skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I feel like the author has severely overreacted here.

Counteroffers are a fact of daily life with most corporations, there's nothing malicious nor personal about them. A ludicrous counter-offer means the company has severe managerial issues and has allowed someone to become absolutely, non-negotiably indispensable.

IMO perceiving the counteroffer as "buying off his dreams" is a huge overreaction, and in my various jobs has never been a malicious move. Your boss is trying to save his bacon, not destroy your dreams.

The author does nail one point, but for the wrong reasons:

> "So some of these offers are just plain “keep them in the building while we find a replacement who’ll do the job at the price we were paying.”"

That's exactly what these counteroffers are. Very few counteroffers are serious counteroffers (serious as in they will keep you on indefinitely at the new salary). Management is going "oh fuck, how did we let this guy become so critical" right now, and as soon as the immediate crisis of you leaving is gone, they will attempt to replace you. You'll be out on your ass as soon as they find/train that someone.

I've had this exact thing confirmed by multiple HR folks I've known, all off the record of course. They admit that they explicitly get asked by management to organize a "manage-out". Hell, this sort of thing is bog-standard for most large HR departments.

> " Companies don’t just allow their managers to get slapped around and make outrageous counter offers to people. Budgets and HR minions can’t stand that. The manager gets dinged by the higher ups because she’s “lost control”."

This seems like where the author is off the mark. In my experience no HR person nor upper-management exec has to chase your boss down to push you out. Your boss already has every intention to manage you out as soon as he drops the counteroffer on the table. Especially when the offer is 2x your salary.
as a founder of a defunct ISP (est 1991), I sure wish we could have charged by the bit, instead of connection speed. And it does seem to me that if Internet service is sold by the bit it is a communications service, not a computational service (those have legal meanings and ramifications).
Used casio watches wholesale
On the one hand it's an ego boost to feel they want me to stay. "Okay, I must be doing something right."

On the other hand, I'd be more insulted that they think I'm actually worth 2x what they are paying me now, but weren't.

Ultimately, I think you did just fine following your dreams. Good luck! :-)
Here is a wonderful little quote from the article:

"Also, for the record, we have never sought advice from any of our advertisers on what we carry editorially. To anyone who knows how TED operates, or who has observed the noncommercial look and feel of the website, the notion that we would is laughable."

For anybody that knows how to read press releases, this speaks volumes. It is indignant and righteous and yet at the same time it clearly leaves a loophole one can use to back out of the statement at a later date. Hint: one does not always have to seek advise to receive it. Sometimes the "advice" just comes to you.
Honestly in that example I think you're probably safely within the classic definition, since its just a gap in tooling that makes it you can't make those types of transformations automatically in baby steps.

Here's an example of someone using it wrong: "We are going to refactor the API call to have 5 parameters instead of 4." The word they are looking for here is "change" or "extend", and they're falling back on "refactor" since they think it makes them sound smarter.
Interesting thanks!

But I think your argument falls down, when we inspect the merit of the world "popular".

Electric cars, have never been mainstream.
Nowadays web email services like Gmail set the minimum standard for how email should work. You should be able to choose your email address from what's available, and also create new email addresses whenever you need them (with self service).

If the corporate email system cannot provide service that is as good, then people will start using services like Gmail instead. I see it happen all the time.

Personally I also regard it a sign of cluefulness to have an email address with very short local part. I always hated Gmail's 6-char minimum limit for usernames.
One day I had an epiphany. I realized as I was programming at my computer that nobody had a freaking clue what I was actually working on. If someone asks how their low-priority project is going, I just say that I'm still working on it. They have no way of knowing if I'm actually working on it right now. In the real world, saying "no" a lot will get you enemies. It's much more diplomatic to only work on some low-priority project an hour or two a day (you don't have to tell them your are only spending an hour or two a day), or say you'll get to their project immediately after you finish this thing your are working on (which can be a small component of your large important project). It's important to know how to say "no", but in practice it is important to minimize the number of times you say "no".
the email doesn't matter, it's the exception to policy. Setting up your email address is probably one of the first things that happens when you get hired. Being told by the boss that it's not worth 5 minutes of IT's time to make you happy is not a good tone to start off a new job with.
Could someone post a summary, for those of us on iPhones?
I see lots of different comments here about monitors. I think you're kind of missing the point.

The point of the article is that engineers value being trusted and allowed to create the work environment that bests suits them.

Whether you prefer 3 x 23" monitors or a single 30" monitor or even a 13" MacBook Air, you should be able to use the tools that make you most efficient (especially if you're being paid $120k+… what's the impact of a $1,000 27" display on the cashflow).
Do you have Flash enabled?
IMO graphs should be on a separate machine(s)/monitor(s) for all to see & watch, this could clear up space for your own work. While encouraging knowledge to be disseminated.

