skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The first step should be giving some disclosure to the candidate. Say, "55k? You're so silly. We'd hire you for much more than that, we only pay fair salaries here. Let me talk to my people and see what we can make available."

If the other people aren't providing a value commensurate with their compensation, you should fire them whether you have an expensive replacement on tap or not. If they are providing such a value, it's probably better to keep them in place. Too often people overestimate new hires and underestimate the value of institutional knowledge. But if you have people that need to be fired anyway, that'd be a good opportunity to do it.

If your bosses think you're an idiot, you should leave. If you ask the board for more money and they have more money to give, they'll probably give it, unless they think you're an idiot, and then you should quit.

If there's no way you can get the additional allocation, just tell the candidate that you'll hire him at 55k for now if he's still interested and give him a bump when the money for a raise materializes.

If you're upfront with people, life is much easier, and you'll find yourself looking over your shoulder much less. :)
True, but "fast" is a crowded concept in people's minds. If you look around the web you'll read that Firefox 4 is fast, Chrome is fast, Opera is fast. IE is "native" which is then connected with performance claims. It's a new name for an old feature that has a kernel of truth to back it up. I'm reminded of an early scene in Mad Men where a salesman convinces a cigarette company to advertise their tobacco as "toasted". Sure, so is everyone else's, but that doesn't mean that one company can't own that idea in the minds of the public.

A similar thing thing with the IE blog's new favorite phrase "same markup" which seems to be "standards compliant" in a new blue dress. Search the web for 'standards compliant browser' and you'll generally find folks heaping scorn on IE and praise on all the others. Search for 'same markup browser' and the opposite is true.
$x/hour * 40 hr/wk * 50 wk/yr = 2n1000

The general rule is always "times 2, add 3 zeros" to do it in your head.
And that was written before the md5 collisions were discovered. And no collision has yet been discovered for md5 for files of the same length, they are all extension attacks...
Agreed. Hence my transfer ;) But I do respect what TAMU is attempting.
It may not be the best option...if you have someone with crazy amounts of excellent connections giving you $100,000 and personal mentorship.

Yeah, that's not going to be contested by too many people.
+1

I've found glassdoor.com to have pretty accurate (though anonymous) reports of employers' salary ranges and employee satisfaction.
> full salary transparency would result in a race-to-the-top.

because you work for a hobby...
A race to the highest price the market can sustain. Companies will never pay so much they make a loss on a person, so the marginal revenue from having an additional employee is a firm upper bound on how much they will pay that employee.

This is good from an employee's perspective, but it reduces profits for companies. As such, it is unlikely that many companies would voluntarily support transparency.
Show HN: Wolfpacktal.es - Group Messaging without your cellphone contacts
Hi everyone, I lurk around HN quite a bit and have learned a lot over the past few months. I recently completed a simple app and would really like everyone's feedback on it.

http://wolfpacktal.es

Wolfpacktales is my attempt at group messaging using only social networks: Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Gmail. The idea is similar to every group messaging app out there, you create groups (in this case 'wolfpacks'), and add whoever you want to participate (but in this case, you add from your social networks and not your cell phone contacts).

I haven't built any groundbreaking piece of technology here, in fact all i did was tap into some APIs and customize as needed. It's a free app that I just built for fun amongst friends. Let me know your thoughts.
Yes, a thousand yeses. For having tried that (and relatively succeeded), I know the benefits of having personally developed a language and made it (relatively) popular.

It's an amazing thing to have on your CV, a great experience if you've got lots of free time and/or are very productive, but I really wouldn't base a business on it. It might be affordable as an investment if it's a very small part of an existing company based on another business, but that's about it.
I was hoping 1.0 would include support for dynamic modules. It's the only thing nginx is missing. I have to compile my own nginx everywhere to get all the modules I need (which isn't hard, just a tad annoying to manage).
Depends on the type of job you are looking for. If you need total flexibility, you might try freelancing. You will be more likely to find freelance gigs anyways.
But remember that there is non-billable work (accounting, etc.) and a 15.3% self-employment tax. And also remember that there are probably not 50 weeks of 40 hours/week at this company but rather short-term or part-time work. And you are paying for your own benefits.

I've found a good (albeit a bit conservative) rule-of-thumb is to convert the hourly wage into the yearly salary. Working as a consultant for $175/hour is similar to being employed at $175K/year.

EDIT: The U.S. federal self-employment tax for 2011 is 13.3% (15.3% was for 2010).
Abrams is a comedian.
I don't think the "many clients" argument holds. If done properly, Dropbox would (deterministically) generate the keys from your username and password on the client every time you log in and encrypt/decrypt stuff there.

You're right that sharing folders between different accounts would require having a key shared between the clients and thus stored on the Dropbox servers as well.

