skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've been fiddling with the Kaldi speech recognition toolkit over the past 6 weeks or so, which provides "recipes" for creating speech recognition frameworks (basically a combination of preprocessing/featurizing/training steps for various speech recognition models (HMM/GMM, neural nets, speaker adaptive training, etc).

These recipes are a bunch of bash scripts to glue the toolkit binaries together, all connected via Unix pipes.

With all respect to the authors, I feel that Python would have been a much better choice for this task. Bash is a verbose scripting language to begin with, not to mention much more difficult to modularize. I find it takes me at least twice as long to decipher bash scripts compared with their pythonic equivalent.

I think it's a good example of "old, tried and true" not necessarily being "best".
A senior position in the doc will probably get you ~2M in savings by 35. How do you retire with that?
Interesting, I find the ergonomics of transducers a lot better than the threading macros, especially because it’s a more generic interface. Also, they seem to be an ideal point in the lazy/strict evaluation continuum: they compose like lazy functions (I.e. if you have (take 3), you’ll only get three elements even with an infinite input stream but they avoid the unpredictability of lazy functions like map because the actual process is run eagerly (unless this doesn’t make sense for the output datatype e.g. a core async channel.).

I’d also be a bit careful about judging popularity from open source codebases too: they are used heavily in all the production code based I maintain :) and I get the sense that they’re pretty widely used by the “silent majority” of clojure programmers.

My debugging strategy for them is basically what I do for threading macros anyways: (into [] (comp ... (map #(doto % (->> (println :it))) ....) inp)
I have never worked in the valley, so the answer to this question might be obvious to the people working there. What happens to all the experienced engineers?

According to this, the Senior, Staff, or Principal titles are generally for people with 5+ year experience? Those roles make up 30%, 10%, and 3% of companies respectively. That leaves 57% of engineers in positions listed are usually for people with 0-5 years experience. Does that mean over half of engineers are relatively new to the industry? Are there large numbers of engineers that go their entire career without getting a Senior title? Are there large numbers that end up changing industries? I know some people transition from hands on engineering to management, but there can't possibly be that many management jobs to make up that difference, right?
I get Airbnb and Stripe being up there for entry-level engineers, those companies are almost printing money.

But Lyft, haemorrhaging money, is top of the list, and Oracle - the company no-one in the Bay Area or on HN seems to work for, and everyone seems to hate - is 5th? Are there legions of quietly-well-paid Oracle engineers out there just keeping their heads down and getting on with the job? Why isn't Oracle in the more senior lists - they make complex and expensive databases, isn't that something you need to pay a lot of money to get really smart people to work on?

And Netflix, which I thought famously paid very well, only pops up in one tier?

It's more likely I'm misinformed than this list is wrong, but I find this pretty surprising.
Why? Should not content creators make a fair profit on their content? This includes books and movies. If you read Stallman's early writings on the matter his goal was to have software development funded and directed by the government, so no linux or bsds for example.
Absolutely real.
I mean why are ther multiple objects that have to be sent instead of a single cbor object. And why is some of it cbor and some of it json?
My company is shown here; the number for my level seems roughly correct. There have certainly been times when I had to work harder than I would have liked, but it's not crazy.

The way I see it, every job has downsides, and I could certainly leave to go somewhere a bit more relaxed. But the problem I always run into justifying that is, say I go somewhere where the total compensation is 50% of what I get now- am I really going to like that job twice as much? Tech industry is tech industry, at the end of the day. So, probably not.

We do a job to get paid. So, getting paid is nice.
I'm not sure about the salaries, but I'm more sure Amazon isn't in Seattle, CA. (Staff engineer slide).

I'm also wondering how much of the salary (which certainly contains a lot of stock) is due to stock appreciation. If someone joined Amazon in late 2016, the value of their stock awards has more than tripled.

Do offers for these companies go this high, or is this only after a few years? This seems it's more "what I'm getting paid now" rather than what the offer was.
Interesting, thanks.

Now I wonder how many of these jobs are 100% work from home. I'm not sure a salary doubling could take me away from my family and into commuting an hour a day. But I mean, if they're going to pay me to engineer in my pyjamas, sure! =)
> They can just ignore the license if they want/need the software that much. Seriously doubt random users are gonna get sued for violating terms.

By all means tap-dance in the minefield. You'll probably be fine.

Arbitrary enforcement is the cornerstone of a good, solid chilling effect.

Finally, as a point of policy, I'd rather people not get the idea that OSS licenses are ignorable. That's even more Ballmer-esque in its implications.
It’s for real
I've never developed a "real" application for Windows, so I didn't know this off the top of my head, but it appears that compressed PNG format has been supported for icons since Vista, which came out in like 2007.

