skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
75th Percentile for Sr. Developers with a strong framework experience in the valley is $150K right now. Plus the options upside (Which should hopefully come through every third or fourth company you work for).

Yes, during a death march, you do tend to stay working after 5:00 PM, and possibly even work on weekends.

But, once you get into year three or four, a properly managed software shop should see those pushes for just three or four weeks a year, and it's not uncommon to see engineers putting in 30 hour work weeks the rest of the year.

Of course the whole roller coaster of layoffs is still pretty valid - but if you are a good developer, jobs are pretty easy to come by once you've built up your network, and you can treat the off time as vacation. There is a reason why recruiters make $20K-25K (minimum) for tracking down high performance developers - they are hard to find.

If you are an average developer, having to deal with 6 month to 2 year sabbaticals might suck, and I can see why the government job approach might make sense.

My conclusion: Rock stars should look to being principal developers for private concerns, others should consider all their options based on their needs.
Australian Startup Index - Dec 08
Been there, done that. Worked at a government/university job for about 2 years. Very few people there cared about programming or software whatsoever. It's hard to stay motivated about anything when no one around you is fired up or cares about being there.

Used a programming language similar to COBOL that made me want to bang my head against the wall. Features that would normally be trivial to implement were almost impossible. Took forever to get any code moved to production. Took about a year of meetings to do something as simple as installing MySQL. Version control = Excel Spreadsheets and folders. Any suggestion to use a new tool required a special committee, more meetings, etc. No one wanted to learn anything new.

While you will have extra time to work on your own thing, you might lose your motivation and joy, and gradually become apathetic. I quit 2 years ago, and am doing much better as a freelancer.
When you don't love what you do, you work for the government. I care about my retirement too but if that is your end goal, then you clearly don't care about the work you do. All you want to do is just go to work, come home, retire and die.
Thanks for the link. To me, this is a very interesting topic area. You, the linked post & the many follow up articles seem to rely on two quite different reasons for this issue.

The big outsource companies making up such a large section of the IT market have ugly business models. They get the kind of work where quality & innovation are not actually real competitive advantages & the bill by the hour on a cost+ basis. They're poisoning the industry everywhere from Universities to corporate culture.

Indian culture is creating problems. I've heard variations on this theme. Mostly they centre around family expectations & such pushing young individuals towards being risk averse.

The former, I think might not really be a 'problem' as it seems. The availability of secure jobs (especially places where parents have a memory of this not being the case) will bring in employees. They would have been Accountants or hairdressers if that is where good solid careers lay.

But, maybe they also make this career path accessible to those that otherwise would have been accountants or whatever.

Sure, these companies may not be the best possible for creating a thriving startup/innovation city. Maybe a Lenova or a Google would have been better. But that doesn't mean that these companies are a net loss.
Pip: easy_install replacement
The Art of Giving Up
May I make a suggestion? Instead of choosing one or the other, why not play with the syntax a bit? Pick one and try it out on a small but non-trivial task. Then make small changes and iterate. Maybe let some friends play with different flavors of it. This may take more work but the end result will probably be more genuinely useful and your language will probably find more users.
In many industries, there is a non-stoppable trend towards larger and larger companies.

In retailing, Wal-Mart is crushing their competitors, who are also extremely large but they do not have the economies of scale that Wal-Mart. (In addition, Wal-Mart has better management.)

In some cases, large companies succeed because consumers want the perceived value of purchasing from a large company. Dell and HP basically own the server and desktop computer market, and there is no reason to assume this will change in the next ten years. People feel that Dell will not go out of business.

One of the industries hurting most right now is the automobile industry. GM and Chrysler say they will run out of money unless the U.S. government provides several billions of dollars in aid soon. Ford says it does not need government financing but it has pledged all of its assets in a collateral-based loan. Yet almost no one is willing to buy a car from a small automobile company, they are viewed as risker than GM or Chrysler.

In choosing software companies, one factor sophisticated purchasers look at is, "How likely is this company to be in business 5 and 10 years from now?" When you commit to a software package, you are making a huge investment in time and energy, far beyond the purchase price of the software. You want to know that in the future, the software company will continue to enhance the product and will be around to provide technical support. This is why companies, for example, purchase software from Oracle, even though Oracle is ridiculously. People expect Oracle to be in business ten years from now. Yes, open source to some extent mitigates this risk, but putting aside very successful open source projects (Linux, Apache, MySQL, how do I know that they will be around ten years from now. Do I really want to writing the code myself?)

Law firms have consolidated tremendously in the past decade. Large clients want one firm that can provide experise in dozen of areas of the law and can handle complex transactions that span the globe. In Boston, ten years a 100 lawyer firm was considered to be a large sophisticated firm. Now such firms (at least on the corporate side) have merged with other firms to create 500 attorney firms.

