skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This isn't going to end well for Matthew, well if he doesn't work the back side of the curve, let me explain;

The challenge is performance is transitory and pay is forever. Specifically, you will have engineers who happen to be on a project at a time when they can have a big impact, and they do and you want to reward that. But then the next few years might be polishing that project's stability and corner cases which will "feel" like very little impact. As a result if you change their pay to reflect their impact when they first deliver, and leave it like that, then the next few years will "feel" like the curve is inverted and your paying and not getting the impact that you would expect from that level of pay.

This is why, invariably, engineer pay tends to evolve into "base pay" + "bonus pay" which can be thought of as the cost of keeping you around and the appreciation for what you have done for us this year. Many people make the "bonus pay" a fraction of your base pay, in that way an increase in your base pay will be reflected in larger bonuses later. Google famously did this and then added a twist which was called a "personal multiplier"(PM). This PM could range from 0 to 3, and the trick was it was kept secret. In that way you could never know whether or not your manager was "playing favorites"[1]. But it gave them a nice talking point about being "open" about how you would be compensated while not letting you convert the how into actual numbers.

The second thing is that everyone is different. And even when they are a lot the same, they are different. Sometimes people will reach a compensation level that meets all of their needs, and lets them save for retirement, and they don't "need" any more than that. Tandem had a great term for that, it was called people who "retired in grade" which was code for someone who was not being motivated by pay any more so they weren't working as hard as it was possible to work them.

The third thing is that sociopaths love a score. They really really do. All you have to do to get the most out of a sociopath is tell them how you are going to score them and let them see how they score relative to other people. (you'll say "pay" in your discussions but the sociopath will hear "score.") These folks will invest all of their time and effort in "winning", and because they are sociopaths they won't necessarily use that tactic of "work harder than those you are competing with." They may in fact spend all of their time developing schemes to sabotage other efforts in order that their effort stands out. Really not a great place to be, really.

The bottom line is that compensation is hard, doing it well requires that you be honest about what you would pay someone to replace the person you are evaluating and verifying that you are paying them at least that much. And when people start going the other way, you need a plan for that too (you can fire them of course, but as the article mentions they have lots of domain specific knowledge that is handy). Generally successful companies move those people to working on projects that are important but not urgent.

[1] To no ones surprise, the managers were playing favorites.
Loyalty to your company went away with pensions. Also, if those numbers are right I might need to clean up my resume.
That's not what it looks like on levels.fyi. It's regularly:
"SDE 1, 110k + 75k stock options", and then levels.fyi will declare that 185, not 110 + 0, 112 + 38, 115 + 19, 120 + 19

edit: and then people will come on here and say "look! Brand new Google employees make 200k!"
The point of having both proportional and state-based voting is to incentivize both small and large states to stay in the union. The optimization is for political unity over perfectly representative democracy. It makes perfect sense when you consider the ideals and goals of its implementation -- that being a compromise in order to convince both small states and large states to cede large parts of their sovereignty to what at the time were effectively foreign nations.
exactly. what's old is new again.
I can’t see how developer ethics comes into it at all here. Either the code is trivial boilerplate and not a license issue, then there is zero ethical issues with using it in my opinion. Just like I copy 2 lines of code to open a file from any repository with any license without either ethical or IP worries. If the code is nontrivial like the fast inverse sqrt - then it’s on the user to realize that they have been fed a landmine by copilot, and it’s on them to avoid or attribute as appropriate. This is a license issue though, not an ethical one. I fail to see a situation where it’s ethical to violate a license or unethical to
use code that doesn’t violate a license.

Note though that all such examples of nontrivial regurgitation that have been presented yet have been deliberately “triggered” (as far as I know) knowing they would likely show up if copilot was fed the function header. It’s also important to remember that this is still preview software. The final version hopefully has more restricted output since this is obviously the big weakness of the system.

I agree it’s a license footgun 100%. But as I said this is the developers problem. Which is why few of us will ever be able to use it in its current form.

As for the ms sources argument - the reason ms bought GitHub is to have this kind of access to a lot of code. It’s their code to use in this way. People who committed code gave GitHub (and it’s future owners) the right. Microsoft (as far as I understand) can sell the right to view this code, for example, through GitHub fees. It’s not against the license of a GPL repo to do so. So Microsoft isn’t violating a license by mangling the code into snippets and charging for the pleasure of downloading those snippets. What’s against the license terms is for me to download the snippet, and accidentally use it in my proprietary software.
Does that make the tool bad to the point of being useless? Perhaps. Is it illegal or unethical? I don’t think so.

> You can't just plug some GPL code into your project and sell it, even if you can find the code itself on Google.

