skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As a developer who, admittedly, has never had trouble finding a salary I'm satisfied with, and who is comfortable negotiating, I'm not a fan of transparency. It seems like it would cause more problems than it solves.

If salaries are private, then salary is purely a function of negotiation between employer and employee. Presumably both are happy, or at least happy enough not to terminate the relationship.

If salaries are public, however, then a ton of other variables get thrown into the mix. For example, it's possible to end up in a situation where I'd be happy to stay for a certain salary, and my employer would be happy to give me that salary to keep me, but because they can't offer all my peers the same salary, it doesn't work out, and nobody is happy.

And that doesn't even take into account all the extra interpersonal conflict and rivalry that transparent salaries could cause.

The mitigation for both of these issues is, of course, is to base compensation on objective performance rankings. But that's a nontrivial problem. How do you compare a sales guy to a developer to a DBA? Even if you did come up with a mostly fair solution, it would still invite endless discussion and dissatisfaction from people who feel the system wasn't evaluating them properly.
"Puppygames is working on releasing the Revenge of the Titans source code! ETA: 2 weeks."

@humble 7th of April, I got it on the last bundle but haven't played it yet, does anyone know if it's good?
The Dreamweaver and Maqetta approach seems dated. CMS templates (Wordpress, Tumblr, Weebly, Cargo) are the new dreamweaver and they're put together with lower level code.

One middle ground for now would be taking a good CMS template and editing that.
Wait...Google starts at $100k/year for people fresh out of college with an undergraduate degree? So what do they go up to for people with experience?
Incentives in academia can get pretty complex, however. In terms of bragging rights, salary tends to factor in way below publications, tenure, chaired position, etc. Plenty of academics are still lured away to other institutions with the promise of a better salary, but it's less socially acceptable to admit that that's the reason you're switching jobs (instead of, say "I would get to be head of a program/department"). Also, unlike most tech jobs, most academic jobs are not located in the most exciting places to live, which adds yet another confounding factor.
mostly unrelated: why is your name green?
I haven't used this but coding up an HTML/CSS layout is already pretty quick if you're experienced and have macros and templates defined already. Nonetheless tools like this might fit into your workflow if your CSS-fu isn't as strong or you want to prototype several visual designs at once.
I think your sarcasm filter might be malfunctioning. Everything you just said was already implied by what @innes wrote...
Speaking of HBO, I'm really looking forward to Game of Thrones, but as far as I can tell, there's absolutely no legal way for me to watch it in Germany. There's Sky Atlantic in a few other countries, but not here.

I'll buy the DVD, of course, but...why won't you take my money now? It makes no sense. Whatever other broadcast deals you make, you should also be selling episodes or online subscriptions for a fixed price to everyone.
It Depends....

I have a friend who can do anything with a golfball. He is literally amazing. As an amateur he was one of the very best, but he freely admits he cannot succeed as a golfer because he just does not have the right mental makeup.

He will sink 6 foot putts all day in practice but ask him to sink a six footer with a tournament at stake and he just cannot do it reliably.

Being great at something is often not just about skill or love of the activity but also you "gotta have the right stuff"
I want to emphasize that this is not news because reality hasn't changed. The way reality is measured has changed.

The IAEA reported Japan changed from rating each individual reactor (1,2,3) a 5. They combined them together and finally rated the event a 7.
Reuters reported the environmental impact is only 10% of Chernobyl.

P.S. The cherry blossoms are especially beautiful this year.
We're just a few years into serious codegeneration tools. Most people still have the bad taste of MSVS code generators in their mouth. When it evolves, code generators will be unbeatable to manual coding, area by area, language by language, slowly. Some langs/frameworks/toolkits will never have decent codegeneration.

A paper document generates code also, like OO.org (LibreOffice) or OOXML. They're pretty good at that, I have yet to meet the first guy manually writing a doc by hand. Html5 will replace those document formats, simply because they're based on paper.

