skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Everything I read here I can relate to with big companies. It seems once companies reach that 1000 employee mark the culture changes drastically. I can also relate to how going from a private to public company can impact employee "life". Not that money is necessarily tight or the company can not afford the "perks" they once gave to employees as a private company, but with being public comes added scrutiny and greater sense of needing to be responsible with spending. The average Joe investor does not want to hear that employees are enjoying free meals when his stock drops $1.00.

On the other hand though, from reading these emails it seems most of these people went to work at Google with a preconceived notion that it was going to be different and that somehow Google was going to be this theme park environment. As with any job at any company it is what you make of it. If you take a job solely because you think you are going to eat/drink free everyday, have daily live entertainment, and going to work is going to be fun then you are taking the job for the wrong reasons. Work should be fun, but you need to make it fun and not rely on the company or the culture to make it fun for you.

As for salaries, while I do not know exactly Google's salaries, I would be willing to bet that they are extremely competitive. I do know that a starting salary is most often highly negotiable and the people that tend to complain about receiving a low salary are the ones who go in expecting to be offered some godly amount right from the start. The other thing you have to weigh is the benefits or perks in relation to the salary. For example, if you get to eat lunch and dinner free every day at the office then you are saving around $10-20 a day in food. That adds up to over $200 a month or probably around $3000 a year in extra compensation you are receiving. Just like the one person did comparing the job at Google to buying a luxury car with all the fancy options and extra cup holders, you have to compare the salary plus perks to your current salary with no perks.

I have been there, not with Google, but with a startup. I went from government contracting, to a small startup as a very early employee, and then to Microsoft, and back to startup life. I can say that once you are bit by startup life it is tough to move to a big company like Google or Microsoft and be truly happy. The culture is not the same and to expect it to be is ridiculous. That is why I am back in startup life now. It is fun, fast, and everyday is a new adventure.
it /might/ be better - but you can't make that kind of UI change now.
Well, how about: Not being a leech?
News news is here: http://ycombinator.com/newsnews.html
Biologists have really got to stop using a count of genes as a measure of similarity. Not all genes are equally important!

It is utterly unimportant that humans share 98.5% of genes with apes, or 70% with bananas.

It's the genes are not not shared that are important. It's those that cause the differences (between species or between humans), and thus those that are important.

Those 1.5% of genes that are not shared are orders of magnitude more important than the 98.5% that are. And the .1% are far more important than their numbers would indicate (although obviously not as important as those genes that divide species, but much more important than one tenth of a percent would seem to imply).

No matter how many times they say otherwise there are measurable, and important, differences between races. The fact that they can not understand them in genes does not mean the differences are not there, it means the geneticists don't know enough yet.
Two words: exit strategy. Go with three; I like number two, but you don't control the user experience there. Do that with the proceeds you get from selling the company you make for idea three.
"Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn."

-- Ben Franklin
They can spread the adoption of resources (including iPhone apps I'm sure) much faster than small, indie players who don't have the connections.

Luckily, they're not that clueful about the Internet, primarily because it does not fit into their business models.

Houghton Mifflin and Scholastic both sell significant amounts of bingo cards, on dead tree, through retail stores and catalog sales. (Or they did last time I checked.) These two companies have 8 digit marketing budgets, massive connections, and industry clout.

Now I don't want to toot my own horn too much, but if you were to, say, Google "[pick a subject] bingo cards" right now, you probably would not see Scholastic on the first page. Nobody at Scholastic just slapped themselves on the head this morning and said "Oh, effity, we didn't have a Martin Luther King Day bingo activity today. That was a missed opportunity!"... but I just did!
(1) Optional Fortress like "typing". It's almost always a mistake to add a number representing an amount of dollars to a number referring to feet. And feet can't be added to meters. Heck, it's typically wrong to add gigabytes to megabytes without a conversion (which depends on whether you're talking about disk space or ram).

(2) Many of the complaints mentioned come from the way that a given entity, "the sheet" (or page) is used to both computation and to present multiple computations. Rethinking that is likely to yield huge benefits.

(3) It should be possible to tag computations so they can be more easily used to build other computations. For example, I was recently doing some cost analysis and realized part way through that I'd like to break down the numbers in other ways. Since I was using a sequence of equations in an ordinary programming language, it was easy enough to define appropriate accumulators and pick up the values from the equations, but it would have been a pain with a spreadsheet. And, my solution was too granular.

I'm not expressing (3) very well, but I think that it's a big deal, so feel free to contact me.
* the newly expanded columns should line up on top.

* the elements should not be pushed lower when a taller child element is introduced. This hides the elements on the left column(s).

* to keep a visual track of how I arrived at the current level, set background of the clicked elements to a different colour. This should provide the same functionality provided by point 1 above, without taking away the visual cue.

