skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> really well paid

That's the kicker, nobody wants to unionize because they're actually pretty well off - and (and this may be an anti-union talking point) it has the risk of actually lowering the income for some, so that the lower-paid people get paid more.

Anyway that said, if you're working in tech and feel like you are being exploited - underpaid, overworked, unpaid overtime, expected to be always online / on call without specified pay, etc - by all means, unionize.

Another issue is that there's a lot of naïve, young people who still have the energy and lack the corporate culture cynicism who do end up working 14+ hour work days and ask for seconds; this is what people are up against as well. But this is where the awareness has to come in; if you do not get paid for those hours, you are being exploited. The hours you spend, you will not get them back. And, just spending long hours when you're still young does not automatically translate in success later on. If you're unlucky you'll end up with burn-out. And of course, if you need to work long hours or multiple jobs, you're not being paid enough. I know the housing market especially in SF is fucked, but working more will not unfuck that. Look into remote work and live somewhere cheaper.
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There's also one argument which your CTO didn't make, but really should have: Hetzner is less reliable.

For instance, both my postgres master and replica went down one day the other weekend, because another machine in the same rack popped the breaker. In my specific application, I can cope with a once-in-a-blue-moon blip like that -- Hetzner saves me literally thousands of dollars per month in compute and bandwidth, I like doing [a limited amount of] sysadmin, and it's worth the trade-off. But, how do you think your CTO is going to feel about this move when all of your dev VMs go down just before a big customer deployment?
This actually sounds like a positive. Can they exit from Canada next?
I'm not sure how you would go about being anonymous if you already gave them all of your bank info and IDs.

Monero is the only payment method I would consider to be most likely anonymous. It has very low transaction fees (<0.001%) and completes a translaction in about 20 minutes.
I don’t think it has anything to do with asthetics. Running on pavement is hard on your joints.

There are more older people trying to run distance to keep in shape and many of them need more cushioning. It can also be a decent training shoe where you can try to do long miles day after day.
Afaik that's a one month old hoax. Isnt it?
Will we ever see the return of hand curated directories of websites like the old days, categorized by topics and approved by human review?
> it is within reach for most programmers to jump on the real estate ladder, heavily invest, and retire comfortably.

In Amsterdam, where I currently live, I would say a normal salary for a senior dev would be ~ 80k euros gross. A decent apartment somewhere in the city could be ~ 500k. Unless you can pay a pretty significant deposit you won't qualify for a loan (rule of thumb is you get 5x gross salary = 400k in this case).

Back in the day the same kind of apartment could probably have been bought on a working class salary.

Climbing the real-estate ladder is hard for a dev, impossible for anybody making less than dev salaries.
As a person that works in DevOps (but doesn't write YAML files all day), the problem is using the wrong solution for the scope.

I think DevOps groups a lot of times end up doing the work that the groups they support should have done for themselves. However, the working yourself out of a job is a very real thing. This is happening with DB Admins and QA primarily. Cloud technologies is displacing the rest.

If your company has 1 dev, 1 sys admin, 1 DB admin and 1 QA person, creating a DevOps team won't produce more efficiency, it will have the opposite effect.

On the 10x complexity comment, if DevOps is done correctly it's invisible to the user. In practice any decision made automatically has drawbacks. On the flip side, a lot of developers are unaware how things work or lack consistency that automation can put in place.
I wish PoE were more common as an option to power these SBCs.
Not using Agile reduces cognitive load perhaps too.

When i've seen agile in use, it's because incapable managers lack the insight or trust to let teams surface valuable work through emergent properties of what they're working on, so they, in politburo fashion, try controlling things, which just lessens the attention spent on work.
> An estimated 821 million people are still undernourished (high confidence).

> Changes in consumption patterns have contributed to about two billion adults now being overweight or obese (high confidence).

We’re trending away from undernourishment.

https://www.ipcc.ch/srccl/chapter/summary-for-policymakers/# - section A.1.4
Terra $45B Face Plant Creates Crowd of Crypto Losers
Many of the limitations are around the values for payment processor minimums. With rapid inflation it will be a race to see if those values change first or the values of what we consider 'micro' today exceed their minimums making 'small-but-not-micro' payments easy because they are just normal payments in the eyes of payment processor policies.
Honestly why I'm considering not starting my own business. Getting the product to work is the first 80% of the work. The remaining 96% is billing, authentication, and marketing.
Your CTO is correct. Generally speaking you start building using the path that can deliver value the fastest to customers. This is usually something like Heroku. At some point you run into platform limitations and have to migrate to another platform. Generally this would be AWS or some other cloud. Eventually you outgrow the cloud provider and go into a data center. By that point you’re talking number of racks vs VMs.

