skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Management figures as long as they always match what someone is offered elsewhere, the employee will always prefer to stay

Do some companies really believe that? I can't speak for the world of employees, but if I have to put in the work of finding another job because my salary situation is stagnant, I am going to be very bitter with my current employer and require a crazy large counter offer to consider staying.
I'm working on a web app for listening to podcasts and did a soft launch with some good feedback -- but haven't heard much about my design. The site is http://flapcast.com -- thanks!
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I've been dialing into conference calls all week from China, where it's still Lunar New Year. This means fireworks and firecrackers, from 8am til midnight. Sounds just like shells and machine guns.

"No, I don't live in a war zone, it's just Chinese New Year."
I'm just wondering what Github's voice is towards Githire?
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> Let's assume this company has nobody with a true technology background at its leadership level, because if it did it you wouldn't have this mess to begin with.

From immediate experience, this is false.
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good tips!
In practice, this is a non-issue. Instead of thinking of your routers as "the interface" and your controllers as "implementation" you can think of the controllers as the interface and everything else as "implementation". If you're concerned about arbitrarily changing class and methods names that are only used as interaction points for the user, you should be similarly concerned about arbitrarily changing routing logic.
Pointing at a big company and saying "they're doing it wrong" is easy enough to do, but you have to remember that every decision comes with tradeoffs. Take Google's codebase, since it's the one I know the best. A couple of the key decisions:

* Single rooted tree. Separated repositories would make it harder to share code, leading to more dupication.

* Build from head. We build everything from source, statically linked. No need to worry about multiple versions of dependencies, no lag between a bug fix and it being available to any and all binaries that need it, whenever they're next updated.

I don't think that an "internal Github" is going be a magic bullet here. It's more likely it would be a matter of trading one set of hard problems for another, as we all of a sudden need to figure out how to do cross-dependencies sanely, deal with multiple versions of libraries, etc, at scale. You are correct that one monolithic Perforce repo is a bit of a pain point, but that doesn't necessarily mean that the right decision is to shatter our codebase into different pieces - we'd rather make our repo scale better. For reference, we've already got hundreds of millions of lines of code, 20+ changes/minute 6 months ago (so what, 30+ now?), and plans for scaling the next 10x are in motion.

If you're interested, I recommend http://google-engtools.blogspot.com/. It details a number of the problems we've run into, and our solutions for dealing with them at scale.
You're right.

I found the original email equally disappointing, though. It boils down to "We pushed the envelope on size, it's too slow, we'd like to speed it up." Well, duh.

He uses the word 'scalability' early in the email, but shows no indication that he knows what it means. I'd love to hear if different operations slow down at different rates as the repo accumulates commits. Do they scale linearly, sublinearly, or superlinearly as the repo grows? Are there step functions at which there's a sudden dramatic slowdown (ran out of RAM, etc.)?
And then you get blogposts like this: http://teddziuba.com/2011/10/node-js-is-cancer.html
git is not memory efficient by design, i used to push about 1G commit to the server and it hangs forever, i had to abort it and push in as small chunks instead
sometimes during a call a music starts to play pretty loud from one side of the call, which renders the conference useless. I still wonder how that happens.
I don't understand the local company/mother company distinction. A startup doesn't normally have a child company or a mother company. Is this really a spinoff? And there are outside investors? Sounds pretty strange. However, I can see how in a situation like this the mother company might not go for you being an investor, (maybe it isn't the founder). Is the mother company itself large and profitable? If they aren't, why are they spinning off? If they are, why are there outside investors and no salaries?

Profits in year 2? Are you pretty sure there will be any?

This whole thing sounds flaky so far.
My first professional experience was working at a company where this seemed like the norm. They had no well-defined plan for advancement or raises, and I was constantly given the run-around when I would bring up the topic in conversations with my manager or HR.

Those which consistently threatened to quit renegotiated by throwing other employees under the bus, which led to a very tense work environment.

I wholeheartedly agree with the sentiment that retaining employees by expecting them to renogiate for themselves is wrong headed, but I'm not sure that "never make counter-offers" is a great philosophy. You paint yourself into a corner by having this doctrine which doesn't allow you to have your whole arsenal available when the moment arises in which you might want to make a counter-offer to retain an employee.
The only reason anonymous's security operations aren't more frightening is due to their culture and goals. They just want quick wins and publicity (for themselves and for the material they unearth). However, their capabilities are top notch (limited mostly by their hesitance to do anything that requires physical presence). If they were, say, employed by a hostile government or were motivated by greed or specific political goals they would be scary.