Although some people seem to think copilot can be used to “wash” licenses by giving users a black box “excuse”, I think that idea is dead in the water. Anyone who has a nontrivial-enough GPL snippet in their proprietary code has violated the license.
I disagree that the terms aren't "very helpful" as in this case the context should have been sufficient for any adept English reader to comprehend the meaning of my post without digging into the individual etymology of the word choices I made.

Also, psychosis can be the temporary or permanent result of foreign chemicals, injury, or diseases damaging the brain directly such as untreated syphilis.
The privacy policy (https://attractivenesstest.com/privacy-policy) doesn't even mention 'picture' or 'photo' or 'upload'

In fact it's just a copy paste from their other crypto related site: https://investindefi.net/privacy-policy
You are describing all video game publishers, Nintendo, Microsoft, Epic, Sony. This is actually for indie developers, who can de-risk a project by taking the upfront money.
+1 for the K1, I’ve been very happy with it
NeoAxis Game Engine 2021.3 Released
Should package registries be held responsible for the packages they host?
Exactly this. Washington Post had an article sometime ago about software used in sentencing/parole that consistently judged black defendants more harshly (recommended longer sentences than white people for the same exact crime and recommended parole at a lower rate for black prisoners). The software was proprietary and there was no access to the code but even if it were perfectly written it learned from the data fed to it.

The software came to the conclusion that race (black vs white) was a predictor of crime and recidivism. How did it come to this conclusion? Because of the data

- Black people get arrested at a higher rate than white people

- Black people were also more likely to re-offend than white people

So the conclusion that the program came to makes sense. But it totally ignores the external factors that lead to the 2 above statistics

- Black neighborhoods are more heavily and more aggressively policed, meaning that you will uncover more crimes.

- Black people are targeted by police (black and whites consume drugs at the same rate, but black people are more likely to get stopped, more likely to get searched and more likely to get arrested)

- Over their lifetime, black people are more likely to have more contact with police (even if they live in an all white neighborhood). All it takes is for one of those times they commit a minor infraction (having weed on them etc). That conviction then becomes a justification for elevating their 'risk' level.

- Black ex-convicts have a harder time getting jobs due to inherent bias (all ex-convicts have a hard time, but black ex-convicts have a much harder time). This closes off avenues to gainful employment making turning back to crime one of the few options available to them. And once again, black ex-convicts have more contact with police than white ex-convicts.

Sans context, the input data can be an incredibly effective way of propogating bias into the model.

Even strong AI will not solve for this without some corrections/mintigating strategies. The most effective strategy would be solving the policing problem (bias, over-policing, how we close off all avenues at rehabilitation to people who have been convicted of victimless crimes)
I was just thinking this earlier today. So many of the same people who are careful to diversify their financial investments, mind their cyber security by having different passwords and MFA, also put all their valuables in one bundle, whether that's a phone case-wallet or digital cards. I'll pass unless we reach a point where we have no alternative.
Here: https://github.com/blues/note-hardware/tree/master/Notecard

The PDFs have dimensions
Bitcoin’s Buyers of Last Resort
I don’t think this actually benefits navigators and astronomers. You just can’t predict local area noon based on clock time without additional data. Even when you have that data, it won’t be accurate to the second anyway.

Even if you are at the exact center of the time zone, clock noon is only rarely at solar noon. See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equation_of_time
> If you have physical access to the computer, it's always going to be game over.

Not if it's off and you don't leave the key around.
Most of these things are either likely to be fads (NFTs) or just ways to fuel the speculation and ponzi schemes (compound and uniswap.) Theoretically lending could be used for doing things in the real world I guess, but it seems like once the money is in crypto, it just sloshes around creating more crypto. The betting market is an interesting one, I hadn't seen that. IMO DAOs and DeFi are interesting, but I haven't seen it have a big effect outside of crypto yet.
This might be someone pretending to be Wikipedia. What legal basis does Wikipedia have for telling someone to change something on Instagram? (Unless it's removing Wikipedia content, which would be a reasonable - and legally enforceable - request.)
Is the problem that the photos need to be photoshopped to hell by a professional rather than an algorithm?
> I don't really understand this article, or the current trend of job hopping.

The answer is in your comment: your friend who started recently at Intel is getting more than double the salary of the long-timers. What's not to understand?
Of course, the idea is you reach that upper limit sooner, and making so much more earlier in your career - when properly invested - compounds upon itself dramatically and had enormous implications for one's own financial safety and lifestyle.

And also, thanks for your reply there, nice to hear from you again!
Most people give their total compensation as their base salary + (initial grant / vesting period). It is an annual figure, but only a good proxy for year 1.

In later years the situation is more complicated as the stock price will move, you'll receive annual refreshes which are performance dependent, and you might reach a new level. While the base salary changes with levels can be modest, 15% or so, refresher targets can practically double from level to level.
> I was offered a measly 5% after being dragged in 4 meetings about how great I am.