Another thing to consider, as a developer, is how to make your app as independent from vendor requirements. For example, if you build an app in such a way that it only works using SQS you’ll run into issues down the road.

Also, why y’all using dedicated dev VMs? IMHO it sounds like there are other issues to solve before you migrate the app somewhere else. If I was in your position I would work on making the app easier to setup and deploy. Your CTO has a lot to consider and being a CTO at a startup isn’t an easy thing. How long does it take to deliver a feature to customers? How can you help speed that up? What are the engineering goals of the CTO and how can you help with those goals? Make his or her life easier and work with them. Continuing to push an issue like this will cause you frustration and make your CTO dismissive of your ideas and suggestions in the future.
There doesn't seem to be much public transportation happening in Shanghai either...
I dunno, but I would guess tech ability.

>I’m confused - are we underpaid?

Most certainly yes. If nothing else, just by nature of corporations setting "market rates," or at least defining the position and what they are willing to pay.

Another example, that famous productivity pay gap chart? Most of that is through automation done by computerization.

https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/
Another vote for "listen to the CTO." In my mind it's a tie of you're paying $0 at Azure since you're on credits, and you don't yet have the expertise to do anything else, by your own admission. The company grows by the product, not the infrastructure. Ship things, get money, hire sysadmins when Azure becomes cost prohibitive (read: not necessarily "not free anymore," but too expensive to stay), then migrate.
Holy cow, this is amazing. Absolutely fantastic!
Still, this depends a lot on what features you are actually using. If your use case is a few dedicated servers and maybe a https load balancer, you can have that at Hetzner for half the money. Paying the premium for any of the large clouds only makes sense if you really plan on using their advantages, i.e. well-integrated managed services like RDS and SQS or quick scaling.
Must be educated in America, not in home countries.
I'm too nervous to name the company, but here we go. [Edit: whatever, I didn't sign an NDA. This was Algolia]

I've been meaning to get this off my chest. Out of all ~100 interviews I took over the last 8 months, there was a singular egregious example.

It netted out upwards of 25hrs.

You may ask, "lelandfe, why did you go through all of this?" It had been 8 months without a paycheck; I barely made rent this month (landed a dream job recently! phew). This was for a senior demo eng role:

1. 30m phone screen

2. 30m behavioral

3. 1hr technical. Asked to write a hashmap to filter JSON, binary search over an array, and a Markdown renderer

4. 8hr take home assignment. But, "if you do wish to spend more [time], please go ahead." I spend the minimum time needed, which winds up being more like 14hrs.

I have to register for the platform, come up with a fictitious company, and then design and build a real demo site using the service – turning over the source code and live demo at the end. The scoring rubric is how creative the use of the platform is, and how much value the search service adds to my fake company.

5. 2hr written email correspondence test. I'm given 3 fake emails from "customers," each asking about specifics of the platform, e.g. "where can I find X and Y on the admin?" and "please define concepts Z and A for me."

6. 30m presentation of take home to 10 employees of the SaaS company, followed by 30m Q&A with the team. I'm only made aware of this after turning in my take home. Building and rehearsing the presentation takes around 3hrs.

7. 3hr on-site

8. Day after on-site: 15m wrap-up discussion w/HR

9. 15m wrap-up discussion w/engineering manager

Through all of this, every decision maker expressed extreme satisfaction with my performance, and the engineering manager repeatedly told me how smart and well-spoken I was.

A week later, I get, as an email: "our team has decided to pass on your candidacy." They adamantly refuse to give me more feedback (though admitting: position still open, no other candidates in final stages), and don't refer me to other roles.
People still use cars. In many of these foreign countries people often just buy them as a status symbol. That none were sold is an indication of a serious economic problem.
And hungry in the sense of hungry for money, achievements and career, not literally hungry.

I mean some SF folk live in such luxury that they think eating is a nuisance not worth their attention, so they take on subscriptions or all-in-one meal replacements at 10x the cost and 0.1x the flavor of normal food (think Soylent, Juicero, etc).

If your company or colleagues glorify that lifestyle, run away.
I maybe wrong but let me paraphrase what I think they meant (and why I think it's a great analogy).