Anonymous's MO is to spew their exploits to the world and move on. This minimizes the damage of their intrusions. If they kept quiet and spent time soaking up information or leveraging breaches to gain more and more access the things they could do would be jaw dropping.
He was blogging (not very frequently) at http://bramcohen.livejournal.com/. Now he is blogging (not very frequently) at the site above.
>How can you honestly say (or think)

The author noted why - he said as he wasn't financially benefiting [or acting as an agent to procure direct financial benefit presumably] he assumed it didn't count as business. TBH that's the measure most people use for "is this a business thing".

It could get quite tricky. For example part of what I do for money involves working with ceramics. I get inspiration in all sorts of places. If on a holiday to USA I happen to see a nice piece of ceramic art that inspires me then suddenly I've learnt something that benefits my business and one could argue it is in part a trip "for business". Perhaps that's too weak, but where's the cross-over ... if I go to visit a pottery? If I attend a seminar? If I go to a workshop [an event where one learns new techniques]? If I actively participate in a workshop?

Is the problem that USA don't want to let people learn things in the USA and leave the country with that knowledge just in case they give away some commercial advantage?
Ulrich Schnauss, System 7, Man With No Name, Art of Trance, Dimension 5, Jean Michel Jarre, Tangerine Dream, Astral Projection, Kraftwerk, VNV Nation...
Guess they should use "Asian Problems"?

http://arxiv.org/abs/1110.1556

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3096793
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Looks like he may have done some cleaning. I noticed he doesn't seem to own bitconjurer dot org anymore, maybe this is why?
This has been always one of my very favorite stories ever. Its how I convince people that sci-fi isn't just for geeks.

Challenging, funny, deeply thought-provoking. Its just the one of the best things ever. I never tire of reading it and people I tell about it come back and invariably rave about how great it is. I've had quite a few converts to the whole panoply of "speculative fiction" from their exposure to this wonderful little gem.
Probably. He just moved his blog off livejournal (http://bramcohen.livejournal.com/) where you can find his older entries (ideally he would include a link to that on the new site.) He also frequently creates public posts on Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/bram.cohen).
"Management figures as long as they always match what someone is offered elsewhere, the employee will always prefer to stay"

This is not true (the original post, not yours). Typically, when an employee submits their resignation letter, they are out of the company, literally or figuratively.

If an employer makes you a counter-offer, never, ever take it. First, you already have a reason that you wanted to quit. It's usually not _just_ for the money, but probably for other reasons (e.g. intellectual boredom). If you are unhappy with your job, more money will just not help. As someone wise told me once, "Money is not a motivator, but lack of money is a de-motivator."

Secondly, and more importantly, the reason the employer is making a counter-offer is not to entice you to stay, but to buy enough time to find someone else -- a loyal and qualified someone else -- to replace you. Effectively, they are making you the counter-offer so that they don't have to spend the time and money looking for someone and training them, when they can have you train them for six months (even with a slight-but-temporary increase in your salary). You will be let go as soon as the employer feels that the new employee has been trained adequately.

The moral is, once you submit the resignation letter, stick to your guns, and don't be fooled by counter-offers.

[Edit: forgot to add, another reason they prefer you to stay is so that you can finish your current project. This minimizes risks to your project, while at the same time training your replacement. The employer would only keep you until the current project is complete, and you will probably not get any new ones.]
Even if that counter was huge, you'd be insane to stay. Because now you're that guy. The quitter. You'll never be trusted again.
I don't generally like to say sort of stupid things, but I would call a language functional if it has first class functions and closures.
This is a Github internal memo doubling up as marketing. Smart.
Having worked in the service side of a BMW dealership, the service manager there was a tech who got promoted into the position. He was the go-to guy whenever there was a hard technical problem to solve. Some companies Do It Right, others don't.
I fear the market would be small.

It is my guess (though I have no proof) that most places with particularly large repositories have lots of binary files in them. It's hard to get a 15GB repository if you just have text.

This sort of thing suggests a centralized check-in/check-out model, because binary files are difficult to merge sensibly, and nobody wants to spend terabytes of hard drive space storing the repository locally. And your centralized check-in/check-out needs, whatever scale they might be, are probably tolerably well served by one of the existing solutions.
I went through a long Shpongle phase about a year and half ago. Great coding music, if you don't mind the heavy psychedelic feel.
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I disagree strongly. Management has better things to do than push unasked-for money on employees, especially in a young company. An employee who wants more money can and should ask for it.
Anonymous is existentially committed to "lols". They have the power to commit cyberwarfare on an amazing scale (think about China's intrusions into google, data breaches at RSA and ssl certificate authorities, as well as things like stuxnet). But that doesn't fit their goals and culture.
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While it certainly won't always be true, it probably is true most of the time.

