skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hey all, I'm a tech guy that also spent 3 years as a recruiter and in IT staffing sales/business dev. I know this industry in and out.

I'm going to speak for our location (Greenville, SC). The normal direct-hire % is between 18-25%. If you're doing volume with a company you'll probably be 18-20%. If it's a niche skill or new company then 25%. The days of 30% is mostly over unless it's a retained search or some extremely difficult skill.

This recruiter is on par with his advice. For a direct-hire role it is his best interest in getting you the highest salary possible because he will make more money that way. If he's a good recruiter he will do all the negotiation for you and you won't have to worry about it at all. You tell him what you need and he'll work his magic. Trust me, we are very good at getting those target salaries (if not more) for our developers.

If you are going through a good agency and the salary question comes up then you need to defer that to the recruiter and if your recruiter doesn't know what to do then find a different agency. Lots of bad ones out there.

Sometimes though you have to persuade a candidate even if the salary is not what he wants. As an example I placed a Sr. Architect at an awesome gig and the salary was 15K lower than what he was used to making. He was hemming and hawing and I told him up front that he could continue to look for work for his skillset and not find it in this area (he had been out of work for about 6 months at this time) or take the job at the lower salary with the potential to grow. Needless to say he took the job and has since been promoted (which I knew would happen cause of his skills and knowledge).

No on contract-to-hire gigs it's the best interest in the recruiter to get you to take the lowest possible hourly rate and then he will bill the client the highest he could go. Why? Because it's all based on a Net Margin formula and the more NM the recruiter makes the more commission he'll make. Our firm wasn't too aggressive on beating down candidates but companies like TekSystems are notoriously known for low-balling their contractors and high-billing clients.

Hope this helps some. Not all recruiters and agencies are bad but unfortunately many fly-by-night and sorry shops give the good ones a bad name.

I will say this that 90% of the IT jobs out there (at least in our market) are never posted on a job board. They are filled by agencies because they can get it done faster and more efficiently than a job board and an HR person who's clueless on IT skill sets.

~V

ps On a side note we had a joke in that internal recruiters were folks that couldn't hack it working for an agency. It's a different culture and fast-paced and being heavily commission driven tends to drive a good number of folks away. Why I left was that I placed myself back into IT :) And no, I did not get a commission on that (which would have been nice to boot!) :)
The 27 Rules of Conquering the Gym
Ok, but what the hell does that have to do with building the site. Inbound links are obvious. Wow, really, is that all? And there are entire communities devoted to this? Seriously, I really want to know what I'm missing because I feel like I must be whiffing pretty hard here not to see it.
As others have said, this is very dangerous advice. Anybody considering this should talk with a CPA first.
I'd say plethora is wrong at least in US. Ridiculous retroactive copyright extensions would be my main gripe (though I doubt Grooveshark has any works that are about to become public domain). Or creative accounting that makes artist indebted even if their song is sold in millions.

Also I have a suspicion that most people use Grooveshark as a form of radio in such way that it doesn't really feed on artists main source of profit (CDs and concerts).

However don't take this out of context I still dislike lack of any mechanisms for artist reimbursement.
R.I.P PostSecret
Just watched the talk, great stuff!
You might also want to check out Haxe NME (http://www.haxenme.org/) since it targets html5. Haxe may be a good fit since you're familiar with ActionScript.
Site shuts down due to 500% increase in costs after AppEngine price change
In an ideal world we would be able to do away with copyright but I don't see that abolishing is right for everyone. Right now it does make sense for music and movies. That hurts middlemen but not the creators. That's fine. But in the software world it's different. You are hurting the creators.

You're stance on this takes away the rights of creators. The creator's rights are no less important than the consumer's rights.

Copying is not stealing technically but when something that is meant to be paid for gets copied and passed around free it does become stealing. Arguments about software being non-scarce don't apply. When you argue that the developer only has to put in the work to make it once and is getting a free ride because he's just distributing copies well that's just a cop out. It isn't exactly the software itself that people are being charged for. It's what they are able to do with that software that they get charged for as well as the experience of using it. Should authors only be paid for one copy of their book? Why is it wrong to have a choice? Copyright holders don't go around telling people that they can't give away their own work for free so why is it that the anti-copyright crowd insists that creators should not have the choice to charge for what they create and should gladly give away their work for free.

