skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For the engineers I've hired onto my team, I insist they be provided the very things that I want as an engineer:

- Two big monitors
- New dev machine/laptop, running latest bits
- A top-of-the-line chair
- Some natural light (not to be confused with *natty light*)

These are the non-negotiable items, and having taken a few senior mgmt positions, it's now something I state upfront: this is how we roll, no exceptions.

There's a second tier, depending on the environment: personal whiteboards. This is a function of the physical space, obviously; but anytime someone has a brilliant idea, I don't want them waving hands in front of me, I want expo markers flying around.

Aside from standard company stuff, that's it. And it's across the board -- everyone gets this. Everyone is valued, because your time is valued. I expect a lot from my team, and don't want anything petty getting in the way -- especially a few pieces of hardware and furniture that are negligible compared to the cost of the engineer.

It might not be everything in the world, but it sure seems to keep everyone happy because they are seriously productive.
At Google your username appears everywhere. In mail, code reviews, chat, irc - everywhere. I know some of my colleagues by their username only, I don't even remember their real names.

When we start we get to specify three usernames in order of preference. You are given the first one that is available. It means a lot to me to be adg@google.com.
yes, you should.

(ignore my previous tower of babel whining wrt this particular application which sounds completely awesome)
I don't think this is really a worry in Australia at least. Often teachers are left coming up with lesson plans on the fly and the students suffer.

My partner is studying to become a primary school teacher and one thing that has surprised me is the level of duplication in the system. At an individual school a couple of teachers teaching the same year level are coming up with a lesson plan. There are hundreds of other schools essentially teaching to the same framework. Now I'm not advocating a completely standardised curriculum with no room for the teacher to put their own individual style in the lessons. What I am saying though is that I think everyone would benefit if there was much more sharing of knowledge throughout the system. Something like this site enables that knowledge sharing.
I've heard it said by several politicians in political speeches. (Not to start a partisan battle, but it my recollection, they were primarily U.S.-ian Democrats.) It's typically couched as a social responsibility to hire, or a responsibility to hire locally rather than outsource/offshore.
I think Jared is a smart guy and I respect him a lot. However, I think that both Niroka and Officehours.TV could have eventually worked out in some form (they both seemed like credible products when they came out). I think that the key missing ingredient was probably time and some iteration in the solution space (rather than an entirely new product). With that said, I'm glad that you guys found something that worked for you.
Good point. When I'm stuck and management takes a couple days to get back to me and I have nothing to do, I take advantage of this time to learn new things. Maybe I'll read the man pages for "find" and discover a few new tricks. Or I'll read some tutorials on vim and learn some new things. I've learned a lot about MongoDB this year while waiting on roadblocks at work.
I've really gotten into adjustable monitor arms; I have 3 x 24" and a laptop stand, all on dual ergotron arms. Being able to reassign monitors on multiple systems (mba, mbp, desktop linux, system-under-test) is really nice.

I'd probably add a core 30" if I didn't already have more 24" than I needed at the time. 30" + 24" portrait (2?) is probably the sweet spot for a single desktop machine + laptop.
Customer acquisition cost.
I don't believe this at all. Put another way: you're exactly right, but I'd combine two concepts you separate.

Everyone is working for passion/happiness. There's the net awesome that you get out of solving problems and building value at worth, and there's the net awesome that you buy with the money they pay you.

One way to look at it is that it all goes in the same pool and plusses-and-minuses until you have some score of how awesome your days tend to be.

I think that's the only reasonable way to look at it, and I don't buy the 'some of us are just working stiffs' bit that gets dropped into these threads on HN. I think more accurately, it's just generally speaking really hard to find an awesome job and eating and sleeping (under drywall) is expensive... So for lots of folks salary dwarfs work environment in priority.

The sad thing is that the comparison is generally done in a speculative vacuum. It's very easy to imagine what would happen if we made less (or more) money. That's pretty simple math. It's much harder to evaluate the benefits or drawbacks of a different work environment on our lives. Challenging math.

Oh, and that was a total tangent... to the point, in my example the employee is leaving for reasons other than money. So the premise kind of is the conclusion there. I was just being redundant. It's just a logical redundancy that lots of people in this situation seem to miss. Dollars do that.
Right with you on things that impact productivity, e.g. monitors, chairs, etc., but coming from finance I'm impressed by how Silicon Valley will take huge pay cuts for little things like catered food, pinball machines, or hammocks. I didn't realise it until a VC (not going to name them, but a big one) showed me a graph during his pitch of how much less his start-ups pay in cash + equity versus similar companies for "throwing candy bars at the coders".
I think the monitors thing only matters if it's applied consistently, such as getting the biggest/latest/greatest when starting or when requested by the employee for a work reason. If the company doesn't give that to you in the first place but does when you are pressured to get a project done, that's not valuing you - that's desperation. The previous department head in my company has resorted to something similar and that was a complete turn-off as it was more about his ass being saved than caring for his people.
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> See, now you need a policy against that sort of unpleasantness.