In summary, please take a look at how Apple Finder implements directory browsing using vertical columns.
I strongly believe the "sweet zone" for headcount is somewhere around 200-500 employees. You can still make a difference, but at the same time you're not struggling with the day to day nuances of a 5-50 person startup. To sum it up:

You will get paid next week, you're no more than 2-3 levels removed from the CEO, and the fiefdoms don't have the coffers to squabble.
I love toasted rice tea.

If you're in the US and want to get some good tea, I highly recommend the Upton Tea Company (http://www.uptontea.com), they have excellent teas at a wide range of price points.
Take care of paralysed people. They need round the clock watching, so you can sit there nights, drink coffee and code. I used to do that, it made me a good amount of money (from the code I produced during that time).
I suspect touch-typing-optimised keyboard layours are not as relevant now as they would have been for the typewrite generation.

My default home position has my right hand in the conventional position, but my left hovering over the bottom left-hand corner of the screen. I spend far more time using those meta keys than typing. Ctrl+e and ctrl+y (vim scrolling keys) and alt+tab (window switching); ctrl+pageup/down (browser switching) and ctrl+a (gnu/screen escape key) than I do bulk entry of text. It also puts me closer to the escape key. In Windows I heavily use control characters based on win+r, win+e, and tab and shift-tab. I suspect the reason I have the right hand in the 'correct' position is because the dimple on the keys there allows me to consistently return to a known position in between occasional mouse usage. A small change to the keyboard layout (e.g. trying to use a UK English keyboard when I grew up with US English) is annoying not only because of the different positions of some control characters I use a lot, but also because it changes the feel of the keyboard and gives a different feel when I'm trying to return to a known position. I can't slide along the left shift there to navigate my left hand to the right position.

I suspect I'd have an easier time learning a different combination of alphabetical characters than I'd have adjusting to changes in the shape of the keys. I've not seen a typing survey about 'optimal layout' that considers such things, and given how individual it is I'm not surprised. The only reliable way to get figures out would be to take different populations of people at birth and grow them into different layours. With the entrenchment of qwerty and the tie between applications and particular layours (e.g. navigation keys in vim, popular positioning cut/copy/paste hotkeys in qwerty and the important role those keys play in users moving away from the mouse and to keyboard control) I doubt such a study would be practical.
I built a file storage web system several years ago (very popular when free, but when the free beta ended not many people wanted to pay). We computed the hash of each uploaded file, and only stored one copy of the file based on the hash. The database based filesystem simply recorded the hash of the file as basically a pointer to the actual file. This allowed multiple people to have the same file, with different file names (stored in the db), but only actually store the file once. Very simple.
Ha, I find this case to be an exception - to me, browser-based photo editor sitting in "the cloud" sounds more absurd than keeping your Torrent server there.

I run my torrents off Slicehost. It's been awesome. This is what "cloud" is supposed to be doing.
In Search of One Bold Stroke to Save the Banks
thank you, that's helpful. will ask more..
#3 seems like the best option. fastest to develop.

#2 - sure, you save money on the products, but you still have to ship them and pay the buyer. and i'm sure there are legal issues. i bought a dell server recently and had to check a box confirming that i would not sell the machine to someone outside the US.
the VC should require [...] if it has a 50% chance, a 2x payoff

VC's do not invest in ventures with high (e.g. 50%) chances of success. A high chance of success impies a low return multiple. See: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HaeWyLuJsJ4

Investors in Startup companies are not interested in hearing about conservative startups.
Good suggestion, yea I agree.. I would also make it so real name is hidden, they pick their own nick or if they are an existing user just link to that
I just knew you were going to say that!
The chance of an in-thread comment getting as much attention and forty-or-so replies is a lot lower.
My 7yo daughter is totally hooked on Mighty Math. Standing in line (zoo, store, whatever), other kids are almost cartoonishly leaning over her shoulder to play along.

It may be evil, but the realy game changer was when I started experimenting with paying her for right answers: $1.00 for ten out of ten right the first time, $.25 for 7 out of ten right the first time, or $.01 for each one right less than 7.

Am I destroying my child's humanity through pay-for-performance? If so, how?
Hmph.. you might like to think so, but I'm still waiting for my sandwich!
What's really interesting is all of the 'ship jumpers' lamenting how much better it was at Microsoft.

That's not a jab at Microsoft. I was just thinking there must be something there with respect to employee benefits, or maybe just employee treatment, that other large companies may want to look at.

Out of curiosity, are there any ex-MSFT employees here that could tell us what you like or dislike about MSFT? I guess the most illustrative ideas might come from knowing what you MISSED when you left MSFT. If anything.
Learn at Least One New Language Every Year
PBF is definitely edgy. It often makes me feel that I shouldn't be laughing at it.
So for example, if a venture has a (subjective) 10% chance of success

I recently asked a VC on how they evaluate risk in their portfolio, and do they bucket investments into low, medium & high risk and how they identify & classify each of these investments into various buckets -- his answer was simple, they would invest in any company that could potentially get them a 10x return -- as simple as that.
I have downvote arrows on comments, but at some point they ceased to affect the score.

