skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A constrained elite does seem useful within an organization. I like the idea of distinguishing those engineers who go above and beyond and really create something new. However it can also become a gerontocracy easily and can limit the adoption of innovative ideas in the long run.

The problem I have with these sorts of social structures is that it assumes that one person out of a hundred is some how "gifted." After reading Coders at Work and listening to interviews with "gifted" artists I think most of these people do not in fact consider themselves such. AFAIK they just worked really hard and the right people at the right time took notice. I assume this is why I often hear these "gifted," people say they feel really lucky to be in the position they're in -- luck did have a small role in it and that seems to be where the "gifted," term comes from. The important part is the hard work these people put into improving themselves, their skills, and the state of the art.

However these DE titles can have a negative passive-impact on hiring practices. In order to avoid, "bozos," organizations will try to, "only hire the best." However the "best," is a highly subjective threshold that is constantly in flux. What is state of the art today will be laughably archaic in 5 - 10 years (especially so for technology companies). The harmful effect is that every company will adopt this policy in order to compete and hope that the other companies will adopt the "bozos." What then will happen to the average programmer who is learning the ropes and doing their best to become a DE some day? Should they get filtered out?

There are some things about the event horizon that make sense ("one of us is not as stupid as all of us"). However one must be careful when distinguishing their fellows. While it may encourage the best of the best to join together it can also breed an elitist attitude that is counter-productive to innovation.

Interesting article and a good read! It's something that I toy with in my mind now and again. Personally I think DE's should form their own groups outside of the organizations they work at. Let people lead by reputation rather than hierarchy.
It then becomes interesting socially whether it is best to click a button acknowledging that you saw the email but either didn't read or read but didn't reply. Or will at always be a social norm to not acknowledge to give you some kind of out of you converse with the person in future.
OP is a wanker. Wah-wah, Millennials are entitled and don't want to do 70 hours per week of our grunt work, and they leave before they burn out and we can fire them.

People should leave jobs as soon as they realize they aren't going to learn or grow where they are. This can happen after 8 years, or 3 months. Companies don't promise to employ people for 3 years regardless of whether they are any good, so why should an employee be expected to pay dues in a job that's obviously not going to lead anywhere?

The "job hopper" stigma is perpetuated by people who only want the side of "at will" that benefits them.

I will say that most 22-year-olds need to be better at figuring out when a job is worth leaving, because I've seen error on both sides. Everyone gets grunt work when they start out, but there are chef's apprentices (who still get grunt work, but are being primed for something better) and there are dishwashers, and it's important to figure out, in an entry-level job, which of these you are. That's a separate matter altogether. I've known a few job hoppers and they're not all people with bad judgment.

That said, people should generally go into jobs with the intention and hope of being there for at least 2 years, but I think that goes without saying.
I'll go even further and say it also differs by economic climate.

Take today's environment. Companies can't fault people for leaving their first job when they might've landed it only after several months of searching. Chances are that job isn't a good fit for the candidate, but if you're a new grad you have to pay those loans somehow.
If CPAs aren't the right metric, you still need to find a better metric to convince advertisers it's worth it.

And I think the "look how many users we have!" metric is going away quickly.
I think what you're doing to spread the concept of new ways of measuring academic impact beyond citations is great, but to say you're leading the way is a bit misleading. Mendeley has been around for years and has been collecting information on what papers academics are actually reading, regardless of source, not just pageviews or downloads at your site. In fact, your site didn't start talking much about their profile pageviews until after Mendeley launched the Institutional Edition, at which point stats had been accumulating for years.

So again, I think it's great what you're doing, but to cast yourself as the leader of this movement is kinda like publishing a paper and not citing any prior work.