However, they could generate the key for the shared folder, give it to you and your buddies and yet store it encrypted using your master key generated from your username and password. Then it would be accessible to you, but Drobox would not be able to decrypt it without getting your password.

It looks like they're not doing that, but hypothetically, they could. And the examples you cite would not be impossible to deal with.

Of course, this would require much more work, would be tricky to get right and they'd have Thomas Ptacek on their back for using JavaScript crypto in the browser.
I think what he meant was that you have to consider a hefty tax burden come April 15 because, as a contractor, you don't get taxes taken out of your paycheck. This is where having a good accountant and knowing what expenses you can deduct comes in (to reduce your taxable income).

If for nothing else, you should have a business just so you can claim more expenses and reduce the amount you have to pay Uncle Sam (from my understanding, all you need to have is a profit motive -- not necessarily profits).
I think the "race to the top" people are talking about is the psychological tendency of most people to think they are better than average.

So, if you know the average salary is $X and the top salary is $2X, and you're making $1.1X then you ask for a payrise to $1.6X because "you know you're better than most of the people here". Then everyone does. And so on.

I think the way around that is to match transparent salaries with a transparent ladder of responsibilities/expectations/experience, like you were talking about with Fog Creek.

Then there's a clear standard for people to evaluate what they are worth to the company.
The last paragraph tells me this is significantly more consequential than the TMI incident:

"Ultimately, Fukushima will resemble Chernobyl in another way: final containment will likely be achieved by entombing in it concrete and surrounding it with an exclusion zone to prevent visits by humans."
IMHO Safari actually has the best hardware acceleration. Chrome-dev channel is catching up quickly.

By hardware acceleration I'm talking about things like -webkit-transform and the support for various 3D transforms. I'm unsure of how it's implemented under the hood but I know Safari kills on 3D transforms and the best part is it works on mobile.
Sorry to hear this, but I think that the customized browser is basically DOA. It's hard enough to get people to update their main browser as it is. Better to build whatever you have in mind within a conventional browser.
With Barkeley there was something else going on. Barkeley is an extreme example, read this:

http://www.golf.com/golf/tours_news/article/0,28136,2056371,...

This in particular was useful to read:

"That was the weird thing about Barkley. You did fix him. On the range and on the simulator, he had 300-yard drives. He couldn't take it to the course. He had the mental full-swing yips, and you had him killing it.

Yeah, the change was that before he couldn't do it on the range. Now he can do it on the range, but still can't do it on the course. So he's playing left-handed now. He's actually pretty good.

It's bizarre that a professional athlete wouldn't be physically able to do it.

He is physically able to, he isn't mentally able to. It's bizarre when somebody shoots less than 50 percent from the foul line, it's bizarre when Chuck Knobloch can't throw it to first base, it's bizarre when Rick Ankiel throws 18 pitches in a row to the backstop. But it happens."

I had to look up Rick Ankiel. Interesting story of what sounds like a complete mental breakdown of a skill. Tiger Woods seems to be going through a minor form of this now.
Same thing in Finland. If I remember correctly, there's even a number you could text the full name of any tax payer and get his income in the previous year.
> Personally, I could do without the tuition fees and snobby tenured professors preaching the State's religion.

What do you mean by state's religion?
>Imagine what would happen if there were five $70k salaries and one $165k salary for six people doing the same work. People would suddenly get very uncomfortable.

Isn't that the entire point of the first exercise however? If the 165k salary isn't completely obvious, then it should make people feel uncomfortable - they are being shafted.
10 Growing Markets You Haven't Yet Considered
These savings can only come after the cost-of-living overhead. It's important to note that average salary does not scale 1:1 with cost of living.

Depending on your finances, a 20% bump in pay with a 40% increase in cost of living may lower your discretionary income.

For some, this is offset because overhead does not scale 1:1 with salary: living in a high-cost area provides a greater discretionary income advantage to those with high incomes than for those with modest incomes.
This is awesome. So much great information. The Founder's Den sounds really cool.
My corporate-environment programming experience taught me that competence has no weight. Everybody just wants to get along and be friends. People who are buddies with the manager get more pay and advancement than others even if they are far less competent. They also tend to survive layoffs.
Will they be paid a fraction of their salary if the company performs poorly?

The biggest rewards go to the biggest risk-takers.
I think people in the tech industry "get it" when it comes to immigration, but that flies in the face of so much of the xenophobia I see out there. Maybe the tech industry should invest in some educational outreach efforts to at least try and change the tide of things? I see too many talented people come to America only to pack and go home a few years later.
I never thought I'd be tempted to donate to someone so they could focus on playing golf!
FTA: "The cumulative release of radioactive material now equals at least 1.8 million terabecquerels - enough to merit the 7 designation on the INES scale."