Any critical information you could still keep close, but the less important stuff can be pushed to central monitor(s).
This is what all companies should do for "knowledge worker" I/O devices, within reason. For some definition of reason, that is, that at least covers my Thunderbolt display and "large" Wacom tablet.
Monitors are nice indeed, but the one infrastructure item that would get me to turn down a job offer is Lotus Notes. I depend entirely too much on email to be able to do my job to saddle myself with that piece of junk. Using Notes is like trying to run a marathon with snowshoes on.
> This counter offer reeked of skeeze. He was trying to buy my dreams from me. When someone tells you “I’ve been given the opportunity to live my dreams, I’m leaving” the decent human thing to do is to congratulate them and send them on their way. (With a security escort out the building, of course. You dont know what these dream heads are gonna do on the way out.) What you don’t do is tell them you think so little of them, their lives and their goals that you think can buy them off.

Personally I don't feel that they meant any disrespect. They're just desperate to keep you longer. It is hard to find good developers.
> "Money isn't going to make it a fit"

But yet, for many people, it does. In the grand scheme of all programmers (or any profession, for that matter), only a minority are doing it for the sheer passion of it. Most people are in it for the paycheck, and if they can get a larger paycheck without taking a substantially worse job... That's a sweet deal.
I didn't say not reliant - I said not as reliant. At 57% of GDP, Germany's economy is still very reliant on consumption compared to, say, China at 35% [1]. Note that many government expenditures, e.g. Medicare, are counted as consumer spending.

The speaker's argument revolves around inequality, by leading to lower consumption by the lower classes, making an economy unsustainable. This assumes domestic lower class consumption is the driving force behind GDP, which further assumes a diminishing consumption function (consumption as a function of household income). The consumption function is, in fact, quite linear [2]. The speaker also ignores investment, public sector spending, industrial investment (firms buying from other firms), and export industries.

Thus, the notion of consumers being the only pillar of economic activity and by proxy job creation is faulty.

A better argument would be wealth concentration compromises meritocracy and the social trust that binds society together. This isn't a new argument. So the speaker elevates novelty over accuracy in pursuit of a perception of profundity, fallacy be damned.

[1] http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NE.CON.PETC.ZS?order=wba... (2010 countries ranked by consumption/GDP)

[2] http://wps.aw.com/aw_miller_econtoday_12/0,7965,904285-,00.h...
Often, when we are pairing at work, the person driving is thinking out loud or the pair are in discussion with 8 other pairs in their row of tables.
Pah, monitors, blah, blah. What about a comfy chair? I'd go anywhere for a nice chair. ;)
Some projets

Projects.
I always prefer lots of screens of different sizes on a few machines (some running while in different states of deconstruction), as while you can never have too many pixels available, sometimes you may not want to use them all at once. And also computers just die sometimes, so I never like to try and rely on just one of them.
I think there's a definite benefit to team offices, but the team needs to be focused on the same project.
Counteroffers get made all the time - I've had at least 3 made to me in the past, including one for an interdepartmental transfer within the same company (!) Accepting a counteroffer is staggeringly stupid for a number of reasons, but I just can't comprehend why the author would get so offended that one was made in the first place. Answer "no" and move on, easy.
Dude, you wouldn't want to bring logic and facts into this debate, let alone questioning THE GREATEST NATION ON EARTH. :)

What the hell happened to HN?
Youtube's slow update of view counts + a video that goes very and is very controversial very quickly =

303 views

2,115 likes, 837 dislikes
Really, I think the problem with this scenario is not that the company wanted to "spend $50,000 to change 1 line of code." The problem is that management wanted to spend $500 to change one line of code, the dev team spun up to spend $50,000, ended up spending maybe $5,000 before management told them "no really, we don't care about what you think, give us the $500 fix."
I've seen a few of my apps copied - and not just the functionality, but nearly identical name & description posted on Google Play! The automatic reaction is to be annoyed by this, but ultimately it's not a big deal for me.

In the long term, I think the positive effects of sharing with the developer community will outweigh the negative effects of copycats. Sure, it's a little disappointing to see someone else using your ideas. But I'd much rather this scenario (where everyone can copy, be inspired, or even steal freely), rather than a patent-ridden ecosystem where you can't take inspiration from anywhere, for fear of being sued.

So at the end of the day - no, I don't feel the same way. I understand the position Chris took with kreci.net, but for my part I just take the copycats as an indication that we're still living in a free marketplace :)
Indeed,

Also, it sounds like it didn't take six days to change the lines. It sounds like it took maybe two hours spread over six days. Not being able to pivot immediately might be a problem but it sound like it would the president's problem, not Ed's problem. But it might be anyone's problem. It just takes a while to do stuff when you're multi-tasking.