If people are really interested in this kind of thing, I recommend altmetrics.org and #altmetrics

(I work for Mendeley)
App Developers: Stop Abusing Push
I actually thought a 2-year stay at a software job was a long time. In my experience, staying beyond that was pointless. After 2 years you've mostly learned everything you can learn from that position, and I've never received a raise more than 5%, so I always had to look elsewhere for better pay and new opportunities and technologies to learn. If there are companies that go out of their way to retain their software engineers, I've never been fortunate enough to work for one.
Sketchy. The Hacker in Hacker News reflects creation, not destruction.
Would you expect him to do anything else? Invert the question: if you had $500 million cash, would you spend it all on Facebook stock? Or Google stock? Or any one stock?

Even for company insiders who really believe in the future of their company, it isn't prudent to hold more than a small fraction of a billion-dollar fortune in one stock, from a purely rational perspective. Of course, the public expects irrationally enthusiastic behavior from founders, which is the only thing that leads to the gigantic fortunes amassed by the Gates/Ellisons of the world.
This is a great trick. I've done it with my home server with great success, using an EC2 server is an even better solution.
See, I hate arguments for this.

How many new accounts did you create annually 10 years ago?
How many new accounts did you create annually 5 years ago?
How many new accounts did you create this year?

People don't mind switching, and in fact they don't mind having simultaneous accounts. People on this forum think that they are 'special' inasmuch they don't mind negotiating multiple accounts with relative ease, but it's an inevitable tactic.

Facebook can be used to login to other sites, but with Google+ and Twitter and the $20 share price, nobody small wants to bet on Facebook. It's like making an Xbox 360 exclusive game if there was a $0 porting cost.

If Facebook is bought out by Microsoft or Apple, it will truly be a threat as a universal login system. But until then, they will die a death from a 1000 paper cuts.
On Self-Delusion and Bounded Rationality
Analytics and experiments will tell you 'what' but will rarely tell you 'why'. That's the data you can collect from quantitative and qualitative surveys.
Literary Justice
The Economist mag doesn't think so:
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/news/article.cfm?c_id=3&#...
Agreed.

My first programming salary job (did some consulting earlier) was for ~2 years. The person who hired me gave me a series of about 12 promises about what the job would be like, and then systematically broke every one. My second job (huge raise!) only made it about a year, at which point I lost faith in that company and was sick of the long commute.

After that, I did consulting for a while, then took another job for about a year and a half, and moved on and did more consulting...repeat. I did finally land somewhere that I stayed for almost six years before eventually resigning to consult some more, but in general my jobs have all been 1-2 years at most.

I have never been questioned about why I stayed such a "short time" at those positions, and I've only rarely had trouble getting interviews when sending in my resume (the only time really was the period after 9/11, when the country was in shock and, as far as I could tell, no one was hiring). And I get offers from many of the positions I interview for.

So no, I can say categorically that, at least in software jobs, 1-2 years at a job isn't considered problematic, at least if you're otherwise a strong candidate.
This is still true today, but has been becoming less and less true for years now. The .com namespace just isn't big enough.

Today we're mostly just dealing with it - I suspect I'm somewhat more protected here in Australia than most US based people - many of my clients are fine with a $foo.com.au domain even if the $foo.com isn't available, so long as $foo.com isn't already a direct competitor.

The pool of available .com domains just isn't going to support all the things people want to do with domain names in the short and medium term future. Something is going to have to change - and whatever that change is, it's somehow going to have to avoid the problem of all the .com domain owners immediately registering the .newtld version or fraudulently/incorrectly using trademark law to muscle out new businesses.
Is the Curiosity landing on Mars just a big hoax?
We already thought of this problem - we said "hey, there'll be different companies with the same name; we should introduce different namespaces so that, say, a company in Australia and a company in Austria don't clash.

Turns out, end-users want a flat namespace, so everybody has to buy names in that namespace. Until ICANN opens up the top-level domain space to arbitrary registrations (instead of the current 'you have to spend $150,000 and run a registrar' deal), that flat namespace is probably going to be .com.
I think the sub-text is why they leave "jobs that look good on paper".