Even if the employee was unhappy enough to go looking, changing jobs often comes with high transaction costs that most people won't want to deal with without a good reason.

Also, in the tech sector and some other areas, its not uncommon to wind up with an offer when you haven't put in the work to find another job. If you are well connected in your field, you may get offers, or at least invitations to interview, without actively looking for them.
Very nice, and it's nice to see the local scene getting a bit of attention -- I live up in Beachwood, and work for a company that's based in the accelerator in downtown Akron. I may have to swing by for a meetup sometime.

The NE Ohio tech scene doesn't get enough credit, honestly. You've got companies like LeanDog doing some pretty nice stuff in the local Rails and Agile world -- with an awesome floating office, to boot. There's also definitely a startup scene around here, too -- though here in the Akron accelerator, it seems like the startups are biased a little more toward biomedical stuff. Though, that's a particular area that Akron's been trying to encourage, so it's not too surprising.

I moved over here from NW Ohio a couple of years ago and I don't get why so many people are negative about Cleveland and Akron -- I love it here. There's tons of stuff to do, indoors and out, there's a pretty good food scene if you like variety, and the cost of living is pretty affordable.
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I updated a rails project yesterday that was using less-rails-bootstrap. The entire process to upgrade from 1.4 to 2.0 took a few seconds.

The tedious part was updating css class names for alerts, modals, form styles, etc.
Update (I'm the author). This is the feature I finally implemented: https://gist.github.com/1733598

It listens to see if the user scrolled recently and navigated away without clicking, and then explains her what happened and how to avoid it next time. You can dismiss that message if you like Mac's behavior, or you now know how to disable it. Easy peasy.
I'd imagine Facebook's developers are better than that.
Mother company: a UK Ltd company. Business angels invested in this company. Business started less than a year ago and at present almost certainly earning profits every month in one EU country (not the UK) where they already have a local company, which is 100% owned by the UK Ltd. Planning to open a number (let's say up to 4) of other local companies in other EU markets. I would have had shares (say 10%) in one of these local companies. Pretty sure there would have been profits in year-2. Thanks and I hope this clarifies things a bit.
What about a mature company? What about to continue to keep their salary at what it was before, to combat inflation? What about if they honestly are doing well and deserve more money?

To expound upon the inflation bit. Whenever you do not give an employee a raise that matches inflation, you're decreasing his salary by decreasing its buying power.
It's called tone.
I have more bad things to say about Node :) There are just not enough Erlang hackers around here to consider it, same for Haskell. Even Ruby isn't wildly used around here.
Addressing a couple of your issues:

1.) Our uploads go straight to S3, so the first one timing out may (?) have just been a connection problem? We checked our logs and we didn't receive notification of the upload finishing. If you upload more worlds in the future and they keep failing, email them to support@minefold.com and I'll hook you up.

2.) The seed changing is a bug. We're working on fixing that now, but in the mean time if you send your username and the world to support@minefold.com I'll manually fix your seed for you.

3.) We've had lots of requests for Bukkit but were hesitant to support it because we thought it would be replaced by the Mod API. Now that it looks like the Mod API will just be Bucket, well… I don't want to commit to anything but it's something we're "investigating" :)

4.) At the moment griefing is controlled as all worlds are whitelist only. Only let your friends play in a world :) We're also saving snapshots every 10 minutes exposed a mechanism to rollback yet. I might sound like a broken record, but if you email support@minefold.com we can manually rollback your world for you.
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This is my life. All day. Every day.

Along with status checks every 15 minutes.

I love it though, every problem is an adventure. I couldn't be one of those dig in for a month and code developers.
I have my doubts that will stand in court. At the extreme, consider what would happen if you replaced the ePub route by a zip-bzip2-zip conversion. Surely, the final product would not, technically, be made using iBooks Author, but I doubt that would carry weight in court.

Now, if you manually add in those .ibook elements or create them outside of iBooks Author and then somehow merge them into both your iBook and your final ePub, you would likely be OK, but then, what is the use of using iBooks Author in the first place?
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Once you mentioned it, I realized I knew this was in Predictably Irrational. I've never read it, but I have heard it mentioned in this context.

I first heard of this through Joel, so I quickly found a citation from his blog. I know he's mentioned it repeatedly on the SO/SX podcasts as well, so it's likely the association was solidified there.

That said, your quote doesn't make the point I was trying to highlight. Specifically, I was trying to show that moving from intrinsic to extrinsic motivation is not only damaging, but also hard to reverse as well.

