skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Why is this even on HN, let alone #1?

Maybe it is because a large number of HN'ers are currently gainfully employed in the valley and that figures like these can come in extremely handy when interviewing with any company there especially if that company is google.

Datapoints like these are few and far between, sure people lie routinely about their salary but by now I think this thread has given more than enough corroboration to take the original statements by my friend as truthful.

It also nicely showcases that places like glassdoor.com show base salary only but that the total compensation can be much higher, which should factor into any decisions you make with respect to working for big company 'x' (or G in this case) versus running your own thing.
Very true, but there's no need to assign developers as "inspiring experts" and entrepreneurs as "wealthy people."

10/10 of the wealthiest people are not successful because they wanted to be rich, they're successful because they enjoy business and entrepreneurship. These people aren't any different than you; they just have different interests.

It ultimately comes down to your personal interests. Like business? Be an entrepreneur. Like programming and computer science? Be a developer. The only thing not to be is in it only for the money.
Discovery by design
There are three possibilities here:

1. You really did disappoint at the end of your internship. I've seen this happen. People get complacent. Take a good, hard look at what you've done and see if there's any truth to it or that someone could get that impression;

2. The company's situation changed. Funding may have fallen through. There may be a power shift in management. Who knows? or

3. They were lying to you the whole time.

I suspect (2) but, then again, we only have your side of it. I don't mean to sound harsh here. I know nothing about you.

It's time to look on the bright side: you got a three month internship out of this. If you can find someone from the company to get a reference from then that's valuable.

The US operates basically on "at will" employment. With very limited exceptions (eg the Americans With Disabilities Act) they can withdraw that offer and that employment at pretty much any time. If you can demonstrate damages and they can't justify it, you can sue but you'll need to show damages and honestly it's not worth going down that route even if there is a breach of contract, which is a somewhat separate issue.

If you had offers from other companies, go back and contact them. Tell them you'd originally planned to keep working for the company you were interning for as you were really excited about what you were working on and who you were working with but that offer fell through. This is a perfectly acceptable situation and one that won't tarnish you as a potential employee.

If the company was dishonest with you, either from the beginning or at the end, then what happened is a good thing. Better to discover this now than 1-2 years from now when they shaft you out of your options or the like. Integrity and honesty matters. Do not go work for a startup if you don't trust who you're working for. Reputation is everything.

Lastly, I'm glad (for your sake) that you didn't drag whoever this was into the public by naming and shaming them. As tempting as that might be, don't do it. You seriously undermine your ability to get any reference from someone working there and, honestly, this tends to make whoever is slinging mud look bad as well. Just move on.
This is a great example of Microsoft is supporting the hacking community around kinect.

Though I wonder if there is a nefarious side to this in the long-term.

I suspect with the public history Microsoft has, most people developing technology on Kinect as a platform are smart enough to know how to handle Microsoft, and hopefully Microsoft's 'evil' days are behind them.
go to http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3181796 and search for H1b
"the answer's pretty much got to be Shigeru Miyamoto"

No it doesn't have to be. Miyamoto is unquestionably the most innovative game designer but Apple really changed the industry from magic in a box to hey the 16 year old down the street just made $10,000 with a game he made by himself.
Read "The lady from Zynga", a post by Spolsky for a very in depth answer of this very thing.

http://answers.onstartups.com/questions/19422/if-im-working-...
A river runs next to it
it's full of hate and negativity

You can't spell NoSQL without the word no.

This is why I try never to use the word NoSQL. It's a flamebait word, deliberately engineered to add heat rather than light. There's no such thing as "a NoSQL database"; there are only databases. Even the relational databases that parse SQL have significant differences, and the databases that don't speak SQL are all over the map.
Eliot, thanks for coming online and publishing your perspective.

MongoDB simply gets better in any version and it is indeed a reliable platform, at least as human beings (employees) are.
It appears the app page is down. I am not sure if this is just bad luck on my part, or something FB is doing deliberately.
Could any engineer(with 1~3 years of experience) at Google NYC office share some income information? How's the pay at NYC Google generally compared with Mountain View?
You make an interesting point--why is it the technically savvy are partitioning their FB usage, but not necessarily partitioning their secure accounts in the same way?
Shhhhhhhh! As someone who works at startups, the fact that my competitors would trust something like MongoDB with their data is awesome.
you misunderstand me. I LOVE postgresql. It is the best database ever and I try to use it as much as possible. My only point was, they started out as unstable and untrustworthy just like anything else would.
Fuck. Yeah.
When my kid was three or four, I called the sheriff's business number, asked to talk to the 911 office, and asked them if I could have my son dial 911 and talk to them, for training (his). They checked if they were busy, then said OK.