See:
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/?p=12473
Agreed - that’s not enough to retire on that young unless one relocates to a very LCOL area.
Programming Stats for 200k WakaTime users in 2019
Using the 5% drawdown rule, 2M in savings is enough to have a 100k/year income in perpetuity without adding to savings.

Idea being that average market returns are 7%. So if you use 5% per year, you will never run out.
> Economics is entire a human endeavour. The laws are what we want them to be.

no, that's just wishful thinking. Laws of economics are a description of human behaviour, and unless the human condition changes, it will always reflect self-interest and greed. Physical laws aren't "laws" in the same sense as human laws, but descriptions. Economic laws are the same; they describe what people would do under different incentivization schemes.

In this case, despite the proponents of crypto wanting it to be a currency, it has still languished as a commodity. This is due to the economics of using it, the interactions of it with the wider economy, and various other factors that i've termed under the umbrella of 'law of economics'.
Your right, a large part of the problem is that there isn't a quantifiable way (outside of things like bugs/kloc, which are themselves suspicious) to identify a clean code base. I believe that is because much of it is personal preference, the same way some people find single family homes optimal while others like high rise condos. One person may think that adding some "clean python" code to an existing pile of bash scripts "cleans" it up while another may think that keeping the code base using a single language is cleaner while trying to minimize churn and bugs.

Bottom line, I frequently question much of what is being sold as developer productivity these days. It seems in my experience "this code is ugly/garbage/etc" is simply translation for "I don't understand much of this code". Engineers that truly understand the code base just go and fix it, usually with commits that are either small one or two line bug fixes with long commit messages describing how the system is failing and what is actually being fixed. Alternatively, they have "cleanup" patches that have extremely high removal/add line ratios which are replacing large chunks of difficult to understand code with small pieces that are easier to understand, and long commit messages detailing where the redundant functionality was. Very rarely are these changes to a different language/toolkit. But the evidence of skill in both these cases just about never include followup patches to "fix" new problems introduced by the previous round of fixes.
Salary negotiation is pretty one sided today with companies holding all the cards. Better visibility into numbers will definitely help level the playing field.

Collecting offer letters is an interesting way to build trust in data. What's the incentive for someone to upload their offer letter though?
;_;

You know what sucks? I have to pay ridiculous rent for a house in an LA suburb and I make only a fraction of that lol.

Dang!
Are you saying such laws are progressive or not progressive?
Are you sure that case type 'PERM' means green card?

It may mean that H1B visa was granted, but not Green card
(or that initial H1B visa recepient, eventually received green card (this can take a few years) ).

You can still question if giving H1B visa to non-essential or non-fulltime roles in technology or any other sector, is justified --

I just wanted to check if "PERM", indeed means green card

It is very rare that green cards are given as an entry status to a foreign worker.
Maybe. If they were better at fishing than anyone else.
Yes, but property tax is also levied on improvements, which creates a disincentive to develop primo land.
Even at a meager 2% interest that’s $40k a year. That’s a comfortable wage in much of the USA, especially if you’ve been camping in an RV for a decade to retire.
Cryptomator allows you to use local encryption with Google Drive or Dropbox as the cloud storage provider.

I haven't used it so I can't speak to its niceness.
This is an unwarranted slight on CfH, which _did_ produce lots of useful work.

Unfortunately it was far too ambitious and effectively killed private development of healthcare software for the U.K. market in the process, making (for an example relevant to one area of my expertise) dose-based eprescribing a pipe dream despite having produced a ton of useful standards.
Many people stay at lower levels for years. The experience is necessary, but not sufficient, for those higher levels.
They leave the valley, remember it as their time at a startup, and work decades at a non-tech firm.
Why does this sound like a bit from a Jack Vance novel?
Could you make the log a bit clearer? It's hard to tell solid fill vs partial fill. Great game, great work!
These numbers are roughly around what I've seen for new offers.
I would absolutely expect that the total amount Amazon paid in property taxes in 2019 to be round-off error compared to their income, yes. Particularly because local governments seem happy to reduce their property taxes to zero or even negative percentages, but even if that didn't happen.

$2.4 billion in subsidies for these taxes, says one accounting: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/03/technology/amazon-new-yor...

A bunch of warehouses by the airports do not actually create any large property tax bill.
The article seems sloppy.

It’s just grass with pesticides.

I take care of about two acres of lawns across a few properties for a few decades. I’ve never put pesticides on the lawns. Herbicides, sure, sometimes lots of herbicides, but all very much plant specific. I suppose some places must use pesticides, but here in the middle of the US grass just sort of uses sun, water, nitrogen, and some other stuff and grows.

Also the sentence attributing Illinois prairie loss to global warming is hogwash. Global warming didn’t turn the prairies into giant farms.