No you don't. Choosing a name like "GodHatesFags' would be a firing offense at any law-abiding company in the US.
THANK YOU.

This couldn't have come at a better time. Describes my current situation perfectly.

I changed 1 line of code today. It's going to require me to call into 2 review meetings to have it approved. These meetings happen once a week. 2 weeks to get this code to production. UNBELIEVABLE.

I think it's time for a new job.
I usually set up "preferred address" (specified by the user, defaulting to firstname), then set up aliases for firstname, lastname, firstname.lastname, firstnamelastname, flastname, firstl.

The thing which annoys me is when I have firstname on a major public service, and other people have weird derivatives (like first1@ or firstl), and I get misdirected mail. On google I have firstname.lastname and an annoying realtor(tm) has firstname.b.lastname@ and I get huge amounts of useless mail.
Non-resident aliens are specifically excluded from paying capital gains to the US. I wonder why? The US also refuses to collect information on income earned in the US by foreign residents (currently there are some efforts to change this, being obstructed by congress). Of course if you suggest that this means the US is a tax haven then you are in for an earful. Other, bad, countries are tax havens. Never the magnificent USA!

A far more equitable solution to the Saverin 'problem' would be to apply CGT to ALL US-derived gains. Most countries do this. But that is unlikely to happen as it would reduce foreign investment...
For a job like that? Pay them. A lot (a good chunk of the company might suffice). Or suffer an extremely high turnover again and again and again.
Could the lesson plans be open-sourced?
I personally like formulated emails. Maybe it's the fact that I really like consistency but it also makes emailing coworkers much easier. I don't want to have to go hunting through a directory to find their custom email.
You would be well-advised to read this company's Privacy Policy, especially sections 6-9. It is a wonder they can use the term "Complete privacy" in their website copy without any fear of liability.
Socially dare friends to do ridiculous things for money
Of all the "big companies" I've seen, Facebook has the best internal IT. A lot of those policies were set by Yishan Wong; basically, if something can be done more efficiently by an individual employee than by using IT, the process is broken. (http://algeri-wong.com/yishan/) Facebook IT is basically a cache, but if something is faster to get from the Apple Store or whatever, that's how they did it -- not sure how it is done now.

It's hilarious how in big companies it takes weeks+ to get things done in IT which could be trivially accomplished with a credit card and web browser, for less money. Yes, there are security policies (which should be enforced in the infrastructure and by user policy, not by end user hardware alone, and it should be carrot vs. stick for common builds), but things like ordering keyboards and chairs shouldn't be bottlenecked.
"There were often a few token people who were allowed to stay on in town provisionally: usually, they offered an unusual trade or service that a small town relied on, and were thus granted an exception to the sundown rules."

http://dneiwert.blogspot.com/2008/01/how-to-out-sundown-town...

Preface: I'm a white American, with plenty of WASP guilt.

I forget the issue, but an African-American was in the news spewing the standard reprehensible winger talking points.

An African-American coworker of mine said "There's always one", shaking his head in disgust. He probably let his guard down around me, because we got to know each other pretty well and he knew of my political activism (voting issues).

I asked him to explain. He said no matter how stupid or extreme an issue, the white man could always find some black man to voice support.

I'm guessing that "there's always one" is a cliche in the African-American world.

Spike Lee's Boyz in the Hood, a fucking great movie, had scene depicting this phenomenon.

So, in sum, when Clarence Thomas, Condi, or that US Rep Allen fruitcake says something retarded, it's still retarded, and I don't have to measure my criticism (of the idea) just because I'm white and the speaker is black.
This is exactly it. At my company, the cost of someone's engineering rig ends up being a rounding error. So the prevailing popular setup these days is a loaded Macbook Air or Pro (sometimes with Linux installed instead of OSX) and a 30" monitor. I think the only real restriction is that we do not run Windows, which would be an impedance mismatch and support hassle for what we do (massively parallel real-time analytical databases). Of course, this means people have to support their own system if they run some odd OS flavor but no one seems to mind. Whatever makes people happy.

For that matter, we also let everyone pick their own email address as well.
I was watching Steve Keene's talks on what's wrong with Neoclassical Economics (one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZKjQtrgdVY) as he shows why economists get all this wrong. Its strange to me that economists make assumptions tat each marginal dollar gets spent the same way regardless of who it is given to....
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How to be a better innovator
First you say...