I see and understand the anti-copyright arguments (at least more than half of them). I see the abuses by copyright holders and governments and I don't like it. But at the same time I don't see a way for me, as a developer, to continue to make a living off my work in a world where it's legal for anyone to distribute my work freely against my wishes. If I knew of a way where both interests could be served equally I'd get on board with abolishing copyright. As it stands now I can't do that so I pray that SOPA doesn't pass and hope that we can all find a nice middle ground.
New hires in social gaming: King.com, Wooga, Zynga
I wonder if UPS's existing "minimize number of left turns" navigation programs would constitute prior art?
We really need a way of telling when the main link has been modified. The only reason I didn't downvote JonnieCache is because I know his name, because he is a regular contributor, and so I double checked that the url and his comment were the same. Then when I saw they were the same I trusted his comment more than the moderators actions: i.e. I suspect this story link used to go elsewhere.

HN needs tons more transparency on moderation for simple things like this, as well as some of the dodgy issues I've seen in the past. I know a lot of trolls are "rules lawyers", but frankly when I notice changes being done by a select elite for my own good with no accountability or properly outlined rules it leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Especially when people complain of opinionated moderation and no evidence remains of it for me to make a determination myself as to who was in the right (I suspect the moderators are right in most cases, but if it's not there it's not there).

I'm taking a break from HN I think.
Semantic mark up and clean URLs are a big part of SEO. But there's a lot more to it. There is obviously the whole incoming links thing as a few other comments have mentioned.

The biggest issue that I see on client's sites is site architecture, organization and internal linking. Most commonly that means multiple pages with the same content and different URLs. Amazon is a good example of this:

This URL floats around internally - http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1416571760/

But it's rel="canonical" is http://www.amazon.com/Greater-Journey-Americans-Paris/dp/141...

Amazon is essentially passing internal link juice around to non-canonical URLs, then "fixing" it with a rel canonical hack. Not that amazon needs the link authority, it's just an example.

Another good one is folks who append things like ?ref=category to a URL to track visitors through the site. That's a unique URL to google, though you can specify what url parameters are legit in webmaster tools. If you really need to do something like that, use onclick events and keep the href attribute to a pretty, canonical URL.

Those don't seem like big issues individually, but imagine a 3,000,000 page site that never links to a canonical URL anywhere internally (this happens).

Internal anchor text can also play a roll in what you rank for. If you happened to make it through all that stuff up there, here's an SEO gem: use breadcrumbs, but your home link doesn't need to have the anchor text "home". Instead use a keyword that's relevant to your site's purpose. If you sell dog food, use "dog food" as the anchor text of "home" breadcrumb link.

An example: do a search for "online shopping" on Google. You'll probably see overstock.com in the top results. Why? Are they really more well known and authoritative than Amazon in that arena? Every home breadcrumb on overstock.com has the anchor text "online shopping". Millions of internal links with perfectly optimized anchor text pointing to a single page.
New search engine
Thyfoon is a meta search engine. Indexing the "World of Data" and prepare best result.Some key feature :

* User friendly and minimalist design
* Instant answers and more productive(http://www.thyfoon.com/feature.php)
* Safe web and more privacy(We are not store any user information.)
* Less spam

Thanks a lot.
SEO Ryan Gosling
They've claimed a lot of things that weren't true in the past. I'd withhold judgement until I can see the evidence for myself.
اجمل ازياء 2012 للاطفال جميلة جدااااااااااا
I suppose my comment did have somewhat of a "Steve Jobs-like quality" to them. Yes, I happened to get a bit excited about a product I like when I was writing about it on the internet. It's not the end of the world.

It sounds like you'd be surprised at how little I sound like a typical marketer if you met me in person.
Why I Find Dart's Production Mode Evil
PayPal once refunded me out of their own pocket for a seller's obvious mistake. This was for about $30 USD and only a few months ago. I was blown away.

PayPal isn't all bad.
Well which is it then?

Is it a demo of proprietary technology that happens to be baked into a couple of specific web browsers and video card drivers, or is it a demo of what's possible using a (new, emerging) set of "web" standards?

Because "WebGL" certainly sounds like the name of a standard to me, and very few people expect a "web" demo to care about which brand of video card they have installed.

And since you brought it up, "HTML5 is not standardized" is a little disingenuous. Regardless of its ratification state, companies claim and market HTML5-ness precisely to signal their commitment to open standards as opposed to proprietary technology. Or maybe it's come to mean "anything that isn't Flash." In any case, the implicit promise there is that users will enjoy app functionality with minimal-to-zero worries about client-side configuration or component choice.
It's a lot more complicated than you are letting on.

