skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"I'm a PM at MSFT, and you know what I want? A second desktop and better monitors."

If you want them to do your job and you are not getting them, that just illustrates the point better. Economizing on hardware (and paper towels, heh!) is really dumb for a software/tech company.

"I should also point out that most senior devs do have laptops in my experience. It's the really new, junior guys that don't get them right away."

So, in other words a laptop is a status symbol. Junior devs rank lower in the hierarchy though they use the same tools and work on the same codebases as senior devs.
Poll: What's your preferred work environment? (private/shared office, openspace)
There's a discussion going on in a thread about work at Microsoft [1] regarding the preferred work environment; people seem to have different opinions on this matter, so I wonder what the bottom line is.

What do you like most?

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2269988
private office/work from home
shared office
I don't think unions would be necessarily happy with single payer- I wouldn't be surprised to see most (non-public sector, at least) unions cease to exist before long if single payer becomes a reality. Negotiation of benefits is one of the few valuable roles unions play these days, outside of political lobbying for the assumed goals of their constituents. Which is arguably part of the problem.
15 Reasons why readers don't like your blog?
Creative, informative, to the point, attractive, easy to use Blogging, these are the main points every body needs. Sometime your blog didn't get much attention, so here are some tips for you to improve your blog.
Considering that's a large salary in many first-world western-european countries, it's probably only a follow-on consideration (ie, GP-comment's hypothetical striking it rich in Singapore).

Furthermore, at that point, you will most likely be able to shelter your income anyway by putting it into a corporation, and you shouldn't be worried about striking it rich abroad.
Useful resource. It doesn't stress enough the value of direct proofs for intuition enough to my liking.

Example: in section 6.4, it is easy to prove that 6a^2-2a+7 is even iff a is odd, and the direct proof gives a better intuition that the proof by contradiction and contrapositive proofs described.
The costs incurred by people not paying for their medical services are relatively small, less than 5% of all health care costs.

A much bigger issue is higher insurance premiums due to unhealthy lifestyles.

Preventable poor health due to obesity, poor nutrition and lack of exercise are a major contributor to health care costs.

That results in higher costs for everybody.

As a healthy, fit, non-smoker and non-drug user, why should I have to pay their costs?
A poll about preferred work environments:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2270424
I don't think that's actually the problem. Windows (and many other MS groups) have quite excellent performance and integration testing. They generally do a good job of keeping performance under control. I think the biggest problem is how they approach performance as a test signoff criteria, usually, rather than as a budgeted line-item with goals for improvement.

As to situations like what you describe with file sharing in a certain environment that mostly comes down to insufficient beta testing and straight up prioritization/de-prioritization of certain issues.
Not sure why, but from what I hear from friends at MSFT, an approximately equal number of devs, qas, and pms is very standard.
While I don't know if it it is the best way or not, here goes:

1. Build a content-rich site (mini site or whatever) around the topic of the eBook, with links to the Amazon page and SEO (the heck out of) it to attract (free) organic traffic.

2. Depending on the feasibility, you could also use PPC to drive (more, targeted) traffic to this site.

3. Create a free, mini version of the eBook (with 'Buy full version' links) and offer it for free download via the site. Also, submit it to all eBook directories.

HTH
I do, but 'vote up' comments don't add anything to a discussion.
You get what you pay for.

This isn't a glib statement. A business transaction is about more than coming to agreement about the price of a thing or service. It's also about creating and maintaining incentives for both sides.

I pay slicehost for a VPS. They get $50/month from me in return for disk space, CPU cycles, uptime and support. Our incentives are aligned.

With Joyent/Textdrive, every month you get hosting and every month they get nothing. The incentives are not aligned. In fact, from Joyent's perspective, the incentive to provide any meaningful service diminishes over time. No about of cajoling or complaining or threatening Joyent will change this imbalance. Sure, it's 54 hours of downtime today - but I can guarantee that a year from now the outages will be far longer and far more frequent.