"All told 14 million terabecquerels of radioactive material are estimated to have escaped during what remains the world's worst nuclear accident [in Chernobyl]."

The INES scale is more than simply a measure of radioactive isotope quantities released, likely taking into account the distribution of the radioactive contamination due to weather, form of emission and various physical effects, as well as the exposed population.
How is this disruptive?

It seems to be perfectly inline with what everyone else is offering. It seems no different than the relationship between EC2 and UEC (Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud / Eucalyptus). One interface and a bunch of providers.
If you're getting the $165k, you're not going to be very enthusiastic about this exercise.

The modular-arithmetic alternative is better, at least in terms of political stability: they figure out that there's an average of $86k. Then the people making $70k all negotiate up to $90k and, even if getting shafted, people are happier.
But the title is can he become a golf pro. There wouldn't be over a 100 comments here if it simply said "How good of a golfer can you be with 10,000 hours of practice?"
Here's an interesting article from back in 2004 on the issue:

http://osteele.com/archives/2004/11/ides
You could get the same effect just by not defining an upper bound for the number, or if he really wants it to be secret, the first person could just not choose a number that close to the upper bound. It's not like this is something so out of the participants' control that we need to overcomplicate the math.
I've been traveling for most of the last six months, mostly dependent on slow & unreliable hotel wifi. Dropbox's implementation has saved me a ton of time backing up files that would have taken forever to upload in their entirety.
7tutorials.com got demoted to Google PR3. Any advice to get it back to PR4?
Learning by Mimicry – Why you should seek out schmoozing experts
Good for MS. I suppose Firefox, Safari (and especially) Chrome have convinced the sleeping giant to awaken.

Windows on ARM was definitely faster than I had previously guessed.

Windows vs. ChromeOS vs. WebOS vs. iOS on ARM for the future of tablet/internet appliances? Exciting times ahead.
I just tried Shadowgrounds on a laptop with an Intel 4500MHD (and a 1.4GHz Core 2 Solo) and it works and looks surprisingly well (I set the graphics to "low" and res was ~1280x720).

Shadowgrouns: Survivor hard locked my laptop (running Win7), I'm guessing it's some sort of driver issue :(.

Trine runs well at 1024x768, but bogs down at my native resolution (1366x768).

For reference, I can play CS:S, HL2 & Torchlight on this laptop just fine, but that's probably about it (TF2 is iffy). SC2 & Minecraft are pretty much unplayable. Modern shooters like L4D1/2 are completely out.

Hope that helps.
Make magazine calls for an Open Source Flip
I'm not sure how surprising it is that academics are defending academia. Plummer's response is sensible--yes, it's a rigged experiment. On the other hand, if you genuinely think college is a bad deal, paying people to go to college is perverse. Thiel isn't so much making a bet as helping people act as if his bet has already paid off.

Katsouleas just makes a lame rhetorical point. Surely he can do better.

Eisenstein speaks the truth: college is not always the best option. "Getting an engineering degree reduces the variance in your career outcomes. You might not get the billions, but you also won’t get into poverty." That's the best way to understand it. In most financial contexts, cutting your variance also reduces your expected outcome--and levering up to buy low-variance assets is a good way to gear yourself for negative outcomes, whether those assets are degrees or CDOs.

Is there any point more boring than noting that two people who finished school a decade or two ago now think that school isn't such a good deal? It would be pretty craven for Thiel and Arrington to believe the things they believe but lie about it because they'd gone to Stanford, so I'm not sure Wadhwa has a point.
Unfortunately it is as slow as a dog. I'm not sure I understand what the pressing need for a C interpreter that is slow is. If so, there are two of them out there, including cint. The fact is, there is absolutely no technological reason why a C interpreter has to much slower than compiled C. Even the most stupid, naive implementation you can come up with is still as fast as Python (I know because I tried this last year). And with a proper Jit, it is absolutely possible to make it almost the same speed as compiled C.
What about concentration? Does anybody have opinions on whether standing forces you to concentrate on the task at hand more?
"You cannot build a social startup in the dark corners of your room."

I think the title should read, Ship unfinished social apps.

You cannot generalize when it comes to all apps, especially those that have a narrow niche / target user. Sometimes you have to keep the door closed and everything on lock down just to launch with an edge over the competition.

That being said, my most successful app in the Android Market started off VERY crude, and with feedback, it turned into the great app it is today. However, had I launched TOO crudely, I don't know that those early users would even have stuck around long enough to leave constructive comments. It has to look like you are trying and willing to KEEP trying to make the app better.
Motorola VAP2400 video bridge for streaming HD content
Actually Swatch is still doing very well (as well as other brands) — a watch is an fashion accessory as much something with functionality. Flip understood that as brand, and was a notch above what you'd get on a cell phone. That gap has narrowed, but had Cisco invested in the product my bet is that their bet would have paid off. The problem was that Cisco had a larger agenda which didn't match the camera. By the way as digital dominates you'll see a specialty market for analog — everything from vinyl to paper books (just ask any hipster kid).
(This is not meant as a slight against rails. On the contrary.)