In public accounting, the Big Eight has consolidated into the Big Four. Clients want the brand name that only a Big Four firm can provide.

There is no clear trend here. In some industries, consolidation is taking place and will never stop. In other industries, it is the opposite effect.

James Mitchell
www.bostonconvivium.com
jmitchell@kensingtonllc.com
Good Math, Bad Math : Wind-Powered Perpetual Motion
My experience working for a gigantic government contractor was just like you describe.

I cannot emphasize enough how soul crushing it is to work in this kind of environment. You cannot just put in your hours, go home, and work on something interesting. The apathetic monotony is instilled into your being. It grows inside of you during the day, and you take it home with you. You can't just context switch from 8 hours of mental atrophy to a motivated and productive state. Sometimes I would come home and be useless for anything but lying down and staring at the ceiling. I only worked there for a year but I was turning into a zombie.

If you go in thinking you can help rock the boat and make some changes, be careful. You may find that the changes happen to you instead. The dark side is powerful.
Here's a first cut implementation in ruby. Requires the "hpricot" gem. Outputs a dot file to stdout. http://gist.github.com/35841

Output from the above is at: http://jey.kottalam.net/tmp/obgraph.out

I tried rendering this with "dot -Tcmapx -oob.map -Tgif -oob.gif" but dot segfaulted after 70 minutes. The code as posted at gist only outputs nodes for articles written by Eliezer in an attempt to make the dot file a manageable size. Tips/fixes appreciated.
They started out "between a rock and a hard place". I'd say thats probably the primary reason.

This is unfortunate as I hadn't heard of mixwit until just now.
What you are missing is that any H1B willing to work as a contractor by definition works for an intermediary. These intermediaries actually operate in a grey area of the H1B immigration law, take a percentage cut off the contractor's pay and therefore, the only H1Bs who work for them are those who can't find a job with a real software company. If you are lucky you may find someone who just lost a job with a real company and was forced to work for an intermediary.

My advice to you is to only interview H1Bs who have worked for other software (non-outsourcing) companies you have heard of before. If even those are hard to find, interview only those who have worked for top outsourcing firms say Wipro, Infosys and TCS.
Microsoft to Apple: Yes, your phone is better
My handwriting was never good, but thirty years of all-day use of a keyboard, it has definitely suffered. I find that I frequently misspell words (even my name), not because I don't know how to spell, but because my motor skills have atrophied enough that I get odd twitches when writing. My block printing is legible however, perhaps in part because of the mechanical drawing course that I took in college when I was an engineering major. The instructor was anal about the formation of letters and numbers. Other than shopping lists (even those are often typed and printed), I rarely write anything any more. When I sent out Christmas cards, I practiced writing before committing pen to card.
You're welcome! Probably obvious but I recommend scanning or photocopying the exercises rather than marking up the book itself.
Your points are true for Indian programmers who work for outsourcing shops. Many don't.

Google probably has 10K+ H1B engineers from India working for them (and not via an intermediary). There are thousands of H1B engineers from India with graduate degrees from top US schools. A very large majority of these Indian programmers care about technology, as do most programmers in India who work for software (non outsourcing) companies.

By saying that "Most Indian engineers don't care for technology" you are painting these guys with the same brush. Even with your qualification that "not all are like this", it reeks of bias. A more accurate statement might be "Most Indian programmers who work for outsourcing shops don't care about technology".

/An admittedly biased but more informed opinion from someone who has worked as an H1B engineer, has a graduate degree from a top 5 CS school in the US
As against Pakistanis or Trinidadians who aren't? What's your proof?
That was my favorite pen until I tried the Pentel EnerGel. It has gel ink, like the G2, but the barrel is slightly fatter (thus easier for me to grip). The "killer feature" of that pen though is the pocket clip automatically retracts the point inside the pen. I've had a few shirts ruined by forgetting to retract the point before clipping it to my shirt, and this pen does that automatically. When you push the "clicker" on the end to extend the point, a little plastic tab gets pushed down and wedges under the end of the pocket clip. As soon as the clip is slightly lifted (or a piece of fabric gets shoved under it), the tab is released and the spring pulls the point back inside.
Scribd is all about turning documents into public URLs.

The new google service is about sending documents to people or small groups.
This may be true, but it misses a general point that relates to the first paragraph. Separate the world into two types of good ads: the ones you can see working & the ones a PHD can see working.

A pretty girl soliciting people outside your restaurant vs an ad in the paper; Search vs banners.

That's not new. That's always been the case. But online, the latter had massive failings & the former had a lot of success. This is in contrast to the experience of the other big media's experiences.

For most advertisers the nespaper ad/banner is voodoo. If the average ROI is outstanding, then they might punt. But the other type, the search ad/tourist tout is measurable & reliable & understandable.