"But we had a deal!" Yes, you did. And you were a fool to enter into it.

Here's the bottom line:

Your customers don't care what's causing the downtime. It's still your fault.

Website users don't care that the deal has soured. It's still your responsibility.

Joyent doesn't care that they're providing cr@ppy service to Textdrive users, despite the postings on HN by Jason Hoffman (hey Jason, instead of wasting time posting on some internet forum, why not spend that time fixing the actual problem?)

Seriously - Joyent doesn't give a sh?t about the lifetime accounts. If they did, then why are you experiencing 54 hours of downtime? If they do care, and are applying resources to solve the problem, then why is it taking so long? 54 HOURS TO FIX A SERVER. That, to me, is evidence of a shocking level of incompetence. In either case I would get the hell out of there.
Stupid Zombies v 1.2
Mapping humanity's past
Last U.S. World War I veteran dies
My favorite argument comes from http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000068.html : "Mutt can't remember the name of the Unicode version of the strcpy function. He could look it up, which takes 30 seconds, or he could ask Jeff, which takes 15 seconds. Since he's sitting right next to Jeff, he asks Jeff. Jeff gets distracted and loses 15 minutes of productivity (to save Mutt 15 seconds)."

If a question isn't an emergency, I queue it up by sending email. If it is, I ask in person, fully realizing I'm fucking up their day and hoping that doing so really is in the best interest of the company. I also only check my email a couple of times per day and wear heavy closed headphones for coding, because those elusive moments of flow are about half of what I live for.
A decent semi-open setup has you not seeing much other than your monitor, and not hearing anything because you have good (company paid for) headphones on. And like others have said,
If I can always WFH when I feel it is necessary.
What do you do over at Google?
Where do i post there
This is what it mean:

http://brandonwalkin.com/blog/images/LightroomVsExpressionBl...

This time not from my own blog but from Brandon Walkins
I just had my two year anniversary at Amazon. I've written many more than 700 lines but I bet less than 160K. And yes, deleting code is the best.

I don't know the GP but their post is believable. Some parts of Amazon are mired in cross-team dependencies. Worse, to get anything done in those situations, hacks have been piled on top of hacks for tragic years. The right solution may be waiting in the wings but all the dominoes have to fall first.

There is a lot of variety at Amazon. There are high-pressure, high-reward teams like Kindle. There is cutting edge stuff at AWS and elsewhere.

My team is a leaf far out on the dependency tree. Approximately, we have only end users. It's a great situation, even with a pager (shared between five people, so one week or less a month). Our pager, on the average, does not go off. We get to ship software every week and we're profitable.
Myspace Sale Begins
Microsoft treats developers very well. From offices, to hardware, to free gym memberships and health care coverage, to the idea that you're generally not expected to work more than 40 hours a week, it's all great. But that can't and doesn't replace the need for healthy corporate culture and good, intelligent, pragmatic leadership, a lot of which has increasingly been lacking at MS. You'll have a quad core desktop with 8 gigs of RAM, but that hardly helps you play the game of office politics that is often required to get bonuses or promotions (when the company bothers to provide them). It also doesn't help a corporate culture that is becoming increasingly bureaucratic and process oriented rather than results oriented.

A lot of talent is and has been evaporating up and out of Microsoft for just these reasons.
When I was a tester, I coded 4 days a week

I'm sorry, but what's the difference between a tester and a developer then?
you can do a lot with a prototype (zero cost) and a pitch deck. use angel list (angel.co) and other means to get the idea in front of investors.

what are you building that would cost $5k the first month?
Facebook is laptop-only[0], though I've not yet started [1] I imagine they have something similar in mind.

[0] Plus an external monitor.