Did you know the computer also wait many instructions before it performs the one you asked for, even in "c"?
Starting Referly (YC S12) Took Me Three Years
I don't think its fair to describe that as a fundamental error. Rather, your explanation while OK as far as it goes is overly simplistic. Yes, its the real value not the currency that we are after, but you also have to take into account secondary effects like 'aggregate demand'. Perhaps that's an ideological bent of yours or perhaps just omission?

Either way, the process of creating 'real value' on both sides cannot get started in some cases because neither A nor B has any confidence (or capital to support their confidence) that the other side will have the currency to buy the real value they intend to create.

Sure, the currency itself just goes around in circles, and only acts as a catalyst to creation of the 'real value' we are after. But by injecting actual currency to one side or the other (through tax cuts or other means) we increase the aggregate demand and thus amount of flow of this currency in the economy as a whole. This could then (hopefully) increase the confidence of A and B that the other will buy their real value and thus is a way to restart the circular flows of productivity that ultimately creates jobs (and real value).

His talk sort of just assumes you are aware of all the above. His actual point is that by giving tax cuts to the wealthy instead of workers a greater percentage of the stimulus / tax cut stays in bank accounts and thus the effect on aggregate demand is less.
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In which case you then ask them to send it in an email, and CC your boss so there's documentation.

Let the managers fight it out.
Really? Are you seriously making an argument against convenience, by labelling people "lazy"?

sigh
Facebook Shares at 38$
Recently I volunteered for a political campaign, and I signed in with a pen and wrote my email address on the sign-in page. It's mylastname@gmail.com. The campaign director saw this and said to me, "how were you able to get that address?" I said, "I've had Gmail since the day it was offered to the public in 2004." He said, "wow." Not a big deal to me, but email namespaces matter. I totally agree with the OP.
Let's move this to a different preference and see how it looks. Imagine you were saying:

"The right to write with their left hand is a right that no one has, not just left-handed people."

Do you not see how that would be unfair, not to let people write with whichever hand they prefer, just because the majority happens to be right-handed? What would justify imposing the majority's preference on the minority?
I'm very lucky to work in a place where they understand the limitations of this policy.

Most of the product we work on (not a CRUD app) is finished or at least at a fairly mature state. But the area I work on is not. For a while they harped on us about following the process. But due to their lack of interest on what we were doing and some managers protecting us, we ended up able to make rapid changes in response to test failures, often several times a day.

It was incredible. They would seek investigations through change requests on bugs found in testing. Immediately after they were entered - before the change request even went to the overseeing group of project engineers and subject matter experts - we would tell them what caused the problem and write that we had committed a fix to the mainline. This circumvented days of waiting for a response that would have blown our schedule apart.

It paid off big. Today for the first time our tests all started passing. They've been failures for years and no one expected anything close.

There's a time for process. When a lot can break or you have a finished/safety-critical product you want to lock it down. But in initial development of new features, you have to throw it out and do what's right.

For a while they were demanding change control with CRs over software that had never been written or run successfully. Why even bother writing the CR if it never worked in the first place? That means the software wasn't done in the first place, not in a state requiring change control!

It was unusually rapid iteration between the test and development teams, who should sit next to each other and immerse themselves in making the software work. Only by rapidly uncovering and overturning problems like this can you ever get something close enough to stable to lock it down this way.

Development and test respected each other, understood what had to be done, and by working together discussing behavior and the test environment were able to determine what the software should do and how best to test this functionality.

There were times where waiting for the process would have taken us 5 days to get approval to fix a bug. By talking with our project engineer and going ahead with the testers - who realized it was not the time to stick to formal process - we were able to succeed.

I'm very lucky. The testers were cool and understood the state of the software and were willing to shout across the cube and explain what was failing. We worked together and managed to succeed by knowing when a process was important and when the managers would be happier to go around it.

The problems encountered here are mainly about people. We had testers and others who trusted and worked with us. When you don't have that - like the author of the article - it takes some social engineers and lawyer like knowledge and parsing of company policy to get around the problems.
On a complete tangent: of all the language runtimes I'd expect to be converted to run in NaCl, I don't think Ruby's would top my list for "immediate practical uses." On the other hand, porting the Erlang BEAM VM--and thus allowing a web client to become a node in an Erlang process network, and have arbitrary code pushed to and executed on it by the network--would have tons of relevant applications. Anyone working on this? Should I start working on this?
Just a thought I'm not sure I actually believe myself: Does catering to every trivial whim (email address? really?) of your employees create a culture of entitled whiners? I've never worked at such a place, so I wouldn't know.
I honestly couldn't really offer you any advice on how to prevent scraping. The best you can do is slow us down.