The camp saying current code generation tools suck, are right. The camp saying future code generators will fit your needs, are right also.
Please don't do that! Programming is just not there yet.

All attempts to establish best "engineering practices" in programming have so far been resulting in incredibly messy and inefficient technologies. UML, Corba, Object Oriented programming -- just to mention a few.

Also, whatever comes from an academic institution, as a rule, doesn't pass the reality check until it get stress-tested by the industry. Professors who don't build real-life software systems, can't tech engineering by definition -- they should stick mainly to theory.

Until programming matures, CS algorithms and data structures should remain our nails and wood.
My first year programming job I made ~50k though I was a contractor, and did a bunch of overtime so it was likely quite a bit more.

I think it was pretty good considering I had not graduated college... so I was getting paid to learn.

I started at $25 an hour. I quickly learned the business, and realized I could make it better. So i spent my nights building an app to do it better. They loved it, became the new thing we used. 6 months later my contract ended. I asked for more... and oh yeah did I mention I was a junior programmer (the code was exactly what you would expect, so I had some good leverage) to me $27 an hour was pretty good. I was 19, and making more than my Dad (he always said this is the benchmark I'm supposed to pass).

about 4 years later I'm now making $77k with about 5k or 6k bonus. I moved to Boston, so I think without a degree, its reasonable but I would definitely be making quite a bit more had I finished college.

I'm Hoping to quit my job soon, and start off on my own. The project I did for a $2/hr raise after 6 months could've been worth millions... and I'm sure I could do it again, seeing better ways to do things is kind of my thing.
I stopped reading at "static assets in memcached, telling nginx how to get them".

Lrn2CDN, or Lrn2LinuxPageCache
Ask HN: Review my startup - www.triviatise.com
Would like some review of the site, elevator pitch and suggestion of features. Also, please dont mind the design we are focusing on functionality right now. If you are a designer, we would definitely considering hiring you on a contract basis to fix up the site.

Elevator pitch
triviatise helps advertisers get consumers to remember their message. In return for learning and answering questions about the advertisers' product, consumers get a chance to win a prize. Answering questions has been proven to create a much stronger retention of information.

Consumers can improve their chance to win by referring their friends and having them take the triviatisement

Here are some features we are working on:
1) leaderboards that give you extra chances to win
2) tasks that give you extra chances to win
3) the more triviatisements you take, the more chances you get to win
I think it stands for Company Town, which is a section of the site/paper devoted to covering "the industry."

Actually, I'm almost certain that's it.
Those properties are not proprietary (the vast majority at least). There is a draft spec for most of them but agreement on the final implementation doesn't yet exist. Browser prefixes give vendors the ability to test said draft spec in the wild and correct course if necessary. They also make sure that differing implementations don't make the lives of web developers hard for decades. They are a great idea, actually.
According to CNN's cost of living calculator (http://cgi.money.cnn.com/tools/costofliving/costofliving.htm...):

$100,000 in Mountain View, CA
= $58,302 in Austin, TX
= $73,992 in Seattle, WA
= $71,306 in Chicago, IL
= $61,660 in Cleveland, OH

And from a quick skim down any real estate listing for Mountain View, CA I think these numbers might be a bit on the high side.
Could you elaborate on this criteria?
>CS and SWE are really quite different disciplines, as much as say Math is from Physics...perhaps a better analogy is Physics and Civil Engineering.

I really am not sure about this. Software Engineering really is the process or craft of creating software. Computer Science is the theory behind how computers work. A good SE program should really be teaching more topics on top of a good CS program, because a good theory base can make a huge difference in creating good software.

The main problem is that Software Engineering, as a vocation, is just too large to really be taught. A developer that works in scripting languages only doesn't really need to be concerned about specific architectures or even most data structures because they don't really use them. However, a kernel developer needs to know all of that, and be extremely proficient in using those topics for their work.

So while a Civil Engineer only needs a subset of all the Physics topics, it's not really possible to do the same with CS and SE.
Several strategies exist:

1. Bump everyone to $105k and ask if he's willing to take that number. If he's going to turn the job down over $5,000, do you really want him?