What you are saying is like saying architecture is just drawing diagrams or good journalism is just writing about stuff.

Like many industries, there's an art to SEO and plenty of nuances far beyond clean coding and user friendly design.
Ok, I thought that was cool.

Its a bit scary, in that it will force such conspiracies to become more complex (its an arms race after all), and it highlights a 'good' use of an analysis technique which the evil doers can use against their enemies, but still.
Valve posts a record year for Steam
I have a source for #3s if you want it.
What "unladen swallow"? That project did not have the expected improvements and was abandoned...
That's true in isolation, but the variables have corrolations. If you dicker about salary long enough that the candidate takes another position you make no money at all. So the biggest incentive is to get your signature on the offer. That makes serious negotiation on the part of the recruiter almost impossible. I've never seen it in practice; they've always left salary discussions to me and the employer.
"Why I won't..." articles generally tl;dr to "because I'm a dick". This is no exception.
Big Study Links Good Teachers to Lasting Gain
Apple TV (or Google TV, or any other TV platform) still doesn't have anywhere the reach of good old-fashioned cable.

Well you could have said the same thing in the early days of Sky satellite television when they bought the EPL rights. Coverage at the time with number of receivers couldn't match BBC/ITV but the Premier League followed the money.
The limited world of iOS's auto-renewable subscriptions
A recruiter's income is proportional to salary * time-spent-per-position. If they could close deals 20% faster by settling on salaries that are 5% lower, it would increase their annual income. Also, repeat business is controlled by the firm, not by the employee, so it is to their advantage to keep the firm happy.
Stay On Top of the Fight Against SOPA/PIPA with These Tools
How hard would it be to provide drone support to out of their depth pedestrians? That would be an interesting startup.

... Whoever does this please don't sell to Apple or FB.
Link-bait title conflates "ghetto" with "high crime areas". It's disrespectful to the millions of individuals of various groups who have been forced to live in ghettos.
I read this, and all I can see is:

"Don't do marketing."
"Just make a good product and people will find it."

I think this is the downfall of many great products. The current startup world has an idealistic belief that better products always win and if you build something people want, they'll find it, when in fact, this has never been true. The "best" politicians consistently lose to those better at marketing and branding. The "best" ideas in organizations often fall to those trumpeted with more style or by those with more clout. Many great startups shut down because they couldn't find a repeatable, low-cost way to acquire customers (and SEO is exactly this).

More here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/i-disagree-with-fred-marketing-is...

And here: http://hackersandfounders.tv/RDmt/rand-fishkin-inbound-marke...
I too have been bitten by this. What makes it truly annoying is that it isn't documented anywhere publicly, so beware! You are not allowed to build a business on auto-renewable subscriptions, unless you are a large publisher.
It's not the same thing if the Apple TV can't provide features like comparable HDTV to large parts of the population. "Watching a web stream on your tv" and "Watching TV" aren't the same thing.
i think that's bullshit. "I make X, I feel I am worth Y". Credibly demonstrate that you are worth Y[1]. This got me the raise I wanted within my current employer, and willingness to decline an offer less than Y will get me the salary I want the next time I move companies.

[1] here's a hint: don't say "i can do XYZ, trust me" -- signal to them you can do XYZ by blogging, speaking at meetups, portfolio of projects, etc.
No, he means CLisp, mr "informed"...

http://www.clisp.org/
Poor wording on my part. What I meant is that they too had to build a user base from nothing.
IDEs are dead. Long live the IDE
Theses are old keys; I will have them removed from repository though.
There's no need to employ this tone; we're all adults here.
I'm quite obviously speaking about myself.
Great discussion, thanks. Now im off to the urology forum to ask about my sore elbow. Theyre all doctors, right? They all went to med school. A body part is a body part...skin and bones and theyre all connected anyway.
holy shit. thank god these exist.
Microsoft takes legal action against UK retailer Comet
I'm sorry, but no, there is absolutely no antithesis between those two goals. Hell, that's part of the Hacker ethics:

"Make public data available, protect private data."[1]

Art isn't private data. Credit card info is. In other words, you are bullshitting.

[1] http://dasalte.ccc.de/hackerethics?language=en
In case you miss it, here are the (corrected) numbers that indicate 200ft is reasonable:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3432520
Jet-Propelled Tidbits and the White Stallion
The first thing you learned about probability is wrong
While I can't be sure, I believe that my TomTom Go 730 gives left turns a higher penalty than right turns when calculating a route.