[1] And from what I've read on HN, I probably won't, as they're going out of business any day now :P
Make the headings easy to scan through, most readers dun not read in details, just the headlines. Also, in the pricing table, recommend them a plan. And give them incentives to take action now.
I've done both and much prefer offices. It's much easier to collaborate in an office than it is to drown out distracting noise from a shared workspace. Offices don't keep you from being able to swing by someone's desk or have someone drop by yours, unless you shut your door for a reason.

My current area at work is open and I have to on occasion bring ear plugs to keep the noise down to a level where I can concentrate. There are group meetings, conference calls on speakerphone, and loud personal conversations happening all the time. IMO, if it comes to needing ear plugs then the one purported benefit of working in an open area is lost since you can't really be sharing/collaborative if you've closed yourself off.
It's all explained in the book Peopleware, along with years of data to back the conclusions.
Why do you imagine that informal collaboration isn't possible with offices? It happens all the time. Maybe you're just being prejudiced against a situation you have no experience with?
Any experience here with the 'lean startup group'? Worth your while?
Interesting.

Haven't checked, but wondering what's the current user base and growth rate.
True, I can see Variable insurance premiums based on your likes / friends, it _is_ a scary prospect. I guess a similar problem applies to any form of insurance. I don't know if it's wrong to do that though, if it leads to lower insurance premiums to the rest of the world. Insurance companies already tend to do a real world equivalent of what you talk about, but at a much lower level.

For (2) and (3), Agreed again, but what does it matter if you're just a data point to Big Corp A? Do you really expect them to treat you as an individual even if they don't have any of your data?
are you using any other means besides the blog to drum up investment? i'd be interested to hear what and if/when you succeed..
not a weird-ux ?
This guy sounds like an asshole. If he is so concerned about the current state of affairs he should write some tutorials and teach some real problem solving concepts. Instead he rages about something and in the end pretends to be smarter than he actually is.
I had seen a 12th grade level cited, but I don't think the methodology was rigorous.
It’s time to adopt modern Bayesian data analysis as standard procedure
I think almost all tests(as difficult as it is to measure) show firefox coming in with the least amount of memory usage.
If the assumption is that you will finish receiving the piece before you finish sending it out, you can start uploading mid-way. If you have a bad checksum, then o well, they fail too. The idea, however, is to maximize local-isp traffic so the more you send, the better.
I suspect the type of code you write. As a dev I'd expect you to write code that ships to customers. As a tester you write test code and harnesses. Stuff the customer never directly sees.

I think I can honestly say that at ever company I've run or been a manager of influence we've had more lines of test code than product code. Yet I'm still surprised when people say "testers code?"
I started about two weeks ago getting intros to angels from within my network. I connected with a couple of angels over the past week and perfected my pitch. Over this weekend, I submitted to AngelList and wrote the blog entry. So, to answer your question, it is a variety of things, and I've found it is a lot about relationships and connecting through people you know to the people you want to know but do not know.
I've heard the ratio is dev::test::pm ~= 4::4::1
Lose Crazy Amounts of Weight With These Fat Loss Guidelines
> 7. Bad designers. Oh yea, there's -a few- of us out there
> that just picked up GIMP yesterday and think a
> 600 x 600px favicon should be fine. Even designers
> capable of really good work may not understand why
> a 2400x1600 image cannot be used thumbnail-size on
> the page. This is sad, but I've seen it.

There are a lot of designers that think that there is zero difference between print design and web design. The only difference being sending the finalized design to the printer or the programmers. (I.e. I design in my little corner over here, and poop out my design to you code monkeys that are little more than the automatons that will construct my vision) This may not apply to all or even a majority, but there are good numbers of them out there.
A private office is very different than working from home, I'm not sure why that's the same option.
Had not thought of offering the first chapter or so free (Even though I have purchased a book that way myself.) that is a great idea given it's an unknown author Thank-you.
Ask HN: Where to go from here?
Hi all,

I'm posting under a throw away account because I have friends involved that would know my original account.