It puffed up his chest a bit, but we talked about emergencies, how to get help, why we don't call 911 unless it's an emergency, etc.

I suppose if everyone did it they wouldn't be agreeable, but no one does, so you should too. :)
According to the link, that's 320k operations per server, which means that it handles 8 million operations per second with 25 servers.

I don't think it's a stretch to say that any database that has 25 servers should be able to handle at least 8 million operations a second.
I work for someone else because today, my expertise is in software development, not in

* sales & marketing

* graphic design

* finance

* business law

All of the above can be obtained and I plan to obtain enough expertise in those over time so that I could start my own software shop. But today, I assess my risk of total failure to be very high, with no soft landing.
The Simple Gadget That Could Slash Apartment Buildings' Water Use
Show HN: Excssive, drag and drop CSS compressor
This is certainly true (I've worked both sides of the fence in terms of types of firm).

To add a generalization, my rule of thumb is the variable part of compensation varies most for the domain experts. So in technology for the sake of technology style companies like Google, total comp shoots up based on stock/bonuses. In reality, Google is an advertising company so presumably the ad sales folks bringing in whales aren't hurting either. Naturally numbers get skewed by overpaying to keep certain people (i.e. overshoot on retention packages), and given large scale, there are always some overpaid due to lucky timing/placing. Such is life! In hedge funds, the traders get the big bonuses, but the programmers get a solid salary so lower bonuses don't hurt quite so much. Luck also plays a part for those folks var comp. For those in hft, I'm aware of a few places where given the right mix of skills, someone who likes to think of themselves as a programmer can get the trader style bonuses.
It's unfortunate, and it sounds like they should have been better/earlier in communicating intent to you. But there could be other factors, like financing falling through or real skills-match concerns that only emerged in the last few weeks of the internship, that contributed to the situation. And even if they had hired you, it's possible for the situation to change in just a few weeks or months – so them following through with the offer was no guarantee of settled long-term employment, either.

On the bright side, there's lots of hiring of people with your skills right now, in NY and the Bay Area [1]. Though the work-eligibility factor will complicate and slow any processes, you could probably start (and complete) many interviewing processes in the next few weeks, and might have several offers by the end. So I would use your 'grace period' for that, rather than travel, if living/working in the US is your top priority.

Also, because of the arbitrariness of current-era US immigration law, I would make sure you get your visa advice from a specialist, or at the very least a sponsoring-employer, rather than a comment-thread. This seems to me like an area where a single inadvertent admission – "why yes, I did talk about job opportunities with a stranger standing next to me in line at Disneyland" – can lead to a bureaucratic troubles that are almost vindictive in their application.

[1] See for example the recent "Who's Hiring (November 2011" thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3181796
The interoperable solution needs to be easier to set up and/or much cheaper than Dropbox/Facebook/etc. though. Any interoperability standard will have to be obvious to normal people to have a hope of being a real selling point and make people strongly averse to signing up for a non-interoperable service, and WebDAV doesn't seem to be anywhere near there.
Yes, It's a known bug. Thanks for reporting it anyway.
The V8 JavaScript implementation landed an incremental collector a couple months ago, FWIW.
Given the history of android update promises "confirmed" is probably best saved for when ICS is actually available for user update.
11 Things To Do With an Extra Hour
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Brushing up on your standard CS algorithms and concurrency school problems, a favorite of SV interviews. And being skilled in whatever area you are being interviewed for.
Why doesn't OS X Lion have Siri?
The words in question for "cartelicious" are "cartel" and "delicious". I believe you can do the rest.
> All the existing debugging tool will only show you Javascript code when you want to debug

The key word here is "existing". This is about to change with CoffeScript support being worked on in Firefox (and some plugins like AceBug)

For details see: http://www.quora.com/CoffeeScript/Is-there-a-CoffeeScript-de...
This method is awesome, but the biggest problem isn't batteries, or whatnot. It's that the electrodes don't always last as long as we want. Often it's on the order of 6 months to a year in humans. No one wants to have their head cut open repeatedly.

If a doctor said "you can walk for 1 year only" would you take it? I would, but not for the personal benefit. The loss of walking so soon after gaining it would be hard. I'd really only be doing it for the scientific advancement.

I've worked in labs that do similar things, I'm not trying to knock it, I'm just saying there are still a lot of hurdles to be overcome to make it a realistic solution. And we've been working on these hurdles (electrodes lasting longer) for 10 years.
I can't believe that the top comments in a thread on hacker news boil down to: most developers should probably just stick to working 40 hours a week, because most developers don't have the other skills required to run a company.

Yes it's true running a business takes more than just tech skills, and not every developer is capable of running a multi million dollar company.

However, I think that most developers are capable of running a successful small business.