2. Offer him a $10,000 signing bonus and the same salary as everyone else.

3. Hire him at $110k but give him more responsibility-- including tasks that the other developers don't want to do, such as responsibility for 3:00 am phone calls when the database dies. How many people are going to complain about someone else making 10% more than they are when that "someone else" is taking on the worst projects with a smile and giving them more time to work on the good projects?

4. Discuss it with the team. Are they willing to hire this person at a higher salary than they are themselves going to get? Maybe they think he's quite good and want to work with him. Maybe they think he's not worth it. There's a lot of valuable information that can come out of this discussion.
It was a shortcut. I meant that companies typically release application source code when they feel they can no longer profit from it. Examples: Blender, Inkscape, SOffice, Fish Fillets(a really fun and unique puzzle game), Mozilla, DooM, Quake1,2,3, Hexen, 0 A.D (Exception: The GIMP). I wish I could say most of good open source games were developed as open source from the start, but it's not true. BSD folks have a point here when they talk about undercutting, but I don't think this is bad.

---------Offtopic

Linux games don't have to be open source, but it's a development model I like for practical and ideological reasons. Open source, also GPL, is really the point of Linux. Otherwise why not just go with BSD ? Perhaps I wasn't so clear - I like open source development because in theory it has no restrictions on game design, as opposed to Hollywood style products. But in practice fear of unknown (I guess ?) prevents lots of open source innovation from happening.

Copyright and monopoly originated not to make people profit, not because X deserves Y, but to get more stuff into public domain. You know Gutenberg we praise so much tried to destroy his printing press and keep the secret to himself ? Yet the industrial revolution only started once James Watt's patents expired and he could no longer innovators with lawsuits.

Open source is great for maintenance - I wish companies realized that ! Look at dosbox, wine, various old games. They think they gain a competitive advantage by keeping their infrastructure secret, but how much do they spend in maintenance costs ?
Well these engineers weren't savvy enough to figure out that they could make 110K right now. Who's to say they will in two years? Or maybe you just give them a raise to 110K in two years and they'll be happy with that and never figure out they're worth 125K now.
Nah. How's anyone supposed to create anything if they're busy reading HN all day? I have enough trouble as is.
I suspect Jason has allowed pride to inflate himself somewhat. He probably has come to feel that things like the 'mental game' of golf is an innate ability he posses and others do not, rather than something he has come to earn.

This is not an insult, especially as he had to earn it to even have it; it is a folly I find myself making often as well. Once you have beat something into yourself so thoroughly it feels like second nature, even you begin to suspect maybe it really was second nature after all.
I wonder what the difference is like between Canada and the States? It must be lower in Canada, even in Vancouver, BC with all the expenses here.
Still, I'm sure I'm making well below what I should be.
Well, whatever the situation, I'm happy I'm working at a fantastic place with great people and interesting work! I also make far more money than I need to live comfortably.

[edit] I make far less than $100 000.
Absolutely, CS and SE are distinct fields of study. My school offered majors for both.

SE is unabashedly about software and the process of developing it. It's about design patterns, how to manage software projects, testing and verification, etc. I just looked over my school's latest curriculum and it looks like they've added electives on embedded, real-time and distributed systems.

CS is, well, CS. The software is just a means to an end. I was a CS major, and prefer it that way.

My issue with SE degrees in general is that we don't have the decades (or centuries) of process experience that other engineering disciplines (mech, civil, EE) have. Agile? Waterfall? Pair programming? OOP? TDD? We're still figuring out best practices in software.

There is a noticeable lack of rigor in most software projects, but that is correlated with software being incredibly hard to get 'right', as opposed to a bridge or other fixed piece of critical infrastructure.
I own the domain startup.io which I originally thought I would use for a Startup Q&A site.