I've seen it pick different roads to go A->B than to go B->A where the only reason I could discern for the difference was minimizing the number of left turns.
this is the first site that I visited and it refuses to support Mozilla 3.6 browser, which is default on my ubuntu 10.10 notebook.
Do you know what keywords are generating the most traffic for your competitors, what keywords you'll most likely be able to rank for, what keywords have the highest conversion ratio, are you using video sitemaps, etc.

It sounds like your just constantly reading material aimed at beginners rather than diving in depth into the subject.
NYUD gives me a 324 error (no bytes returned). This one worked for me: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:blog.no...
I don't doubt you can get hurt badly in a Yoga class and I never have.

That's why I only generally attend the less intense classes. I know I'm not lance armstrong.

My girlfriend manages a studio and has seen her share of nasty injuries from exactly what this article warns about: "Now urbanites who sit in chairs all day walk into a studio a couple of times a week and strain to twist themselves into ever-more-difficult postures despite their lack of flexibility and other physical problems..."
email: info@ycombinator.com

I was once hellbanned for 4 days, for no reason (they said it was a mistake). I was reinstated by sending an appeal to that address.
Best performing VCs of 2011
you mean it's already invented? than it should. (i just never met this function in programs i used)
Right, but that assumes Apple would show the Premier League for free and without any ads.

Securing rights to popular tv content seems like an extremely good way to seriously establish Apple as a contender in the tv market, and a very nice way to utilize their tremendous and growing pile of cash.
I suppose I should be happy that authority figures are getting in touch with technology.

That said, I'm pretty sure Bloomberg learning to code marks the peak of the second tech bubble. That, or Ashton Kutcher becoming a VC.
Bloomberg was already highly technical once before. Listen to his Techcrunch interview where he talks about having to solder integrated circuits onto boards to build the first Bloomberg terminals. He's not just another clueless MBA CEO.

http://techcrunch.com/2011/11/28/founder-stories-how-michael...
Kicking ass together: How to improve coding skills as a group
What happens in Quirks Mode in web browsers?
I think social is too broad and too vague a description for a product. What problem does it solve? is it a horizontal/vertical market? Who exactly is gonna use it? Saying your product is social software seems like a cop-out to me.
More or less, but it's really best not to think of them in terms of RS codes at all. The reason they're called "fountain codes" is that they're used like a water fountain. The transmitter just starts sending out bits for a file like a water fountain spews out water. The receiver(s) collect bits until they've got enough to reconstruct the file. It's like they're collecting water in a bucket, and when they've got enough water (good bits) they can reconstruct the file. The receivers with a good channel are like people standing close to the fountain who can catch lots of bits. Those with a bad channel are like people standing further away. But everybody can eventually fill up their bucket. And the transmitter is indifferent to what channel they've got.
But even if they did that, what would they watch? You still have to provide compelling content for people to sit down and watch. I can think of nothing that would drive adoption in the UK more than the EPL.
Ravens Nest? This an Ottawa project? hehe. if so/add Ultimate as a sport. hehe
We've spent a lot of time doing whitehat SEO on our website, and it's paying off (2x search traffic in 6 months). I really would recommend most startups spend a few days reading up on it from good quality sources. Nearly 40% of all our traffic comes from search so it makes sense to pay it some attention.

It's not hard. What is hard is navigating your way through the crooks/spammers/quacks who will try every trick in the book to try and sell you something you don't need. Startups do not need to hire experts to do it for them. What they need to do is solve problems like they solve other problems, with no money.

People who sell SEO usually:

- Have the gift of the gab

- Prey on peoples ignorance

- Prey on peoples greed

There are good SEO people out there, but they are rare. Also I struggle to imagine a situation where smart people just can't read up on it themselves and execute it themselves.

As a startup you should be focusing on good quality content and sustainable growth. So play to your strengths and don't pay a lot of money for magic potions that offer short term benefits. Play the long term game.

SEOMoz is a good place to start (their free blogs etc). Executing good technical SEO on your own website is pretty easy.

Tibbon made a good point, 'dont do SEO do accessibility`. I'm not sure I'd go to that extreme, but it's a good way of looking at it. Google is your most disabled user, it can't see very well, it can't really understand things very well either. If you make your site highly accessible you're well on your way to good SEO.
i thought i suggested something new for them to patent :(
So there's a lot of extra work to do for self hosting customers. But isn't the question really whether your customers are ready to pay for that extra work?
Looking Back on 18 months of Testing and TDD at a Startup
Prioritizing Product Roadmaps