It's part of karma-grump protection. One's downvotes do not count, unless he upvotes first and at least as many times. If you run across something you want to downvote, first find something else to upvote. If you want to rack up downvote ammo to spare, upvote often. For example, if you upvote 10 times in a row, you will have 10 downvotes available. After that, your downvotes will no longer count, unless and until you do more upvoting.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39301

I'm considering adding an additional layer of protection against grumps: to only allow users as many downvotes as they've made upvotes. That way each user's net contribution to the global karma would be at least neutral.
Sounds like no one told them about the iceberg:

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000356.html

You know how an iceberg is 90% underwater? Well, most software is like that too -- there's a pretty user interface that takes about 10% of the work, and then 90% of the programming work is under the covers. And if you take into account the fact that about half of your time is spent fixing bugs, the UI only takes 5% of the work. And if you limit yourself to the visual part of the UI, the pixels, what you would see in PowerPoint, now we're talking less than 1%.

That's not the secret. The secret is that People Who Aren't Programmers Do Not Understand This.
Google could be nothing, but disappointment from the way it's built up. It's seen as this magical place where work does itself and things flow so perfectly. The fact is that at Google, most people are going to have to slog away somewhat tedious things like making context ads match their page content 0.1% better. It's not all fun, change the world Gmail and such. Most of it isn't the interesting stuff that we see. That's not really what makes Google, Google. What makes Google what we see is that relentless pursuit of increasingly tiny increases in efficiency. Sure, they had great theoretical ideas like BigTable, PageRank, etc. but what made something like PageRank work was that they didn't stop - they kept making ever more tiny increases in accuracy in a way that could become quite tedious to program and test.

You also tend not to get a full view of things at Google. If you're in backend engineering, that's what you work on. I know that I like seeing the full product and knowing that I've worked on what the users are going to see.
I think the problem with captchas is that they are too complicated even for humans. Its frustrating as hell to have to retype that crap 20 times before you get logged in.

Why can't the whole solution get simplified? A captcha that asks a user some real world question in clear text. Have one admin enter a set of questions, answers and links once a day from top Google News. And then have the widget match it to answers provided. Include a 30 second wait time after each failed attempt to hinder the bots.

I mean captchas get cracked left and right, because they are just a matching system...all you need to do is analyze the letters and retype them. By making it a question from News or Wikipedia, you'd improve the world by a) eliminating bot spam b) teaching people some new information c) and even promoting artificial intelligence research

As an admin I'd see this go as this:
[Enter Question]
[Enter Answer]
[Enter Hint Url]

Hell you can even monetize it by charging 1/100th of a penny per login attempt or make a partnership deal with a newspaper to get paid in exchange for using their stories
There's a wiki page, but this discussion page is better

http://www.airliners.net/aviation-forums/general_aviation/re...

The pilots requested permission to fly the plane off the levee (!) but were denied.

There's a whole series of interesting power-out landings, including the DC-9 at Sioux City. A recap would be a good idea for a blog post for someone....
BATFE (Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives) is the US agency with jurisdiction.

BATFE used to be part of the Treasury Department (because those items were regulated by tax law) but there have been attempts to move them to the Justice Dept; I don't know if any succeeded.
Go for #1.

Re. #2, there seem to be many human cogs that might not give end-users a consistent level of service

Re. #3, the cost of getting you software in these institutions might require a sales force, and that means to you might need to raise some amount of capital

All this said, a question: which one do you find most exciting to work on?
There is no difference between 'pulp' and Shakespeare. Shakespeare wrote for the crowds of his day. The difference you allude to is between 'good' and 'bad' writing, according to your personal preference.

'Pulp' refers to popularity, not literary merit.
they would invest in any company that could potentially get them a 10x return

It's like an SAT score, though. If 10x is borderline, to be competitive against other funding-seekers you should be approaching VC's with much-riskier (e.g. higher-return) opportunities (100x; 1000x; etc.).
I think Microsoft has had longer to adjust to the fact that they're not the new hotness and is probably closer to recruiting / compensating accordingly.
Lycos kills Jubii....Lycos is still around?
Sexual Suicide
Its basically grass is greener on the other side syndrome...people have built up Google in their minds, and it just couldn't live up to their expectations
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number
Your numbers are wrong. They are changed by the management over time to account for karma inflation. http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aycombinator.com+%22kar...

Recent karma-threshold schedule:

10 karma - Upvote comments.
51 karma - Downvote comments. Flag comments.
Buy a 250gig Buffalo TurboUSB 2.0 external drive for $80 and it works out to less than $2.25 a month assuming a 3 year life span -- the duration of the manufacturer's warranty.