I've been interviewing at a Los Angeles-based game developer for a web developer position. I have a few friends who work there. The interview process is wrapping up, and has been great. Things are looking very positive. I'm very positive that I will be receiving an offer from them.

I'm from the mid-west, working at a small company that I truly dislike. I also have friends here, which at least makes being at work enjoyable, but is despise my boss because of certain things he does. I could go on for hours about him, but mainly I just feel like he doesn't deserve the things he has managed to get - he's just a scumbag. I code at work here, too. I'm aching to quit but am scared to quit without something to move to - I only have about $10,000 saved up.

So, this job change would seemingly be a great opportunity. It'd put me out in CA doing web coding at a young, neat company. But, I honestly feel in my gut that it's not what I want. I just feel like what I'd be doing there would be so insignificant. I want to be creating neat, useful tools that help people on a daily basis. I want to be creating services of value to people. It is what I have always been passionate about.

So I am confused as to what I should do. Moving to California has always been a dream of mine, but not under these circumstances, really. I always thought that if I were moving out there, it'd be to San Francisco to live out my dream. I just think if I moved to LA, I'd stare out the window wishing it were SF I was looking at. It's not exactly about location, for me, it's more about doing what I love and feeling fulfilled by it.

This feeling has been ramping as I proceed through this interview. I just read this blog post (http://www.tawheedkader.com/2010/09/how-i-made-a-principled-decision-to-quit-my-six-figure-day-job/) and am in a pretty irrational state of mind right now. I feel like quitting my current job, turning down this game company offer if they make it, and using my $10,000 to try to bootstrap my own project. This would be the most insane course of action if I were to ask anyone in my family, or maybe even anyone else at all. But, I feel like life is short and if I don't try this now then I'll never have the chance again.

What do you all think? Should I take this new job offer if it's made, and move out to LA? Should I remain at my current job, and bootstrap something in my free time? Should I go all in, and quit my current job and bootstrap something?
Plug and Play API Developer Area with Elance
run your startup in England, free health care for everyone
Also, "Mathemathics for Computer Science" course from the MIT has a very nice introduction on proofs. Excellent book: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1935049
I see people claiming that and upvoted all the time, but: how do you know? It may very well be the worst decision ever made.
Anything but 'open-plan'!
There is actually a very good reason: given that it is unlikely that we will miraculously find a way to change the ratio of wrong to right verdicts, you can only lower the amount of people wrongfully convicted by lowering the number of convictions. As most convicted people are actually guilty, that means that most of the newly unconvicted people are, in fact, guilty.

Assume that currently 1 person is wrongly convicted for every 10 guilty ones that go free and try. Do the math to change that to 1 in a 100 and be affraid of the consequences of putting this principle into practice.

And again, note that you are not talking about changing the ratio of wrongful convictions to right convictions, because that is highly unlikely: you are talking about changing the absolute amount of wrongful convictions by allowing a larger amount of wrongful exonerations. Because of the ratio of the amount of people involved, the amount of guilty people that would need to go free is staggering. You need thorough Bayesian reasoning to understand this one.
Are those really POSIX or just bash? Namely the $() example. I was under the impression that only `` was POSIX, and that $() was bash/zsh-specific (maybe ksh too).

Also,

${CC:=gcc}

is only more readable than:

[ -z "$CC" ] || CC=gcc

if you know what that syntax means. There are a ton of syntax in bash/zsh to modify varables inside of the ${} construct. I usually have to look them up every time that I see them, even when I was the one the wrote the original code. I would say that more people know the 'test' syntax than the ${:=} syntax.

> 3. You can assign one variable to another without quoting

This is somewhat annoying, because something like this:

command="ls -l"
$command /path/to/dir

doesn't work. It tries to run a command called "ls -l" which probably doesn't exist. Passing that to exec will work, though. A more common example of this issue would be trying to build a command-line in the shell script before executing it, you might have base level of options:

base_options="-l -d --debug=1"
command $base_options $opt1 $opt2

But $base_options gets passed as a single parameter to command.
I just wrote TLS client certificate authentication for an internal systems API with node, in about 20 lines of code. Node's biggest power is a great abstraction for low level HTTP and socket stuff. You get direct access to everything, with a sane and elegant API.