So in bad times you lose confidence in the things you can't see. The voodoo looses out. But you probably don't fire the tourist tout until things get really bad. Theoretically, for mega brands with mega budgets to do focus groups & hire PHDs to test the effects of their ads over years, there is no difference qualitative between a tourist tout & sponsoring a tennis player. I don't really know, but I think that the theory doesn't pan out. Even campaigns in the 10 of $Ms are really reading these kinds of studies, following 'best practices' & guessing. My evidence for this is that their ad budgets go down in bad times & up in good times.

BTW, it runs both ways. Good times make companies spend more on 'brand' advertising. Most Search campaigns are always linked to returns somehow & those don't change that as much as group psychology.

So 'brand' advertising is susceptible to bubbles & crashes.
Is there a backstop similar to PBGC available for public sector plans...

Raising taxes.

Besides, the feds will most likely bail the states likely to default (CA, MI, NJ) at least until 2013.
Ask YC: Twitter is the most exciting technology...?
Descriptions range from it being the "most exciting technology i have come across" (Tim OReilly) to "lame tool for people who like to hear themselves talk" and "illusion of being desired"<p>What do YOU think of Twitter?
Meetup's Dead Simple User Testing
Except for that its exceedingly difficult to accomplish anything of worth without some political influence outside of your sections control. Doesn't matter how much buy in you can get from your management, you're still in the end at the mercy of someone else's political whims.
Odeo/Obvious Corp/Evan Williams did. That seemed to have turned out well.
Funny this is on HN after 5 years. Sean runs Fortius One these days. http://www.fortiusone.com/ ... still disrupting.
Why not allow both? To resolve ambiguity, there could be keywords CLIKE and PYTHONLIKE which determine how the code is to be parsed from that point, e.g:

CLIKE

def factorial(x) {
return ( x<=2 ?
1 :
n*factorial(n-1) );
}

PYTHONLIKE

printf(factorial(10)) # note ';' not needed

Incidently I'm writing a language that'll have C-like syntax which will then be compiled into Lisp-like intermediate code. The Lisp-like code will be available to the programmer, who will thus be able to inspect the syntax tree, write Lisp-like macros, etc. Furthermore, the programmer can embed the Lisp-like code inside normal code (like inserting assembler inside a C function).
Bummer. The music industry is a tough nut to crack. I don't know anyone who's really ever made tons of money on a startup there; tons of legal bullshit. Anyone know if Napster ever did well? I think Shawn Fanning only ever made money on Snocap.
Expect advisors to give you advice - and only that. The best ones usually don't have the time/bandwidth to perform any sort of real action for you (including email introductions to their famous and important friends); if that were the case, they would be called "actioners" or something.

Separate the advice-givers from the action-performers, and seek out the best in both domains. The point should be to gain timeless insight that helps you grow as an entrepreneur, and which can be applied to all of your future pursuits - regardless of whether these pursuits happen to relate to your current project.

Oh, and try to hold off on bringing on action-performers as long as possible, if your business plan can allow for this. You'll eventually be able to pay action-performers by the hour, rather than via very-expensive equity. (You are building something of great value, aren't you?)
Hopefully they'll give away the source code.
This makes sense. If you want free themes, you go to the main site. If you want to buy themes, you go elsewhere. This situation is being overdramatised. It's not like you can't get the premium theme anymore.
Even worse, a luxury product (often) in a market where purchases can be deferred 12-18 months if necessary.
Although it is tempting to think "Wowza, this is a story about the enduring power of stock options to make big fortunes", it is more about the enduring power of compound interest to make fortunes. Although his benefactors are lucky he held IBM stock rather than something that went bankrupt in the interim, really, if you hold just about any diversified equity portfolio for 100 years when you're done, boom, you're worth really huge amounts of money.

Heck, my meager Roth IRA savings plus 100 years of 8% compounding would be worth about $25 million, give or take. That is below the actual performance of the American stock market these last 100 years, to boot.

(Granted, most of us can't directly benefit from 100 years of appreciation, but most of us could directly benefit from well more than 40, and if you have kids or causes that will survive you, hey, the sky is the limit.)
Most of the themes I've found and used have been through searches on Google.
I'm a BitTorrent fan.. but I can see why they had a hard time getting funding...
I understand you're being general, but as a specific example, my office is the opposite of that. (I work for federal gov't). A lot of extremely intelligent, diligent and competent people whose interests would belong right at home here.
What? ... Private sector wins for efficiency, innovation, and general business competitiveness.

Wake up and look around: the government built first computers, your beloved Lisp, freaking Internet, not to mention sending man to space. Most universities are public. Innovation is so expensive that the private sector can't even dream of achieving anything of those magnitudes.

Government, believe it or not, will be the one who solves the energy problem, will eventually cure cancer and AIDS and hopefully build a true AI, while entrepreneurial types will continue "throwing sheep" on facebooks.