I don't want my teeth pulled just because. If it's a fix to a problem - a means to an end - and there's no other way to do it, I'll consider it. Likewise, I don't want to work with developers who are super passionate about typing code into vim. I want to work with developers who are passionate about solving problems. Code can be a means to that end, and by the time it gets to us we typically already know we need some code for it, but the danger is spending days or weeks writing code nobody needs and nobody asked for because it's "their passion."
Then where do you expect Mayor McCheese to govern?

https://mcdonalds.fandom.com/wiki/Mayor_McCheese
Well said. I think the key point you make is that we are paid to maximize the value of the business. If the business isn't profitable, we could all lose our jobs. Too many IC feel that if the company isn't maximizing their personal effort they are inefficient and wrong. However, sometimes more value can be added by NOT writing more code or more documents. It is sometimes more valuable to throw away a bunch of completed work and not fall victim to the sunk cost fallacy. Sometimes a "worse" architecture is the highest BV.
You can try experimenting with supplements. I’ve been taking l-theanine and I’ve been sleeping throughout the night now, whereas before I would wake up within 3 hours. I think my GABA levels are low which also manifests as anxiety so you can look into which neurotransmitter(s) you suspect are the issue for you and experiment accordingly.

Of course, cleaning up your lifestyle will do wonders for your neurotransmitters over the long term. Focus on diet, exercise, and reducing stress. Good luck
I've never been in a union, so I can't assess their inner workings.

However, nobody says you have to join an existing one - you can just make your own. Amazon and Starbucks workers are doing it in much harsher conditions, so why wouldn't developers be able to?
Good luck enforcing the trademark :)
Are there any interesting new features in this release?
Southern England is on the same latitude as Northern France. Copenhagen is on the same latitude as Glasgow.
It's fair to ask people to do work, but they should be paid for it if it goes beyond an hour or so. I've turned down opportunities with a ridiculous recruiting process, I couldn't imagine what it would be like when you actually worked for them!

When I was managing the software division of an IT services company, we would send all candidates a fizz-buzz type programming assessment that should only take 5-10 minutes to complete. After that, we would do a 15 minute phone screen then had someone come in for a 1-2 hour long interview with some live programming. The point of the exercises in the interview was to see someone's thought process, not if they could actually "complete" the exercises.

At that point, we'd have a pretty good idea of where a candidate's skill were at and we could start the process of extending an offer if the team agreed they were a good fit.

There were a few occasions where the candidates had no experience with any of the tech we were using, but were obviously capable developers. We'd usually make an offer at the lower end of the salary range for that position with a raise being guaranteed in 10 weeks if they met the requirements. There was the expectation that they'd do a bit learning outside of work hours if needed.

Everyone who was given that offer accepted it and was given the raise.
> to do nothing

The author puts it better: they do lots of things, all day long, but produce almost nothing.
OP asks about micropayments, your remake is not specific to btc lightning payments. So I guess this is something to solve (soon) on the government level.
You're underpaid by definition if the company reports a revenue >0.

If your labor was compensated for the actual value it produced, no company could turn a profit. Thats the fundamental problem of capitalism
How was this quantified? How much degradation would be expected if the amount of power were to be drawn from the equivalent battery without algae?
The 3 year survival odds are about 1:23 for software/services startups, and 1:70 for hardware projects.

I have culled many half-arsed options... and the decisions are far from arbitrary. Also, who budgets for a project burning over $100k a month in labor without a detailed plan... lol
Yup. It's bound to happen. And when it does, Reddit will no longer exist in my eyes.
You're opening for me to go off-topic and talk about drug abuse here. And my opinion is that the user is at fault for consuming unhealthy amounts of X, but that we as society should help out. (See the resemblance?) (Also note that society might have failed people and led them to abuse too, but the final decision is made by the person either way).

But closing the door for people who don't have issues with self-restraint feels like collective punishment. (Not that Maccas are in the wrong here, they can open and close restaurants wherever they want, I don't mind.)
I assumed this discussion was about the package manager and not the OS
I'm waiting for the day they turn off access to Old Reddit. Then I'll stop using it' and hopefully finally be free of the neverending bullshit there.
Not sure how the cloud helps here other than it essentially being pointless there since the VM hosting provider can just extract the crypto keys from memory (or already has the keys in the first place if one uses a managed product...).
and have your windows smashed daily. You underestimate the power of propaganda and how people think in Russia in regards to this war.
> I have a nice collection of in-progess but dormant pieces of software.

That's already more than I have; I get my job satisfaction from my job, I like to spend my free time with family and hobbies that don't involve more work.

But, different strokes for different people; I like playing video games, others like writing code for fun.
I don't think this is the reasoning at all.

I think trying to conduct transactions in a heavily sanctioned nation that's also fighting a war of aggression against a neighbor, and incurring heavy losses, is causing a headache for the bean counters, and it has finally become more trouble than it's worth, financially.

These enormous multinational behemoths - as an entity - don't give two shits about the people dying in Ukraine, Russian soldiers dying, or the Russian people enduring hardships. They care about profit.

It's no different than the stance on civil rights, or LGBQT+, or any other issue. If you look historically, these companies only bother to "do the right thing" once it has the potential of threatening profits. It may sound cynical, but the historical record is pretty solid.
I'm actually all for take-home projects, because I excel at them - and I have the time. But I fully understand that others don't have the time, or don't want to risk being ghosted after submitting work.