So, grumpy stuff said, I do keep lots of varied native plants too. Grass is just for the area that want to survive occasional foot traffic and be open to show something else.
These are offers.
I was a manager at one of these companies and my L5s were making half of what this thing says. Don't trust everything you read on the internet.
query a redis db

General rule: if you're looking for "fastest", pulling data over the network is not part of the solution.

As for the choice of language, it's going to be heavily motivated by what languages you (or your team) know how to benchmark and optimize. It doesn't matter if, say, Befunge is the "fastest" if you don't have anybody working on it that can optimize it.
I believe what is needed is a salary and stock breakdown, just like levels.fyi. You can’t pay the rent or buy food with stock.
While I don't disagree at all with your assertion that a mixture of intelligence and commitment is highly desirable - and that these are indeed exactly what these interviews are designed to select for - I'd argue that is part of the flaw with these interviews. The problem being that even if you as a hiring manager have successfully selected for people who are able to work gruelling hours on nonsense algorithm puzzles for the benefit of advancing their pay or career, it does not necessarily imply that they have what it takes to be a good employee.

As a manager, I want people who are hardworking, sure, but how I can I know that they're working on their assigned tasks instead of studying up for interviews and trying to jump ship? Also, I want to work with people who are creative, empathetic and collaborative (the latter is a hugely important trait perhaps even more important than raw algorithmic interviewing ability in a highly teamwork driven discipline like Software Engineering) - none of which these kinds of interviews help with. Or maybe I want a mixture of people with different strengths and weaknesses, like a team with an algorithms expert paired with a creative problem solver that can figure out new approaches to business problems. Applying a uniform standard involving mostly rote memorization and practice of the same set of interview puzzles to everyone is in my view antithetical to building a strong engineering organization. But you're right that it works "well enough" and no one has found alternative solutions that work better so it is unlikely to change in the near future.
If you're getting screwed, get out there and stop getting screwed!

"I never sat back feeling sorry for myself. If you don't give me heaven, I'll raise hell" - Jay Z
Remote work at FANG is possible but usually earned through a niche in-demand skill set or years at the company.
This mostly strikes me as ”I know R better than I know Python” - which is fair for deciding what to use, but is obviously not an objective comparison.

Hopefully I’ll have time tomorrow to write a rebuttal for some his arguments. Particularly, the preference for CRAN and code longevity strikes me as being shortsighted.
> showed how to floss for real

For me, that was the key development. Up to that point, I hadn't understood that the goal is to scrape plaque off the teeth, and had only been flossing to get food out from between my teeth. Once I understood that, flossing became much easier, not to mention, after a couple of weeks of reduced gun inflammation, more comfortable.

It was a dental hygienist who explained it to me, not a dentist... I think for dentists, there may be a bit of a conflict of interest.
Founder of world’s largest BitTorrent distribution site arrested (2016)
I like how a guy earning a fairly unremarkable-when-we-adjust-for-cost-of-living salary with a bunch of fairly unimpressive table-stakes credentials: "clean cut, well-spoken, hard working, respectful" (whaddaya want? a cookie?) is meant to be a Amazing Pussy Magnet.

One of the major factors - aside from the gender ratio - behind tech guys not finding partners is this weird expectation that if they shave, clip their fingernails, and don't act like an outright dirtbag that women will flock to them, regardless of whether they have any personal appeal or not.

A lot of dudes in tech are just bores with zero interests and a outsized sense of entitlement to the opposite sex (talking about the het guys, don't know how it works on the other side of the fence). Just to top it off, they expect to be magnets to interesting women, too - these guys are the first to sneer at gold-digging women who are, frankly, their appropriate mirror image. That is, if the only thing you can say about yourself that isn't table-stages normal person stuff is that you're "a SWE making $120K+ a year" who exactly do you think you're going to attract?

Bonus points: deciding that the one thing that's missing from the above picture is being swole, and filling in any extra time not spend being a "respectful male SWE" with incessant iron pumping.
It's so variable that I don't think there's even a good answer for this. My current company does the engineer -> management track, so there can absolutely be an abundance of management jobs. You can also work as an Junior/SEII/Senior for 5+ years without being promoted at all. Keep in mind all of these titles are arbitrary/subjective.
China-made UOS welcomes the first domestic CAD software
you'd be in a position to invest too as you go.
lawn care invites exorbitant water consumption, pesticide use, creates smog from lawn mowing, and induces a mono-culture ecosystem.