The way you do this is interview elsewhere, get an offer for 40% more, and _then_ tell your manager that you have an offer for 40% more and that you'd really like to stay but they'd really have to do something about compensation. You'll get more than 5% then (but likely less than 40%). It's annoying that you have to invest the time for this, but it does provide data to your current company that your market rate is in fact what you think it is.
It seems like there are some major accessibility issues that are a result of embedding text/inputs/etc. within threejs itself. Have you considered using an HTML element and dynamically positioning it with CSS transforms (i.e. update style per useFrame call)? It's a little more work, but it should solve a large class of accessibility issues, and is performant to boot.
I blame the prospectors who found the oil.

Fuck it, let's kick the can like we mean it: I blame the dinosaurs who died and turned in to oil.
You're 100% right. I came from a long line of "work till you drop at the same job" men who never took vacation, so it was burned into me. I was loyal out of "because that's what you are supposed to do", which I now view to be an illness. Which is why I left. I was naive thinking the fun of the first decade would last indefinitely.
The tangible existence is irrelevant, computational chemistry is more than capable of exploring this territory. The issue isn’t simply finding giant complex molecules that would make up such hypothetical lifeforms it’s looking for the basic building blocks.

In the end all of chemistry comes down to quantum mechanics it really is quite constrained. Put another way you can list our every possible 2-9 atom molecule containing Silicon plus common elements and look at how the behave.
Unfortunately, that just masks the difficulty by using ambiguous terms that nobody knows if they agree on, and makes communication hard with 3rd party stakeholders who don't share your conventions. When marketing wants to know when something will be done, we can argue about whether dev-weeks or calendar dates are more appropriate, but I think I'd get told right off if I tried to tell them it would take a hundred "story points".

There's no shortcut to avoid the requirement to present different summary statistics to different stakeholders. It's a consequence of decision theory. Unless they're equipped to understand the whole distribution.

It's also the wrong sort of rounding. I think an ikea sofa might take an hour, but if it took all day I'd be pretty shocked. But with software tasks, it's important to accept that the distribution is long-tailed. Sometimes it really will take 10x as long as you expected, and that's not your fault. Story points would have to abandon all meaning to capture that much variance.

I don't recommend incentivizing estimates, though. A big benefit of recognizing a developer estimate as short-hand for the median of a distribution is that when the time doesn't match the estimate, it doesn't mean the estimate was "wrong" or "bad", and the developer shouldn't feel bad.
Judges typically will not even look at the pleadings unless they come up in the case (which they often do not). Even then, the worst a typo will ordinarily get you is a nasty footnote or comment about sloppiness.
Because of how he behaved wrt to the Groove staff when he sold the company to Microsoft
Time goes 00:00:00 through 23:59:59

Except when leapseconds come along and make it 23:59:60

And daylight saving skips an hour, or repeats it.

AM and PM are really anachronisms though, I don't remember the last time I've ever seen "4pm" written down in normal life.
Location: Cape Town, South Africa (GMT+2)

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: Not at the moment

Technologies: C#/.NET (including .NET core), Node.js, PHP, Python, Wordpress, Shopify, HTML/CSS, JavaScript, TypeScript, JQuery, MSSQL, MySQL, PostgresQL, Docker, Git

Email: hi[at]steventhomas.co.za

Website: https://steventhomas.co.za

I am a Fullstack Developer with over 15 years of experience and I am open to remote part time contract opportunities of up to 30 hours/week or for a fixed term (long or short) as a senior developer.
Good point. I would say the confusion is due to my outdated expectations.
Some exceptional buildings (there are many, but not most) transcend their property/production purpose to have positive visual and aesthetic or other value (historical, innovative etc.) and be beautiful or something on their own; not visual pollution.

But they were not built this way for no reason, assuredly the architects, builders, owners, and affiliates gain some goodwill/awareness/advertising value from an important structure in a meaningful location.

Same then for every other structure, only at 10-100X less revenue per hundred impressions. Property is advertising. To the left.
I would honestly pay for a database of inages that could give me professional shots of locations I have been to.
I didn't mention. I think the thought was with designated initializers the order of initialization is what? The order of the elements of the struct? Or the order where it's initialized. In C probably matters little as side effects are usually blatant. C++ I think cryptic side effects are common.
Typos and fuzzy searches cause <datalist> to break.
Denmark and Sweden have VAT rates of 25%, so it's not nearly as unrealistic as you make it out to be.
My title is Architect. It can be easy to stagnate. Recently I've had success working on brand new projects. Setting up the skeletons of code bases, CI/CD, database/persistence layers and internal/external dependencies before teams get onboarded. You might think of that like a glorified lead engineer. I stick around for 6-12 months to help the team get up to speed then move onto the next project.