Then you'll have all your data with you all time time so you'll never have to be online to access it, and you'll never have to worry about some 'service company' losing your data or allowing it to get into the wrong hands, and you'll never be subject to the company going out of business.

In other words, take responsibility for storing your own data -- on your own hardware -- instead of trying to find excuses to pay someone else to store it in the cloud for you.

:)
I LOVE idea number 2. For example, River Island is an awesome fashion retailer in the UK (www.riverisland.com). Perfect for "going nightclubbing" kind of apparel. So a "wrapper portal" to these kinds of sites would be great, especially for people who don't know where the "hot stores" are in a given country. I happen to know about River Island, even though I live in Austin, Texas, because I happen to have spent some time in the UK, but for people who have never been to the UK and want the "hot stuff" this portal idea would fill a real need, provided you can keep your over-head low. Can you rely on your close friends to work? Good question. I agree with President Reagan, trust but verify. You might want to retain a good solicitor to help with legal issues too. I agree the competition for Idea 3 is pretty steep, and that being able to monetize Idea 1 is going to be tough. I might get downvoted for saying this, and I don't care, but I agree with SCO CEO Darl McBride that Linux is essentially a pirated copy of UNIX, and therefore you are correct that UNIX folks won't want to buy Linux tools. Just my opinion there, so downvote if you like, but I think I'm in good company, lol. Anyway, Idea 2 I am definitely exited about, and certainly if anyone here is planning to do any clubbing in the UK and needs some "hip" apparel, definitely check out www.riverisland.com. (Of course I speak from the point of view of the LGBT themed clubs, but imagine River Island would have some good stuff for more mainstream clubs too.)
Better contrast in HN articles
I love HN, but the color of text in articles contrasts very faintly with the background (both are grey), making it not so easy to read. Therefore I kindly suggest changing the color of the text to black, or making it otherwise easier on the eyes.

As a workaround, I use Firefox's View: Page Style: No Style, but would be so much better not having to :)
Your data is old and out of date. Your Karma 20's arrived almost a year ago. http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=rodrigo
Talking about things being 'godawful slow' is lame without showing context and timings.
Flagging is much lower; somewhere in the 100s.

It's 51, the same as downvote.
Stompernet Formula Five 
Formula Five presents a choice of options across five areas, each of which can add 15% extra revenue and because of the compounding effects, it can double your business after you have implemented the fifth item.

* Formula 5 module 1 - margin magnifier

* Formula 5 module 2 - sales stackers
The concept of interacting with smart computers is always interesting (including this parody and many others), but the implementations always leave me unsatisfied. I guess that's why I stick with sci.fi for entertainment.
I'm not saying he stole it, but it is a fairly natural extension of older ideas. The Garfield Randomizer, which randomised panels from Garfield strips, came out sometime in 2005, then the idea of removing Garfield's speech bubbles from the comics appeared on Truth and Beauty Bombs forum in January 2006 along with a few variants. Garfield Minus Garfield came February 2008.

It doesn't seem to matter who has an idea anymore. Free-spirited exchange of ideas eventually seems to give way to whoever can market themselves the best in order to extract the cash out of those ideas, whether it's CollegeHumor, Ebaumsworld or I Can Haz Cheezburger.
Actually they are cool with it. Me and one other guy request the slow windows, everyone else hates them. He does consulting for restaurants, working up business plans and processes.
I’ve got a keyboard layout kind of fetish, but I have realized there’s no perfect keyboard... there should be a keyboard layout for every specific task you need to accomplish on a computer. If you are just a writer you have very different needs from a programmer, and a SOMELANGUAGE programmer will have different needs from SOMEOTHERLANGUAGE programmer. So I still have my fetish, but I just gave up looking for my own graal
Caught 1000000 exceptions in 859 millis

See http://kip.sateh.com/ExceptionsAreSlow.txt
There were a couple posts a while ago about the Semco management style which felt like a much better solution than the traditional vertical hierarchy. I would have thought Google would be a lot flatter as an organization.
i read that as "the terror of an english lit assignment." ::wipes tear of nostalgia from eye::

as i read i kept wanting to see the punchline, that is: how did this effect the next 30 years of garfield (seems unchanged to me) and other comic strip themes.

also, when i used to read comics i'd always wonder if comic writers were all given the same "list of suggestions", because quite frequently they'd all go through the same theme-phase together.
Off-topic, but is there a reason they don't use ski-lift-ticket vending machines, at least at the slow windows where the per-ticket labor cost of manual vending must undoubtedly be rather high? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alta_Ski_Area#Recent_developmen...

Eventually, users will be able to track their vertical and lift ride data online and purchase Alta Cards using "ticket vending machines".
A guided tour of Emacs
Darwinian selection explains complexity in the economy, technology, and the arts