A news submission site is appropriate as well.. anyone want to help?
I believe this is exactly what happens in Sweden, Denmark, and Finland. Salaries aren't public directly, but tax returns are...so you can easily see what everyone makes.
Seems like a good idea but I doubt the data is very accurate. I live in Montreal which is well known to be one of the cheapest places to live in North America (very cheap housing, very cheap energy, etc.) but WA puts Montreal as the most expensive?
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=cost+of+living+in+mount...
To call this lawsuit quixotic would be too generous. (And I forget, did Don Quixote ever come off as so whiny?)
In Norway, personal income is a matter of public record
How hard would it really be to re-implement MySpace? I keep thinking three or four focused coders could duplicate the major needed functionality pretty quickly with today's web technology stack.

I ask that because I am wondering what the $250mm in run-rate expenses is for; the article scoffs at cutting so much out of G&A next year, and that may well be impossible, but it's hard for me to understand why Myspace needs even $100mm a year in opex when reddit (which is, admittedly, 1/10 or less the traffic) has been functioning with 2 - 4 person tech team.

Anyone?
Could someone explain that to me?

http.Handle("/", http.FileServer("static/", "/"))
if err := http.ListenAndServe(":3000", nil); ...

Does the http module keep track of the routes within the module state? This seems like a horrible idea coming from python. How does this work in Go? Is it possible to run two HTTP servers in parallel using threads with this model?
I agree and I'm working with marketing folks to make this stuff more clear. There are just so many details to get a release like this out the door that some things didn't get as much attention as they deserved. But your point is well taken and I'll try to get the message cleared up as it is pretty cool IMHO.

Also look for some more technical deep dive blog posts on my blog by tomorrow at http://brainspl.at where I will clarify a bunch of this stuff.(right after I get some sleep;)
Those numbers sound pretty much like mine. They're also pretty meaningless thanks to the incredible opportunities for scholarships at nearly any school you'll care to look at. After scholarships, between family and myself I'll pay around $33,000 at the end of the day (the discrepancy between the aforementioned $25K being the additional housing and other expenses I chose to incur over the most fiscally responsible decisions).

I left school with $9,800 in debt. Most of the amount paid off before graduation (at least 60%) was mine, the rest my parents'.

No, you can't work through it on a sub-$10/hour job. But I had those jobs, too: they were beer and social money. I set up my own consulting company and I did GSoC and made more than enough to put myself in a really good position coming out of school.
Interesting:

http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=stsmytherie

Is Microsoft somehow paying for these posts?
p.s. I like this as a Private Equity play -- buy myspace for cheap, and "Facebookize" the design and concepts while your crack team of coders re-writes the entire infrastructure.

Voila -- the world's only credible Facebook competitor, newly lean and mean.

Now who do we know who's willing to lay off pretty much all of Myspace??
Flock is dead
A lot.

http://techcrunch.com/2011/04/06/google-said-to-have-high-le...
http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=v4dbtutorials

Seems to be another bot.
"Hey, I'm performing at or above this person's level, I should be compensated accordingly".

The value you bring to the organization should be the deciding factor, and your performance relative to someone else might be a way to measure this, but probably isn't a good measure.
I would believe it were he 20. However, most golfers start fading in their thirties, having lost the extra power that their bodies could provide when younger. While I don't doubt that he will be an excellent golfer (thus "proving" that 10,000 hours of dedicated practice will indeed make you great) I certainly doubt he will be a PGA golfer.

That said, he might have a chance for a lesser tour. And that, for sure, will lead him to his true goal: motivational speaking! (Oh... come on, like it isn't obvious...)

I've certainly thought about doing similar, outrageous things. It seems to be a current pattern: do something seemingly outrageous and interesting, write about it, derive income.
Confidence is everyting[...]
Why Search Is Still King But Ignored
Why are there hardly any search startups funded, while the search industry is one of the most profitable industries?
It always made me sick that Huffington was making so much coin from unpaid bloggers.
Interesting -- I never paid much attention to the relative weights, because I figured that the piling on effect was always taking place. So I used karma to figure out which contents to start to read, by some sort of ad hoc guess at what overall karma % a comment had in a thread.