Ideally, if we're stuck with whiteboarding and take-homes, candidates should get to choose.

But with that said, ref. the article...25 pages? Who comes up with that kind of work?

My take-home projects have been like 2-3 pages max, and took maybe 2-3 hour to finish from beginning to end.
Unions could insure that you get some sort of compensation for the work you put in during your application. If you just try to ask for the money on your own they'll laugh in your face and show you the door.
You can be both underpaid and paid far more than most people. Different jobs have different values, and so someone in a correctly paid job can still make more money by switching to an underpaid position that has far more value.

Of course in reality pay is about to supply and demand, not value. Thus underpaid just means you haven't found it worth your while to switch to a job that pays better. There might be good reasons for this.
the difference is that for 30 years since McDonalds is in Russia, nobody said “We don’t need McDonalds”

they only left after the “special operation” started, but the propaganda will try to shift the blame and tell “whatever, we don’t need McDonalds anyways”

next thing you know: “we dont’t need bread, we don’t need bananas, we don’t need water, German cars are for fashists”, etc.
I remember the evening news on TV when the first McDonald's restaurant opened in 1990 at Pushkin Square. There was a huge crowd of Russians outside, wanting to try the burger.

It was a sign of a more open world, something resembling an end of the cold war.
There was a sense of optimism in the West about a peaceful future with Russia.

It does not matter that McD itself is closing in Russia, but it does tell us something about what the political and security-climate has reverted to.
> I replied, "I am worth what someone will pay me for my skills. It's not just salary but benefits as well. I would expect this position described to me has a significant budget."

That's a good answer

> "..Typically equipment purchases come out of the technician's budget."

Nonsense. Not if you have auditors. I'd have walked out of here long before this. They don't grasp the iron triangle.
"In the late 1990s, the government instituted land reforms intended to evict white landowners and place their holdings in the hands of black farmers. However, many of these "farmers" had no experience or training in farming. Many farms simply fell into disrepair or were given to Mugabe loyalists."

" From 1999 to 2009, the country experienced a sharp drop in food production and in all other sectors. The banking sector also collapsed"

Looking past the racial issues, what this was is a socialist redistribution of wealth away from a productive educated class to an unproductive, uneducated and corrupt class. It's economic suicide, if only the corrupt government had been educated enough to recognize it. The results were predictable. South Africa is flirting around the edges of doing something like this. I hope the example of their northern neighbor is enough to stay their hands.
Pretend you’re hiring in this landscape. If people will submit to it, if it provides a more reliable signal of likely success than degrees or certifications do, and if you feel like it’s required to stay competitive, why wouldn’t you?

(To be clear: I don’t condone the practice at all, but I at least can understand possible rationales)
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I think it means something more along the lines of "we publish thousands of pages of articles including media and data viz, and we need it to have a consistent look and feel"
I switched to ZSH and was quite happy with it, now using FISH - mainly because of it's excellent auto-completion that displays as you type. Otherwise both ZSH and FISH are good options IMHO.

Although for typical "shell-scripting" I still use BASH for the most-part where scripting languages like Python aren't as suitable, so my scripts can be used on other peoples systems.
Changing the text direction from horizontal to vertical? What is expected, that the customers will tilt the head just to read the brand?
Devil's advocate here. That's the kind of interview problem solving test I prefer.

You're given an hour to solve a problem that probably takes less than half that time (if we go by the typical problem given for tech interviews). The ticking time stress effect is thus somewhat alleviated and you can focus more on the problem.

You're left solving the problem on your own. The alternative is a distracting onlooker who keeps bugging you with "what are you thinking?" As if probing people for meta explanations of their mental processes is how we help them solve problems.

You're given a phone number to call if you need help.

If my assumptions are correct, their approach is not too far off the mark.
They're probably doing all they can. The problem is their dominance, both means they have effectively an entire industry looking for loopholes in everything they do, as well as legal considerations (arbitrarily punishing individual smaller actors might skirt on the territory of anti-competitive behavior)
This is cool and I’m a fan, but I don’t see how Lightning can be in good standing with the US when it explicitly ignores the Bank Secrecy Act.

There’s no one doing OFAC screening or compliance checks on these transactions, so of course it’s going to be cheap.

I would expect headwinds preventing this from going mainstream.
Russia does. Look at how bizarrely long the queue to the first McDonalds in Moscow was.
Perhaps they will work, as in-app payments, inside Apple's walled garden.
I know a few people who can easily be pushed to violence but, speaking personally and for most people I know, there's no words for which I would punch someone.