Most people can't run facebook, but most intelligent people can run a small web business.

You may not want to run your own business, but that doesn't mean you don't have the ability.
I do believe that if you understand C, you can become a better programmer on those higher level languages.

However, this is like everything in life, you don't need to master C, or Javascript, or as the saying goes: "Too much is like not enough".

Understanding how heap/stack, memory is allocated and free'd can give you a good understanding of how ruby/objective-c works.

Same could be applied to Javascript and CoffeeScript.
"In a few years," Chrome and Firefox will have support for source maps. The average CS developer will be debugging in CoffeeScript, not JavaScript. The original author's argument is much weaker when this feature is considered.
I tried starting a business with a few friends. We made a pretty good go of it for a year or so. We didn't get rich, but we broke even compared to having regular jobs, which ain't bad. But, even though I wasn't really one of the business people in the group, I still had to be aware of and keep up to date with a whole lot of "running the business"/"schmoozing customers" crap that I had absolutely no interest in. I don't care. It's not interesting, or rewarding, or fun. I just want to build stuff. I'm not that bothered who decides what I'm building, so long as it's not an obviously complete waste of time.

So I work for someone else. It's a small company, and I'm a big cog in it, but I don't have to worry about any of the crap I don't want to worry about. I just build stuff that our clients want.

Yeah, I'm not raking in mad coin. Big fscking deal.
How to Succeed the Dumb and Easy Way
Steve Jobs is Still Alive and Well on Hacker News
is the author a C programmer or a C++ programmer? naming a struct 'Point' is suspicious (instead of 'point' or 'POINT')
It's not better yet. The point of the research was the sensory input back to the brain. We've had the ability to manipulate computers with our brains for a long time, but the problem with output-only is that you'd try to grab a coffee cup and break it, because you'd have no idea how hard you were grasping it. Tactile sensation is a huge part of motor control, and one that we take for granted. Try, for instance, closing your eyes and touching your nose. Without sensory feedback, you can't do it.
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It's Europe-wide in fact. British Summer Time (+1) and Central European Summer Time (+2). Would be interested in the history behind the difference in terminology though.
But it's still not irrational to think: "should I try to get one of those while I can?"

If you have a use for one, you could think "is the current price still good enough value for me", and if you have no use for one, then you could ignore it.

It's when you have no specific use for one and weren't planning to buy one, but now you're thinking "should I try to get one of those while I can?", that it seems like a psychological flaw.
IPhone Accelerometer Could Spy on Computer Keystrokes
Yeah, it's complicated having different times in different places in different seasons. A mess? Perhaps. Useful and rational anyway? Perhaps.

"Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so." - Douglas Adams.
Theoretically if WikiLeaks were to publish damning internal corporate documents, they'd be violating copyright. I'm not sure if there are any exceptions anywhere for whistleblowing in respect to copyright violations.

It's kind of a moot point because WL's biggest drops have been governmental, which are non-copyrightable by definition. I guess it's just meant to be a hedge against future leaks.
Advice: Stay in the UK. It's better.
I use http://www.worldtimebuddy.com/ (discovered it on hn).

It has a really simple and nice interface and visualizes the different time zones very well.
Any company is unlikely to have offered such a written contract, with break-up contingencies, except in rare situations (known superstar, heavily recruited, known complications/opportunity costs of acceptance).

In the case of a traditional 'offer letter', the envisioned employment is usually ongoing at-will employment. So that 'writing' doesn't create much protection against changing-minds or changing business situations. Either party can end the relationship at any time. ("Welcome to your first morning at work! I regret to inform you we will no longer be needing your services. Good bye.")
It's very gratifying to see how overwhelmingly the comments are both positive and in disagreement with Michael's blog post.

If you'd like to see the most complete explanation of why CoffeeScript is all about working with and embracing JavaScript -- not giving up on it -- the best resource is probably Brendan Eich's and my joint talk at this year's JSConf:

http://blip.tv/jsconf/jsconf2011-jeremy-ashkenas-5258082

But the other interesting thing here is how many of the comments point to the fact that most people who write posts about fears of CoffeeScript have never actually tried it. Having experienced a good deal of this myself, I have a pet theory about why this is the case...

First, the caveat that CoffeeScript is just a fun little thought experiment: I have no vested interest in whether you use it or avoid it for your project -- whatever suits you best.

Most esoteric programming languages are non-threatening. As a hypothetical programmer working on web applications, I can feel safe and comfortable in my ignorance of Haskell, Erlang, D, Io, Arc, and so on. They're far enough outside of the realm of possibility of adoption for my company that I can shrug them off with an "oh, that sounds interesting", and little more. Wanting to adopt one of them would require a whole new development and deployment stack, a new or ported codebase, and new integration costs with the rest of our system. You wouldn't expect to see an article talking about how people using Erlang are creating a "knowledge gap" for Java programmers.