Plus, I recall from my reddit days that the earliest comments are way more likely to receive votes. So I always ended up trying to divide the karma by the time since post, which just distracted me.

Different strokes I s'pose.
This is exactly what I thought when I started running commands. The "interpreter" is so incredibly slow. Then I looked at the source code and just face-palmed. Python?? Really?
A lot of detail, not a lot of reasoning. What seems to matter are things like ODSCP (or whatever the ssl check is called), so use Opera, and phishing, so common sense.
For what it's worth, proxying HTTP/1.1 is tremendously complex, and WebSockets are an interesting and somewhat intimidating pile of additional trouble. It's been years since I've worked on a proxy (I was a Squid developer many years ago), but since my current project will be dealing with WebSockets, it triggered an instant "I wonder how that's going to work through proxies" response, and an ingrained moment of my heart skipping a beat thinking about how complex such an implementation might become...so I went digging, and found this great thread on the Squid list:

http://www.squid-cache.org/mail-archive/squid-dev/200907/003...

If you want to skim, the really knowledgeable parties in the discussion are Henrik Nordstrom, Robert Collins, Alex Rousskov, Mark Nottingham, and Ian Hickson.

It's actually not as bad as I'd feared, but the protocol also obviously had many issues unresolved back then (and probably still, since security concerns led to it being disabled in Firefox 4 and Opera), as did the plausibility of implementing a proxy or a proxy cache that could support it.

But, to get back to nginx, it is also possible to selectively support 1.1 features without supporting the entire protocol. Squid has supported persistent connections for over a decade, but took years to get support for caching with ETag, ranges, and a number of MUST features, so it reported as HTTP/1.0 with additional capabilities (it might still do this, I haven't paid much attention since leaving the project). So, it seems plausible that someone could implement just the necessary features for WebSockets, without having to implement everything in HTTP/1.1.
It seems that VMware's long term view is that virtualisation itself is a commodity (which it is, KVM and Xen are both "good enough" already), and it's going to be the management of IT resources which is financially lucrative in the future.

Their core business today is selling vSphere 4 management with ESXi as the hypervisor, I think they see their core business in 10 years as being the management layer for your entire IT infrastructure, wherever it runs.
Startup Sales Hiring: Why Should You Fire Your First Salesperson?
Issues:

1) The solder should always be convex, not concave. It's not that way in the illustrations. A concave ball, as sometimes shown, may be a good connection to the pad, but a cold joint to the wire. It'll work, for a bit, but may eventually fail.

2) Always, always, always keep the tip tinned (covered with a thin layer of solder). The solder acts as a thermal conductor between the iron and the joint, which lets the joint heat up much more quickly. It also prevents the iron from oxidizing. If you don't do this, the iron will oxidize, and you will no longer be able to tin it.

3) Feed the solder into the joint, not into the iron. That tells you the joint is hot enough.

4) Temperature controlled iron makes a huge difference. Weller WES51 is the minimum you should use ($90 or so). More expensive irons in the Weller line don't make a big difference. Metcals are nicer, but wicked expensive.
I disagree. First of all, workplace social conflicts develop very fast and are often irrational in nature. If salaries are public knowledge, then people have time to accept that there's just that one incompetent guy making 20% more than he should and within a few hours they forget about it. It's mildly annoying, but as long as people are happy with what they're making and with their own job security, they aren't going to risk their jobs or reputations over it. It's when secrets are discovered that people become irrational, angry, and vindictive. Othello teaches this lesson. Dude discovers a scarf in the wrong place and loses all sense of reason, and kills his innocent wife in the process.

People would get angry and leave in a public-salary system. My contention is that people discover a lot of this information anyway and get more angry in a private-salary system.

Annual performance bonuses should probably be secret. The ranges or "buckets" for each year/class/job description should be public; who fell into what bucket should be private.