Inefficient? Yes. Non-innovative? No. And WTF is general business competitiveness?
I think it has a few uses. People like Robert Scoble have a lot of influence on there - and he spends a lot of time connecting people together. Which is really useful.

Companies are finding it useful for guerilla marketting.. which is bad when it's spam but if done right can be a thousand times better than a blog.

You also get to connect with people you never knew existed. Scoble retweeted a comment I made about Oauth and it led ot me having a fun discussion about it (and getting some new ideas etc.) with people who agreed and disagreed. We'll probably never chat again but I found some interesting people to follow and we hammered out ideas really well.

And then it can be just a simple comunications tool. I love seeing what people are up to (in a non freaky way) and Twitter is more real time that a lot of other social networks out there. I think probably due to the # of desktop tools.

Anyway - a month ago I would have said "nah it's a nice idea but full of idiots" now I say: it's still full of idiots but when you get past the spam and self importance (cof john chow cof) then there are some real gems there.

:)
A government job is a wonderful thing for folks who want to start their own business. The hours are short and the work won't mentally exhaust you, and the pay will put a roof over your head and food on the table. After you get home at 5:30 you can spend a few hours working on your side project.

Then if you quit 2-3 years down the road, everyone will be better off: you'll have a job you'll enjoy, and the government will have gotten 2-3 years of labor out of you for a song and won't have to pay your absurdly generous pension benefits.
I was home-schooled my entire life. I wrote everything on the computer; notes, todo's, letters, essays, everything. My dad is a writer and he would give me essays and books to grammar-check for him when I was young, so my English grammar is pretty good. My handwriting, however, is so embarrassing. I write in all capital letters and it looks like chicken-scratch. Hell, I can't honestly say I even know how to write all the cursive letters!

I'm 26 and I know my writing isn't going to magically get any better with time. I've been looking for good material to help teach myself how to handwrite, but I haven't found much. Maybe I'm looking in the wrong place (or not hard enough).

If anyone has any suggestions for improving my handwriting, I would love to hear them. (I saw the post about the "Write Now" book, and I'm definitely going to pick that up.)
The state and local government pensions I'm familiar with should actually be safer than most pension systems -- in theory, the government agency makes its required contributions to the trust fund at the time the employee is paid. The bigger state and local pension systems are some of the largest institutional investors, so their fates are more tied to the market than their member governments.

As with any other pension system, if a lot of the trust's holdings are in bonds, and those bonds end up in default, that would be a problem.

The government pensions schemes are facing the same problem as Social Security -- people living and collecting benefits longer, health care costs going up (for those that include long term health benefits), and so on.
I don't know of pencils with undo, but here's one with "replay." (If you point at [X] in your notes, it will play back the recording of the lecture at the point you wrote [X].)

http://www.engadget.com/2007/05/30/livescribe-shows-off-leap...

The Apple Newton had two levels of Undo (with redo disabled, otherwise just one).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKHelCE9QAg
I'm venturing into dreaded downvote territory here...

Consider it anecdotal evidence, but I've known several Indians who've done that, and I've seen it while reviewing resumes for interviewees as well. I'm not sure about Pakistanis (they're culturally similar to Indians tho) or Trinidadians (never worked with or interviewed one, and if I did I wouldn't have an adequate sample size). It doesn't matter; as a developer you're much more likely to interact with Indians than Trinidadians.

FWIW, I'm an Indian myself. And know many other Indians that don't pad their resumes, and are very talented/hard-working people. But if you had a job posting in the US and measured x = %age of Indian applicants that have fluff on resumes, and y = %age of non-Indian applicants that have fluff on resumes, you'd find x > y.
I can understand the support business model for software, but selling support for blog themes? It sounds like Matt might be herding the theme designers off a cliff.
Twitter is like having a blog with very short posts. The upside is that everything happens at a much faster rate (syndication + feedback), the downside is that it is hard to have consistently good content. Using it as a information distribution network is really nice for open source.
Xen is open source: http://www.xen.org/ Why not install it on a test box in house and decide for yourself how well it fits your needs?
ok so the reverse is interesting - the memristor can presumably do what those "active + passive" components could have, but cheaper/smaller/faster better etc? Did I get it right?
Get a government job if you want to be financially fed from a tube til death, probably doing tedious, monotonous work.

As opposed to a corporate job, where you get all the monotony but don't get the feeding tube?

I personally wouldn't want either -- but not everyone in the world is very smart or very motivated. In that case, they might as well get a pension.
> I shall be 63, my birthday, and retire with Social Security and a very secure pension

This guy is remarkably naive about the long term solvency of the government.
i'm neutral on it. i don't think its an exciting new technology, but i don't think its exactly totally lame, either. its useful but not groundbreaking. it just feels special because of the tech echo chamber that formed around it.