. It wasn't so much.

B. They weren't trying to police the habits of others.

This post is bizarre in the context of that: it's telling people to do the opposite of what the author does.

Giving money isn't even exclusively a bad financial decision. In a lot of cases, it makes sense. I don't think it does here.
I started following the dril gpt2 account on Twitter. Its amazing how realistic many of those tweets sound.
The article doesn't mention two very important things working in the programmers favor - leverage and margin.

A software product can scale to hundreds of millions of customers with just a few employees (ex. WhatsApp). This increases revenue per employee.

Software companies have much higher margins compared to other industries. You can attribute this to network effects and stickiness from lack of easy data interop between different vendors. This limits competition that drive down margins.

Hardware engineers in chip design command decent salaries also from leverage but the ability for a company to switch vendors limits margins, unless you have IP like qualcomm.
This definitely flies in the face of what the economist Milton Friedman[1] perceived as our societal values.

I personally hope this kind of thinking isn’t the trend.

[1] https://youtu.be/km9OCw3f5w4
That's also the premise of Pascal's wager. By their reasoning, believing in God has a low risk, and high reward. You pray a bit, go to church, and you could end up in heaven. Whereas not believing in God could either be inconsequential, or land you in hell, low reward, high risk. So a betting man should always choose to believe in god. Of course we know that's not how it plays out.

I have had fun with this thought of risk recently. It seems risk is hard to communicate between people, because sometimes people conflate the occurrence rate of the risk with the negative effects of the risk in question. So it's a low occurrence rate for an oil drill to spill, but the damage is the death of the ecosystem around it. You could argue the risk is both high and low for different reasons yet I don't often here people clarify that detail when talking about risk.

In the scenario of my wage dropping, I would say it's a low risk for me, both because of my location and the economy my wage is based on, and because the damage of my wages dropping is low because I haven't leveraged my earnings. Little damage is to be done, AND the likelihood of a drop is also low.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal%27s_wager
A fair response to those focusing on labour market dynamics. If you look at the profits generated per employee at top companies there’s plenty of room for engineers to capture more and more of the pie.

Similar things are going on in startups these days. Early employees are getting screwed even in cases where their startup is hugely successful. In those cases there’s opportunity for enormous increases in compensation for engineers if better bargaining means the founders and particularly the VCs take less.
Clearly, these (minor) grammar issues are predicated on an ESL background. This package is very respectable and relevant to the #1 post on HN as of this morning [1]. Why disrespect the OP in the light of legitimate engineering?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21899491
I'm confused.

The article literally states several reasons programmers are paid so well yet states "What makes me nervous, though, is that we don't really understand why programmers are paid this well".
I don't know, if we're talking comparable salaries to top lawyers (his analogy, the ones that get to top firms and become partners), then we're talking at least Staff+ levels at top tech firms for comparison. That's definitely more than a few years of work, and definitely requires talents and skills that not everyone has. If you get there in a few years of work without much effort, then you're naturally highly gifted.
Not saying you're necessarily wrong, but there's been similar comments about India and China since the early 2000s. India alone has over 1.3bn people, and compensation there is still a fraction of what it is in the US. If it was all just a numbers game, there should not have been a single working developer in the US right now.
Exactly. Very, very well explained.
I'm sure the front page will shortly feature a story on someone's new "CD-ripping as a service" startup.
Because I'm not just made of money
What CRUD app companies pay top tier salaries currently? They all pay much less than GAFAM from what I have read.
The comparison to doctors is an interesting one, but also a very poor one. Doctors run a cartel in the traditional economic sense. The AMA pushed to restrict the number of residency slots, and what’s more is that Medicare incentivizes teaching hospitals to prefer specialists over general practitioners. Doctors are certainly overpaid.

Restrictions like HIPAA and such make it difficult to outsource labor on the software side.

It’s clear engineers are overpaid in the US relative to developer salaries in other wealthy countries. That makes me uneasy, but we got here without a well defined union or cartel to restrict inflow of labor.
> Of course, high salaries will attract more supply over time, which will put pressure back down on salaries.

It's not clear to me that there aren't soft and hard caps on supply, even if everyone wanted to be a programmer because the compensation was so great. There are certainly aspects of intelligence, temperament, and personality that are needed to crank through information, organization, and abstraction problems as part of a team for decades of one's life.
I think in my mind at the time I was comparing it to Hennessy and Patterson; something that is obviously playing a in a completely different league!

Over time I have become a bit more realistic :) I've stopped worrying if it's better or worse than anything else. As long as it's factually correct, I think a rising tide floats all boats so the more we all write and read others work, the better off we'll be.
It was easy for him landing that job but what happens is the environment is changing quickly whatever he knows now he will have to pivot.
That song and dance has been preached for at least 20 years and I'm still waiting for it to happen. After working several jobs managing outsourced talent, the problem for me was never quality of engineer, it's proximity to the business requirements.

If you're a programmer in a different country with a completely different culture you may simply not understand the reasoning behind why or how you are solving a customer's problem.

No amount of documenting and specing ahead of time can correct this to the same degree as having a programmer that truly understands the business problems they are solving.
No. So you can be old and crippled and still live.