And the best way to do that is the figure out who is hitting your pages in such a methodical manner and rate limiting them. If you are smart enough, you might also try to "hellban" us, by serving up totally false data.

Well, no, there are other ways too.

For example, any site behind a paywall probably has your identity, and unless you live in a faraway place with impotent copyright laws -- and there aren't that many of them any more -- there are often staggeringly disproportionate damages for infringement available through the courts these days, certainly enough to justify retaining legal representation to bring a suit in any major jurisdiction. Given a server log showing a pattern of systematic downloading that could only be done by an automated scraper in violation of a site's ToS, and given a credit card in your name linked to the account and an IP address linked to your residence where the downloads went, I imagine it's going to be a fairly short and extremely expensive lawsuit if you upset the wrong site owner.
That's like asking if Chrome is going to come with Adblock Plus or some other random extension or app...
Greed knows no bound, clearly. This being said, my rent got jacked up $300 a month. I must leave this place before I start paying to work here.
$89 < $120, and there's the whole "Decent CS" thing too.

Stop being a dick.
The song "Like a G6" plays.
牛皮癣用什么药好
No one seems to have pointed this out yet, but the code that runs your manufacturing line is indeed "mission critical". Furthermore it's likely that your customers demand that you have strict processes in place for changes, and can actually audit you at their pleasure. So being so bureaucratic about it is not surprising.

The Web 2.0 world works very differently, of course.
Successful perhaps in large numbers but success isn't always about mass. Reddit, Pinterest and others are about mass.

There's another way to measure success—quality and the effect it has and what it causes people to do.

People are afraid of being left out, though, like the whole Svbtle debacle amongst other examples.
He's not making an argument against convenience, he's making an argument for convenience applied consistently. It's inconvenient for people outside the company to remember your first initial and last name if you can use something else, like your first name or your last name.
I agree with you that I'm not the right person. I was brought in to change the culture so we do everything faster(you can imagine the speed at a company with couple offshore devs and half dozen onshore people working on product).

I've, err we, have mostly failed.I can go on about why but at the end, I think we all share the blame and evaluate parts we could have personally done better and apply it next time round.

One of the big realizations for me is that they need someone older and more confident. I'm in my mid 20s and once founded a startup that got 30x the traffic but even months in, the boss would be unsure if I was a good programmer. We tried everything from emailing my code samples to his CTO friends to code reviews by other devs(all of which gave positive feedback) but I feel he could never totally shake that doubt. I called him out on it finally(basically if you can't tell after 8 months if I can program you should let me go). I've been programming since 12 but the lingering doubts actually started making me question my own abilities at which point I decided I need to move.
GM is a ward of the U.S. Treasury, Ford never took a bailout. GM's bankrupt GMAC finance arm is another American state-run enterprise, the re-named Ally Bank.
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RunCore Debuts World's First Self-Destructing SSD
good marketing ploy :)
Those are both good indicators, and at least some companies get them right. I would add a few more that almost no one gets right: does the culture create meaningful chunks of interruption-free time (Paul Graham's "Maker's Schedule")? Do programmers get quiet places to work?
Yes, trying to be blind of people's traits, such as skin color, is indeed not the way to get beyond racism. We need to recognize that some people are different and that is a good thing, not that we should try to ignore the differences.
In Internet Marketing, we refer to being delisted as getting "sandboxed"
I think it should be both. It's a lot harder to see stuff from a distance. Put it in front of me, please.
I believed that the time Goldman Sachs winged into the Game (long before the IPO) it would kill Facebook slowly.

I can't believe that a valuation for FB can be that high without political corruption.

So $18.4 billion for a Social-Network with ~1 billion users, whose only income is using/selling AD-impact valuation Data.
(And in the future an AppCenter where users can buy FB credits to play Games.)

I think Google and Amazon have more Data to predict and raise AD-impacts than FB will ever have.

+The FB code has already been stolen. Every other stock would fall hard, but not FB.
Oh, you will be down-voted times and times again for even posting things like that. It's self-preservation, since a large percentage of current start-ups rely on similarly ad-driven pie-in-the-sky schemes where the best and only possible exit is a sale to Facebook or another large entity with more money than sense.
This is certainly no worse than what Facebook's collecting, and their opt-out controls mean there's not a lot to be worried about.

If you're really paranoid about privacy you should be concerned about Google, not Twitter. Try counting the number of websites with Google Analytics or AdSense (or Google-hosted jQuery, or a +1 button...)