Exactly. Rails is good because it's easy. That doesn't mean that just anybody can write a great program using Rails, though, it merely means that who can write the best program becomes about who is the best programmer, not about who knows the most about Rails.
A Scorecard for Companies with a Conscience
The _atmospheric release_ is reported to be 10% of Chernobyl. Nothing has been said about the release in the sea, which we all know has been huge.
Fair enough. However the only mention of release in terabecquerels reaching a 7 is media quotes. I can't find this anywhere in INES literature.

Furthermore, the dose rate @ distance from reactor matters lot of than the total release.

[edit: typo... does->dose]
It's probably reasonable to assume that many of the kids attending Harvard do have access to "crazy amounts of excellent connections", $100,000, and personal mentors. Many of the kids at Harvard come from the richest, most "privileged" class in society. They go to Harvard presumably because they consider that Harvard is their best option. Harvard is not a 2nd choice. Thiel is out to demonstrate that, for this class of people, Harvard may not be the best option.
Clickable Link - http://wolfpacktal.es
Umm...what? The first person just picks a number, there's no RNG involved, no need to tell anyone a range. I know we're taught to plan for edge cases, but I find this pretty silly.

edit: Nevermind the second point, I basically echoed what run4yourlives said - I think the averaging somewhat defeats the purpose. "Political stability" is the whole reason they ask not to disclose salaries in the first place.
Seems like there's a potential for a (productive?) arms race here: services like Twitter or Facebook might (and presumably already do) algorithmically try to identify fake users. That evolutionary pressure will generate more sophisticated bots...
> I really can't imagine any reason that it could be a good thing.

It means that anyone who's interviewing for a job at a company can look up what everyone else at the company makes, so they don't have to waste time interviewing with companies that pay too little, and it gives them better negotiating leverage.

In general, it pushes the labor market toward being an ideal liberal market. Marx thought that would result in the wages of labor falling to just above its cost of production, i.e. just enough to feed and clothe you. It looks like he was wrong.
Indeed. If your career-seeking paradigm involves going through HR, of course you're going to want to go to college. If your career goal is as much success as possible, even when you accept higher variance, college looks like a worse deal.
I've replied to similar sentiments on HN a few times:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=968013

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1131606

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=690798

People who do systems research don't do much with theory and formalisms, but they are decidedly doing computer science.
Interesting thread. Yes nginx already selectively supports 1.1 features but not everything. And yes I think the current security issues are the same ones, so maybe this will never have to be solved by proxies in this form, I havent seen what the current proposals to fix the websocket issues are...
What if you already have a bunch of custom controls that are common to your app? I'm not suggesting not investigating more efficient selectors or better css practices to target multiple browsers easily, but once you have all the knowledge built up in one place, what do you gain by rewriting it?

When I start a project, if I'm working from scratch I usually rewrite a lot of the css every day, just to achieve the look I'm going for. Once I standardize some things like how text flows, some layouts, and forms, it's time to develop a nice list of css classes you use frequently and tinker with them as needed. Endlessly rewriting css gets you nowhere.
Probably this one:
http://www.webstock.org.nz/talks/speakers/nicole-sullivan/cs...

I attended the talk and the workshop. What is interesting is that it genuinely challenges. Some CSS designers who I really respect did not 'buy in' to her theory even after spending a day with her. However, as a programmer, who has since used the OOCSS in a context 'for real' I found that it does live up to its promise in practice (unlike the CSS 'semantic html/best practice' story, which sounds great in theory but so often becomes spaghetti in practice)
I guess it's the same as in Argentina.

Here, you can choose either Computer Science at the exact sciences university or Informatic/Systems Engineering at the engineering university.

Both offer courses on algorithms, discrete mathemathics, and such. The thing is that to earn an engineering degree, you must sit for advanced physics, chemistry, economics and other complementary studies.
I don't see how anyone can justify barriers preventing people from immigrating to the US. A 100% open policy would be the best humanitarian approach and would also lead to the most economic growth.
> About the only games I can name as exceptions are roguelikes, particularly Nethack and Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup. These are open-source games with no equivalent in proprietary/commercial world.

Actually, that's not the case.

The gameplay for Blizzard's Diablo and Diablo2 are highly reminiscent of Angband.

I've never seen a commercial variant of something as twisted as Nethack though. :-)
Sony v. Hotz Ends with a Whimper, I Mean a Gag Order
First Open Java API for OLAP Available
I think you may have posted this comment on the wrong article?
Did GSA give Google wiggle room to deny it lied?