Thanks for the quote though. I've renewed my mental note to someday maybe finally get around to reading the book.
Yeah, that is the correct link. We would love it if you attended.
I think many people felt Lion wasn't an improvement in speed or usability over the previous OS. Instead of respecting the differences between a desktop vs. tablet and building the absolute best system for each; it attempts to merge the two and provides a less than ideal experience. I love my Apple products but I can say after many months of using Lion it is disappointing.
Forrst has a similar system for promoting user posts as an advertising alternative, though Kyle (founder) uses credits (called acorns) and there are several ways to earn credits, outside of simply purchasing them.

It's a great idea: it's hard to get more "targeted" with ads than content that would have been posted within the community anyway.

If anecdotal evidence is any guide, it seems to have been received really well within Forrst, and the backlog was huge the last time I looked (not enough pageviews to match demand).
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There's two issues: the width of the repository (number of files) and the depth (the number of commits).

Since "status" and "commit" perform fairly well after the OS file cache has been warmed up, that probably can be resolved by having background processes that keep it warm. (Also, how long would it take to just simply stat that number of files? )

The issue of "blame" still taking over 10 minutes: We need to know far back in the repository they're searching. What happen if there's one line that hasn't been changed since the initial commit? Are you being forced to go back to through the whole commit history?

How old is the repository? Years? Months? I'm probably guessing in the at least years range based on the number of commits (unless the developers are extremely commit-happy).

At a certain point, you're going to be better off taking the tip revisions off a branch and starting a fresh repository. It doesn't matter what SCM/VCS tool you're using (I've been the architect and admin on the implementation of a number of commercial tools). Keep the old repository live for a while and then archive it.

You'll find that while everyone wants to say that they absolutely need the full revision history of every project, you rarely go back very far (aka the last major release or two). And if you do need that history, you can pull it from the archives.
It creates a lot of unnecessary tension between management and employees if employees can't just assume that they'll be rewarded for outstanding results and don't have to ask for it. If there's a tacit agreement that if you do great work you'll get a raise with a quarterly or semi-annual review process, employees don't have to get distracted by thinking about when they should ask for a raise or whether they need to get a competing offer to get leverage to ask for a higher raise.

Management might have better things to do, but if this creates an atmosphere where employees feel under-appreciated, they'll leave, and this churn can really hurt the company, which makes it a huge problem for management that could have been avoided by rewarding high performing employees earlier.
I'm starting to think, almost everything good starts by saying "no".
We've experienced this.

We've got a superproject with our server configs, and sub projects for our background processing, API, and web-frontend respectively.

Often, each project can evolve and be versioned 100% independently. However, often you need to modify multiple projects and (especially with server config changes) coordinate changes via the super project.

It's a little hairy sometimes and often feels like unnecessary overhead, but the mental boundary is extremely valuable on it's own. Being able to add a field to the API and check that commit into the superproject for deployment before the front end features are done is nice. The social impact on implementation modularity is valuable. We write better factored code by letting Git establish a more concrete boundary for us.
We are still working on the incubator website, but when it's live it will be blazooka.com. And our name is the same Blazooka.

It's a very young incubator, but the 3 founding members are really passionate about forming relationships with other Cleveland devs and/or designers and launching profitable websites.
I made this a while back http://www.soundcloudwall.com/
Our codebase at my employer currently hovers around 5GB in SVN. Binaries and other generated code are intermixed for historical reasons. Removing them is a non-starter due to the amount of time it'd take to do so; the best solution I've been able to come up with so far is to break out into multiple SVN repos (one for images, one for generated language files, etc.) and then, hopefully, get code into Github while externally using the SVN repos for stuff that shouldn't be versioned in a distributed manner (versioning that stuff is useful as a convenience - avoiding conflicts, etc.).
I know people who chew on pencils does that count too ?
It's called Perforce and anyone dealing with binary files has been using it for years.
now he should know why he's the boss :p
My opinion is based on the notion that it is generally bad to cede control over your own interest. To wait for management to give you what you want rather than to simply ask for what you want is to cede responsibility for wage change to management, which will generally not be in the employee's best interest.

Another more practical problem with the OP's desire to abrogate responsibility for price-setting is that it is impossible to objectively gauge the value of an employee outside of the marketplace. That value is fundamentally determined by the marketplace, by who is willing to pay what for your efforts. As much as we'd like to, we cannot ignore the fact that price is determined by supply/demand even for our own work.

I believe that employees would be better served by accepting the reality of the basis of their wages rather than waiting for some sort of ill-defined "enlightened" management to give you "what you deserve".
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