I for one would like drought tolerant (in CA anyway) native plant species to fill our lawn spaces...especially the ones that get rarely used.
Quantum-Proof Cryptography and Its Role in Security
You own the value of the goods you've made with your own hands (minus the value of their raw materials if you want to be strict about it), and by extension you can freely trade those. Land is the exception because people don't make it themselves, they lay claim to what's already there (even in the case of "artificial" land, most of the value is in the seabed that was there before rather than what you did).

> It also seems counterintuitive because it would essentially mean that someone who holds billions in shares or digital assets has no tax burden under the Georgist logic but a small independent farmer does.

Someone living like a billionaire probably owns a much higher value of land (if only what's under their mansion) than a small independent farmer. The land value tax would end up being built into food prices, so farmers wouldn't lose out on the whole unless they're currently growing wastefully; maybe farming would be pushed onto less valuable land, that's sort of the point (but in practice that mostly happens already; farmers near towns wanting to expand would get gradually pushed out via higher taxes rather than getting a windfall for selling up, which is bad for those individual farmers but better for society as a whole).
> Similarly, if you "bought" a piece of land you just use for a single story home near downtown SF 30 years ago, are you still paying the same LVT you got at action back then? Or will the price keep going up and price you out of your longtime house?

The entire point is for the price to keep going up and to eventually price people out of their longtime homes. It is the specific intent of this sort of policy to force people out of their single story homes near downtown SF. Whether you think it's good policy or bad policy can be debated, but proponents of these sorts of policies consider it bad public policy to allow scarce resources to be monopolized by people using them inefficiently, regardless of who those people are or how they came to possess those scarce resources.
It’s worth nothing that most of these numbers are inflated from share price increases boosting the value of RSUs vesting over 4 years. New offers at the higher levels from those companies are unlikely to be that high unless you are coming in at the top of the pay band for the level.
I'm 34, male. I feel like I just feel less as I age, both positive and negative. No crying, less anger, but also less giddy joy, less vivid imagination. When I was a child or teenager I could read a book and be the character. Now I'm just reading a book.
These are not salaries. It’s total comp. My total comp. calculating pension and benefits in the Great White North is similar, and that’s govt. to boot. Total comp is always a highly misleading number.
Most companies in the valley have a terminal level (a level at which you're not expected to progress to the next one) that's close to level 3 in the chart here. In my experience, a lot of people don't progress beyond that. For the ones that do, the number of years of experience plays a smaller role than the quality of the experience itself.
It's important to compare apples to apples.

Lists like these are incredibly misleading, as they include non-cash bonuses. First off, these bonuses (say, RSUs) take a while to vest (incurring opportunity cost), can go down (there's risk), and so on. For example, being an early junior engineer at the next unicorn can make you orders of magnitude richer than working for FB or GOOG as a distinguished engineer (basically top 0.0001%). But that's kind of a silly data point, because you're probably making a 70k salary, whereas the distinguished engineer is making like a 250k salary.

So let's stick with cold hard cash or let's stick with bonuses, but it's misleading to conflate them.
> Salary negotiation is pretty one sided today with companies holding all the cards.

What makes you think companies hold all the cards? Especially in tech.
Google Launches New Product Updates for Its AI Platform Coral
It does seem so much easier than a hundred different services.
Maybe we should be asking the question: "Why are academics citing papers that can't be reproduced?"

A lack of reproducibility of cited papers IMO undermines the credibility of citing papers.
A lot of Sr. engineers have way more than 5 yrs of experience. Or they go into management.
You read through all the advice in these blogs [1][2]. Seriously.

If you are invested in low cost index funds, most assume you can safely withdraw 4% a year and not deplete your principal. If you're retiring at 35, you might want a greater safety margin, so let's say 3%. That gives you 60K a year.

How do you retire on 60K a year? Obviously take what I'm saying with a grain of salt as I'm a relatively young person and haven't done any of this yet. But...60K is the median household income in the US, so half of families in the US live on less. If you're retired, you can probably save in ways others can't. For instance:

* Housing. You don't need to stay in a high cost of living city, so move to a much cheaper area (maybe a college town).

* Education. You have much more time, so send your kids to all public education, and use your extra time to educate them further.

* Debt. You have a ton of assets. Why hold any debt?

* Automobiles. Bike instead, if you're physically able.

* Health. Probably the hardest one since insurance in the US is tied to employment. I understand the recommended approach here is to pay out of pocket for a plan, but many have trouble with this. Of course, the standard advice is to use the extra time you have due to retirement to stay as healthy as possible, but I acknowledge this isn't a perfect plan.

[1] https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/
[2] https://www.madfientist.com/
Easily by not living in the Bay Area. People FIRE at 1 million, which I always found a bit silly considering we're in the midst of an amazing market hyperinflated by some rather concerning fiscal policy, but with 2 you can weather a lot of bad years.

Family with kids in a big, expensive city? Probably not.