Gay people have never experienced the maltreatment that blacks have in this country.

Then you come back with:

I never said that gays weren't treated badly.

Gays have been routinely beaten up and occasionally murdered for decades. Many have been rejected by their own families.

Freehunter is right, of course -- this is not about comparing who is the most persecuted, as if only the winner of such a comparison had the right to complain about it. It's about seeing prejudice for what it is.

I think that if you really looked at what a lot of gay people have gone through, you would not so facilely deny any similarity between that and what blacks have experienced. Of course there are differences; they are different situations. But there are also very substantial similarities. It appears that you don't want to look at the similarities, and I think you should ask yourself why not.

EDITED TO ADD:

You should really talk to some gay black people. The ones I have spoken to about this have all said the experiences aren't very different at all.
no silos!
A lot of these jobs seem to require security clearance/ US citizenship. Is there a way of navigating this?
Are they detecting whether Flash is available?
I agree. But as it so often happens, engineers love to talk about their personal preference of monitors. I imagine that's because there isn't another place where you can candidly discuss this topic
>>The traditional definition of refactoring is making well-understood, deterministic transformation of code from one state to another in a way that provably has no effects on the behavior.

That is not incorrect but for it to be true refactoring you would have to add this:

You extract (or refactor) all the duplicate pieces of code that are performing the same functionality and merge them into (or replace them by) a single module.

That is what refactoring truly is.
They really are decimating their workforce. Ouch.
Great sounds for when you're brogramming with your bros.
Soak up every bit of venture hacks. Then read brad book called venture deals.
The problem, imo, is not that it took 6 days of reviews to change a major variable. The problem is that the reviews were entirely immaterial to the actual change taking place. Whether variables are hardcoded, have an audit trail, and use proper naming conventions will have no impact on ACTUALLY mitigating the business risk of making a giant change.
If epicene "they" (that is, "they" used for the purpose of gender-ambiguity) is good enough for Shakespeare, it should be good enough for any high school English teacher, or other small-minded prescriptivist.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they#Generic_they
it's hard for me to imagine that the first apple computer would be have been created if woz insisted on using a large cinema projector, much less two projectors

he hacked a regular tv instead, and that's how apple was born
What will happen to house prices in the Bay Area after the Facebook IPO?
Ten Life Changing Events We Make Without Even Thinking
The devolution of gaming culture
If I came across software that was LGPL but charged for downloads, I would very quickly google to find someone who provided updates for free. And if that free distribution channel didn't exist, I would create it.
Well, you shouldn't compromise on any of those if they're important to you. And if you don't care about your username, then great, one less thing to have to worry about.

But I think for anyone that does care about their username, it's a sign of respect when the company lets you choose it, and a sign -- not the end-all, but a sign -- of trouble ahead if they can't, and the OP's point is valid.

(The thing about large monitors isn't the end-all-be-all way of judging an employer either! These are just litmus tests that give a very quick way of judging whether they have an engineering-focused culture. I'd expect these factors to largely align, but hey, if there's somewhere that gets both these tests wrong but everything else right and is still an awesome place to be an engineer -- more power to them.)
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This post confuses masterful flourishes with substance. And by the way, I don't like big monitors - I get too many degrees of freedom and find it too hard to focus. I have a 27" cinema that I never use with my 13" MBP.
US to heavily prioritise economy over environment
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> Simply handing people money to spend is not stimulative because it does not create value. Put another way, taking money from A and giving it to B so B can buy things from A does not (and cannot) make A wealthier.

Sure they can, according to some models.

Here's the argument: Say A and B produce goods for each other, and so A might buy something from B for $5, and B might come back and buy something from A with the same $5. They are happily creating value, trading back and forth. Now, say something scares A so that he wants to save some of his money instead of spend. Then B is getting less income from A, and so she also becomes worried about her future income and spends less. Then A gets even less money, and is even less willing to spend. As you can see there is a feedback cycle where A and B produce (and spend) less and less. This is a recession.

Now give B some money, possibly even taken from A. Now B is getting a more reliable income, an is more willing to spend on A, who thus earns more and becomes more willing to spend on B, and so on in positive feedback.

This is basically Krugman's "Babysitting Co-op" scenario.
Solution: stop taking requests from people. Tell them to file tickets, and your boss will have to prioritize them.
Predicting Churn: Data-Mining Your Game
It's a CI system with amazing github integration. All you have to do is add a small config file [1], create an account, and then enable the post commit hook (a nice little on/off toggle) and your project is now being tested on every change [2]. It also has easy to incorporate badges you can put in PR's to show that your changes pass [3].