For plain old websites, I'd still use something like Rails or Django.
I wasn't really concerned with that law so much as the one enforcing it. Everyone who tangles with him ends up with legal trouble for some reason. It's a very strange coincidence because it happens regularly.
I was at Microsoft for two internships and two fulltime years. I never once had an office to myself, I always had to share. In fact, the new Studios buildings are almost entirely "6 packs" of cubicles.

As for hardware, if you really needed it we were able to get it, but there was a fair bit of scavenging for spare parts to power build/test machines. There was also a shortage of Xbox and especially Win Phone dev kits.

My day to day coding experience varied wildly by task. Some stuff had a 2 minute turnaround, most stuff 2 hours, and some stuff several days.

The politics, infighting, and Redmond isolationism are all very real, and very painful.

That said, the company is huge, so experiences differ broadly across the various orgs.
I've voted for work from home, as it is what I do most of the time. But I also do have a place at a shared office and I prefer to spend at least a day each week there, as it's sometimes easier to concentrate there and I do really hate sitting at one place all the time.
Designer - SwipeGood (W11)
I've worked at startups with open plans for the past 12 years. At every one, it starts out ok when there are less than 10 people. As soon as there's about 20, almost all of the important programming work is done after hours when all the loud people are no longer there. The only thing that gets done during the day (programming wise) is putting out fires. I've come to the conclusion that half the reason startups require "insane hours" is because during the day, the programmers are distracted and only working at 20% capacity.
Software Engineer - SwipeGood (W11)
Spammy title (5 things...), dubious content, 5 points in a short time without comments: smells like cheating?
> The organic chemistry and physics is something you will
> never use as a doctor, nurse, pharmacist, etc.

Knowledge in physics and chemistry is very useful in life no matter what profession you are in.
Cross-browser CSS gradient buttons
In this article you will see how you can create a set of cool gradient buttons just with CSS (no images).
> And as the complainant in the letter writes, it sounds like all the hoi polloi ("Group B") at TED actually buy into this as well. Maybe he should be working on something amazing instead of hoping Bill or Steve or Sergey notices him.

that was one of the things that struck me most forcibly about the article. i would have predicted (a touch optimistically, perhaps) that the "b-listers" would just find other interesting people to meet and socialise with during those few days - heck, ted is packed with them! perhaps i'm just spoilt by exposure to mainly hacker conferences (and unconferences), and science fiction conventions, in both of which celebrities are welcomed, but not especially lionised.
This is interesting if for nothing else than the hope that the record industry will take them to court and prove that digital content is not the same as physical goods and the same rules don't apply, hence contradicting their current stand.

http://www.virtualschool.edu/mon/ElectronicFrontier/WineWith...
> "I don't want to sound like I'm attacking you, but the fact that you were able to start a company without providing health insurance or a salary sufficient to buy it individually is itself a problem."

There is a big difference between financial compensation and offering health insurance for entrepreneurs. Startups frequently pay low salaries (ones that may not support the high cost of health insurance) in return for an equity stake that offers the possibility of a high future payout. You cannot similarly defer health care benefits: when cash is tight, you either offer costly benefits at the expense of other priorities or leave your employees without health insurance. This tradeoff is not present if the insurance system isn't employer-based.

Of course this is only part of the explanation for how our system impedes entrepreneurship. One way or another, we're all paying an absurd amount just to keep us (somewhat) healthy.

http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2011/02...
In an iron lung lawyer forged iron will
I like a mix. I'm energized working in a really open shared environment (like Hacker Dojo or Pier 38), but I also love working from home. Too much working from home gets really lonely.

Now that I've left my last job and starting on my own I work from home most of the time.