The architect part might come into play in finding engineering economies of scale. At this point I know how many of our internal applications work so I find ways to reuse existing code and services when we start new projects.
PaaS solutions can't cover everything that PSP was covering though.
I literally had this conversation with my boss yesterday, and I was a bit floored that they don't quite "get" it.

I'm the lead dev at a small co that does work, mostly custom WordPress, for gov / edu / SMB (mostly NGO or trade groups). I'm the senior technical staff... there's a junior dev and a "project manager who codes but doesn't read log files".

I've been working with this company for 7 years and never gotten a raise. We have "unlimited PTO" which really just means I have no idea how many days off I can take. I mostly work with the biz because it used to be quite flexible and was only a 30-hour-a-week commitment. That's become much less flexible as we lost the ability to stack hours without "approval", I've started to be the only person on-call, I now have a junior who more or less reports to me, etc, etc.

I'm looking for work now, mostly because the cost of realestate where I am is outpacing my ability to save for a down payment.

The thing that got me a bit worked up is that when I asked my boss if they'd ever done the math on what it'd cost to replacement (even leaving out the cost of training) and their response was that they were 100% sure I'd make more money at another company-- they are just paying me what they feel like they can afford.

Then they gave me an immediate 5% raise and 1.5% cash bonus.

None of this makes one bit of sense to me... if I leave, they are going to have to find someone (or several someones) who can operate containers in GCP, write WP/Gutenberg blocks, Figma->PHP WP themes from scratch, and write integrations/ imports/ scrapes for these sites they build.

I've been interviewing and know what that kind of work pays, and how much the folks charge for that... but this boss of mine seems prepared to let me quit rather than up my pay. For full disclosure, I'm making 70K/yr+ health insurance and who the hell knows how many vacation days.

It's fun to do job interviews after all this time, and pretty gratifying that folks are so interested to speak with me, but I'm a bit worried how this person is going to get the stuff done that I've been doing at the price they've been selling the work.
Cat Knocks Dog Off Chair After Dramatic Fight in Hilarious Video
Wow that's dumb. I've done some reading on 3d computational geometry for hobbyist game engine reasons, and in my admittedly limited experience, very few of the algorithms involved are intuitive enough to be derivable in an interview setting.
I have no problem with spotting schematic issues (or spotting code issues) given appropriate time to do it. I actually prefer these to rushed questions where you have to implement the solution because it lets me get into the design considerations without spending time drawing symbols or stumbling through syntax.

Last time I got that question it was a schematic large enough that I would have put it on multiple pages and I only had a few minutes to get through it, which was a problem. Brought it up because it seems to be a touch point for others.
That is incorrect, the stock figure on levels.fyi is per year. It does average out over the grant though, ignoring uneven vesting schedules.
I have a full app very close to public launch that makes nested lists and checklists easy and powerful. It's a personal app I've used for years and finally decided over covid to turn into a true product. I'm garbage at fundraising and have 0 wealth in my network so I'm just bootstrapping as best I can... but nested lists are insanely powerful, I'm probably in the 1% of high context switching costs, context switching is absolutely painful for me which is why I built this for myself, easy, fast structure means I can live in the structure of what I'm doing and by always knowing my place it transforms many "context switching" events in my brain to simpler "working the next task node" events which has insanely less cognitive overhead for me. It's the only productivity software that has helped me do more.
I also wonder about this.
I'm not really sure that equitable is the right term to use here. $50k a year may very well be in line with what everyone else at a hypothetical midwestern company is making.

I think it's always important to keep in mind that current developer salaries are the result of a constrained market and not because we innately deserve it or something. Yes it is a high-skill job, but there are plenty of high-skill jobs out there that pay much less.
I think maybe it's time for these threads to be remote by default.
I wonder if keys in this keyboard can be rearranged to Dvorak layout?

I once bought to their keyboard with numpad only to discover that for some silly reason they rotated the keypress mechanism letters F and J by 90degrees. This, of course, made key rearrangement impossible.
It's impossible for me to have a positive view of Amazon (the company) at this point. There's way too much evidence pointing to the contrary.
18.2 timer ticks per second on the old IBM PC timer interrupt.
Because you'd get up on Monday and then book a table for after work on Tuesday. The ambiguity of defining "today" would be problematic.

Now sure people who work night shifts have that, but it's a small number of people and a small number of services that are open 24/7.
Not true. We assess each update in case of high priority issues that need a quick update.

Also we are cautious of using dependencies that don’t provide long term support/back fixes - where possible I pick stable, responsibly-managed dependencies. Postgres is a great example, security fixes are applied across multiple major versions, not just the latest.