[1] https://github.com/tedivm/Stash/blob/master/.travis.yml

[2] http://travis-ci.org/#!/tedivm/Stash

[3] https://github.com/tedivm/Stash/pull/37
But if you are planning to leave, what harm will it really do? When you have pocket aces, bet and play them!

EDIT: Maybe you'll inadvertently help the next guy. Yeah they might not care much for you but maybe, just maybe, something will click and the folks will realize... yeah I guess disturbing him was stupid on our part. If not and they don't get it... who gives a crap about people that don't give a crap about you!?
Scan the world in 3D - MatterPort is hiring its first full-stack web developer
Matterport (YC W12) creates a low-cost easy-to-use 3D scanner that lets you turn reality into 3D models.

We scanned Y Combinator shortly before demo day -- you can see the scanning process and the automatically generated 3D model on our demo video starting at 0:40 http://matterport.com/#video

We're proud to be creating something incredibly useful. This is going to become a vital tool for the millions of professionals who work with 3D spaces on a daily basis, including construction companies, film studios, building operators, real estate companies, industrial engineers, remodelers, architects, retail designers, insurance companies, and more. Our site is being deluged by requests for new uses for the system every day.

We're starting our beta testing program with several large companies, and we've already finished raising a very sizable seed round.

However, scanning is only half of the Matterport experience. What happens after scanning — viewing, annotating, and publishing scanned 3d content — is essential to giving users a seamless and pleasurable experience.

This is where you come in.

We're looking to you to build out the Matterport website and server infrastructure, including both the database of scanned 3D content and the user interface for browsing it. You would be the first web developer we hire, so you would have a chance to set your choice of language, framework, and best practices for web development at Matterport.

You should have past experience scaling a website from inception to large numbers of users while maintaining reliable performance.

We feel that it's worth giving larger than typical equity compensation for early employees -- we want you to do really well if the company does really well.

---

A bit about us:

We are all experienced founders and were previously early employees at PayPal and Google. We like to work hard and get shit done. We are intellectual and curious. We know how to communicate and get along. We're goofy and keep the work atmosphere fun. We're not brogrammers. :-)

Most of all, though, we're driven to change the world in a deep and meaningful way.

---

To apply for a job at Matterport, send an email to jobs@matterport.com. Put only "(2)" in the subject line. In the email, please describe how you fit the job requirements as specifically as possible. We look forward to hearing from you. Thanks!
I'm guessing it's a hacker status thing. We care a lot about seemingly trivial things, but not nearly as much about other things, that might appear more important. We're easily appeased entitled whiners :)
Google scales it quite well, I'd say....
Ask HN: I want to improve online shopping. Take my survey?
It's kind of mind boggling that HP has nearly 350,000 employees.

Facebook is soon to be worth twice (maybe three times) what they are, with a mere 3,500 employees, despite HP earning seven times more profit. Something will have to adjust with that math.
I wonder why corporate email systems aren't smart enough to take reasonable action. The first time I try to send a message to 'dale' the system should be able to infer the recipient from context. With a good naming convention to avoid false positives (forcing subsquent dales to add a distinguishing letter) this system would be very reliable.
Is this just me or does this not work under ubuntu? In both firefox and chrome ctrl + g brings up search.
Really, it's not as big a deal as you'd think. You simply know your coworkers by their e-mail address, not by their name. (Yes, I call people by their handle, and they call me by mine. We get along just fine)
"A part of me just wants to send him a link to this thread :)"

That's probably the single best thing you could do for him, if he is serious about wanting to attract (and retain!) good technology people.
How Microsoft Lost the Future
Wow, thats horrible.

Why must everyone copy crappy apple keyboards. Copy the magic mouse instead.
Two monitor stories:

1. In my last job I calculated the price of a nice monitor as a percentage of my salary and told my boss that it would only have to make me 0.4% more productive for it to be a good investment. Did I get a new monitor? Nope.

2. A friend of mine works at Google in Sydney and I went to visit. The first thing that struck me as I gazed out across their cube farm (they have a nice office, but it's still a cube farm) was that the OpenGL screensavers on every single desktop were running at a decent framerate, a marked contrast to my workspace, which runs the same screensavers but only 10% have the right video drivers installed :)
do you really want your raw email available publically?
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As an engineer, I mostly just use my corporate email for internal communications anyway, so it doesn't bother me at all (ours is first initial, last name, and I have a doozy of a last name). I agree with crazygringo that it's probably a bit of a dangerous yardstick if you're looking for a job in the non-startup world.
Fez made me feel like a crazy person