CoffeeScript feels threatening precisely because it is so close to JavaScript, because the code can run with identical performance as hand-optimized JS anywhere that JavaScript can run, because any CoffeeScript library can interoperate seamlessly with any JavaScript library, and vice versa. It forces you, as a reasonable JavaScript programmer, to answer the harder question: Why haven't you tried it yet? Posts like these happen when folks try to rationalize an answer for themselves.
The numbers in this comments thread are staggering.
My girlfriend is 27. She has never touched a console and doesn't own a personal computer. She absolutely loves Angry Birds and Tiny Wings on the iphone.

Whether or not Jobs should take credit for that is irrelevant. What's important is that a revolution is happening in video gaming and all smartphones and tabs, regardless of maker, are playing an absolutely HUGE part in it.
Life is far too short to take time away from things we want to, or like doing, to waste on things we are merely willing, or able to do.
And cartelicious:

-Constituents must be words

"cartelicious" is a combination of "cartel" and "delicious"

-Blending sounds from the words

the beginning sounds like "cartel" and the end sounds like "delicious"

-Combining meanings of the words

It's delicious cartel action, for repugnant values of delicious. I don't think this one is a strict requirement, in any case. This is getting a bit too pedantic.
Empower Your Face In Half
Andy Rooney complains about technology
I've never had IDEA freeze on me. Eclipse may offer those (I wasn't aware of it) but you would have to tinker around to configure it, I really prefer simplicity to a mountain of configuration to get it working the way I want. Eclipse is more of a platform, its great for some things since companies have built plugins for all sorts of things (like the Drools visual editor, for example), its fine for this sort of thing but as a regular code editor I find I prefer to use something that is more simplified and limited, not something that is essentially trying to be a platform.
> "because of the schema-less models."

> "I find migrations painful and unnecessary."

A schema-less model neither makes a migration less painful nor eliminates it.

In MongoDB, what did you do when the data model changed?
Growl 1.3.1 is out, no longer free
State of Air
Try to look forward not back, call up a few start ups and see how fast you get a job.
If you're still interested in NYC startups, check out yipit.com/jobs and email me(steve@yipit.com). We're hiring and have sponsored visas before.
If you had offers from other companies, go back and contact them.

Absolutely. If you (the OP) are from Europe you may be used to well-defined hiring windows where a job ad closes on date X and after that it doesn't matter if you are a triple-Nobel-prizewinner, you will not be considered.

The US has a much more fluid model in the commercial sector (in fact it is possibly to apply and be hired where no job has been advertised at all). There is nothing dodgy about directly contacting people you had good leads with and mentioning your circumstances have changed, recap anything positive they have said to you previously, and re-attach your resume.

Standard job-seeking advice applies, for example don't go into any details about the previous employer or the fact that you are desperate for a job in the US. Keep it to the minimum facts.
There's no ambiguity when you're using closures.
Concerning partial function application, you need a special syntax anyway (unless you consider all functions to be curried by default).
You don't do that to save keystrokes, you omit parenthesis because "All services offered by a module should be available through a uniform notation, which does not betray whether they are implemented through storage or through computation."

I used scala for a while, I admit there's a whole bunch of features that can get you confused. This takes 30s to spot.
You're very right, I didn't mean to imply such a dichotomy. I was thinking more along the lines off come up with your personal top 10 at X, where X can be even as simple as people who inspire/influenced you, and look for patterns.
Who has this popular belief?

On the contrary, most people I know assume competency in one discipline automatically grants them competency in others.
It sounds like both of you are talking about cloud stuff when thinking about datacenters. I can see how that many layers and cross-checks would be necessary when all you really control is running memory and some pieces of storage, but a lot of that is due to the platform. When you control the actual metal, third-party monitoring services are much less necessary.

For a real DC, when it goes down I get a phone call from a human. I don't have to reinvent that process. If it's my own server room, I use a landline and a modem for OOB "dude you gotta come down here" notifications, a WAV of Woody Woodpecker or something. If the phone lines are down, I look at the newspaper headlines to see what happened.

There's no reason not to set up a standalone monitoring regime. Whether or not you use heartbeat notifications to tell you all is well is a matter of taste, but there is definitely more to maintaining your nines on a daily basis than simply adding more layers of monitoring.
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Tell your Google recruiter about your competing offers, especially if you're considering choosing another job on this basis.
Old news. I heard this 2 years ago. Remember that is for perceived high-end talent acquisitions only. Do know that there are often agents involved to negotiate at this level.
Eh, they hired 'em. The words are appearing under the TC masthead.
Human error for TC not having a (competent) copy editor, maybe.