If you are assuming that you will always be able to work, making the wages you make today, then you will have a rude awakening the day that you cannot. Living below your means has been almost universally good advice since the dawn of civilization.

I do appreciate your sentiment however, in that there is a lot of advice from FIRE types who talk about even the most minor indulgence as some hedonistic waste of money. And it makes sense to remind those who go to that extreme, that spending money now can actually buy a little happiness. But I think you're being slightly disingenuous by taking the parent comment to the extreme of living off rehydrated beans when they're simply reiterating the idea of saving as a virtue.
You know "medical coder" has NOTHING to do with software right?
I think there's a balance between what you and grandparent are suggesting, but it's hard to strike, and there seems to be a lot more advice about either retiring by 40 or yoloing it than striking that balance.
> But music on the web is very hard to make work as a long term thing, the bills have to be paid and even if the content is user generated you still need to supervise it and ensure that people don't pull tricks to vandalize it or destroy it.

Absolutely, and it's thankless work too, like how the #1 user-agent string on FreeDB's statistics page is "FreedbDemo" straight from their example code project. Moderation is more necessary now, though, with the Musicbrainz/Discogs paradigm where there's one canonical "correct" listing for every artist/album/whatever. One of my favorite parts of FreeDB/CDDB (and one of the reasons I use it to this day) is how many albums have multiple user-submitted entries that fit different tagging styles. I totally get how some people would consider that a downside, and it still doesn't preclude vandals crapflooding you with bogus garbage entries, but I don't consider a lot of the MB/Discogs tagging guidelines to be especially good. Any tag source I use—including the paid GD3—is guaranteed to need at least a little editing, and I find that FreeDB gets me closer to my ideal tagging format more often than any of the others.
> Woah... I wonder if bacteria could in some cases drive certain cancers?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carcinogenic_bacteria

Very roughly, 1 cancer out of 10 has an infectious cause.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infectious_causes_of_cancer

The focus in the last decades was mostly about genetic causes of cancer but as it happens for other diseases (see recent discussion on Alzheimer), it is now shifting to other causes. Statnews.com is a good web site to read for lay people like me, who are interested in serious medical related news.
> When your inputs are from real JSON emitters, it is silly to even have error handling other than rejection.

I'm guessing from this that a "real JSON emitter" is one that perfectly implements the JSON spec and has absolutely zero bugs? Does such a thing exist?

> Exposing a "helpful" JSON parser to the internet is a bad idea, and probably a waste of electricity, since the error messages will likely go into a black hole.

There's a lot of software where any kind of unexpected error just gets repeated back to the user. I'm sure you've seen a modal popup like:

Unexpected error, please try again
(SyntaxError: JSON.parse: expected ‘,’ or ‘]’ after array element)

This is immensely unhelpful to basically everyone involved. If the message at least hints that it's due to a problem with the input itself -- for example: "SyntaxError: Invalid value ‘01’" -- then it's much more likely that an end-user can figure out which value is causing the problem and work-around it, and report a much more meaningful bug to the developer (thus allowing it to be solved significantly faster).

Taking the argument that "helpful" JSON parse errors are pointless to its logical conclusion, there should only be a single possible error "JSON parsing failed", and I can't see how that's anything but a recipe for making everyone absolutely despise your API/product/etc, especially were your JSON parser ever to have even a single bug that caused that response erroneously.
What do you think about it?! How we can to use it?
This feels like a bad translationparty(if that even still exists). The last sentences in particular make it feel scammy.

On that note, I don't understand what pride foreign companies take in writing their own English. I'm an engineer, not great at English even, and would do it for free likely. I can't imagine it could be that expensive.

Here's how I would word it:

SamyGO is a project that allows anyone to legally research and reverse engineer Samsung TV firmware. We will try our best to fix problems submitted to us that are found to exist in the stock firmware.

This project is completely free and open source. We encourage you to join us by contributing your findings and improvements.
Recently I had a conversation with someone who has been featured in Kaggle leaderboard(top 1%) telling 'CS background isn't helpful for Machine Learning'.[1]

I believe that he didn't understand what Computer Science actually is, besides having a degree in it. I'd say it's because of the educational system, where one could attain a degree without actually qualifying in it.

In under developed/developing economies if only qualified people get their degrees, then only a fraction would get their jobs and it would be very bad for that economy and so bad educational systems are by design.

[1] https://twitter.com/heavyinfo/status/1209330850363404288
Software is eating the world and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. Chips are getting cheaper, 5G is coming and machine learning is opening up a ton of opportunities for automation.

It's very likely that the next decade will be the decade of automation, with a boom in robotics and codification of most routine tasks. A shift to AR and speech based interfaces will also require much deeper expertise than hacking together CRUD apps.
Not sure about your analogy. Doctors do many things apart from ‘identify disease and treat symptoms’. More importantly, doctors like to do the other things they do eg counselling patients, bedside manner, shared decision making, working in a multidisciplinary team, patient advocacy, policy developmemt. Many coders love to just write code, they wish they could just write code in fact, without the other stuff a job inevitably entails. That’s why AI replacement is a risk - the job will change into something different (probably with the word ‘evangelist’ in the title) which is probably not as appealing to many.