"When does a high-status / high-pay position become a 'bad job'?"

Its hard to make a blanket statemnet. The value of the article is it dimensionalizes the problem a bit.
YC encourages this, they can grab a lot of feedback and iterate on what they have with the attention they are getting from launching.
Yes! One string type! OMG. What a revelation!
Ripping OAuth tokens out of Twitter apps
Facebook is massively engaging, but the ads they allow to appear on the site are incredibly off-putting.

I personally don't mind ads on sites, but the Facebook ads that I'm fed all appear to be for slimy businesses (I'm constantly seeing ads for Canadian Pardons that are using what I believe to be unauthorized images of celebrities) or have seemingly low-to-no production values.

They need to fix or curate the way ads are displayed, because I think it will eventually become a hindrance to their success.
Am I the only person who feels woefully inadequate whenever I read articles where phrases like "10 or 100 times as productive as the average engineer".

Sorry guys, I'm trying my best! :-(
I once left a job after just three months. It was obviously not a good fit for me, but I realized that sticking around for a year, the whole "I'm going to give it a year" thing, wasn't really a good idea for anyone.

For me, having an explanation about each job change is more important than the length of time at any given position.
Huh, that is unfortunate. Is hinting still important on devices with such high DPI though?
Does anyone know what sort of money that cost them?

I suspect some domaineer was very happy that day…

(we blew $11k for the .com version of a .com.au domain we'd started to succeed with 6 or 7 years back. Ultimately futile, but not really related to that expense…)
Hey Mike! Hope you're doing well.

Wah-wah, Millennials are entitled and don't want to do 70 hours per week of our grunt work, and they leave before they burn out and we can fire them.

I think you're misrepresenting OP's argument here. He's arguing that younger people with repeated job jumps may raise flags at prospective employers.

I tend to agree with OP, too. Jumping between gigs can be a problem, especially for people with little experience, since shorter job stints mean you don't get a chance to work with multiple people in the company or work on increasingly complex projects. Both can be problematic from a career development point of view.

I agree with your point about young 20-somethings, though: most probably don't know how to evaluate offers -- compensation, benefits, culture, and their bosses -- well enough when they graduate. I know I didn't.
5 things every mobile game developer should know about Chinese players
OP is a wanker. Wah-wah

The rest of your post was really good, you don't need to debase it with that kind of pointless drivel.
> It's disappointing that Apple didn't include some obvious retina friendly system preferences. System font size, ui scaling, true native retina resolution, etc.

They did. Granted not all in one menu, but all exist within system preferences. It even asks you after first install if you want to be at "Retina Optimised" resolution or native resolution.
End-users only want that while it's easiest and it works.

I'd argue that both of those conditions are no longer unambiguously true.
Thats ridiculous. The guy is going nowhere and even posing questions like this are a waste of time.

FB has more opportunity than time to do it in. They can literally go in every direction and the stock price will be what the stock price is.
your argument relies on the assumption that data gathered from surveys is accurate and so good that you can make appropriate insights.

For most purposes, I'd say this is good enough, but this is a whole other can of worms.
I agree. A small period of time with a great employee can completely change a company. I don't think past employment length is in any way an accurate indicator of the value an employee can bring. Unless your company objective is "hire someone who will sit in this chair for 4 years, guaranteed".
First, thank you for the feedback; your comment about Amazon was very validating. The pricing model and payment mode (Gumroad) encapsulate and foreshadow a lot about what Ptrfy is focusing on. At $12, we're clearly not going to "Make Everything Digital For All Book Lovers" (1dollarscan's slogan), but we do want to make buying eTextbooks more simple, affordable, and social for those who need them the most, such as college students and technical professionals. We will be experimenting with different formats in the future, but I wouldn't hold my breath, especially if it meant we would have to compete against Amazon. I'll have to think more about how much of a priority offerring PDF-to-X conversions for past customers is, so good question. PDFs are well-suited for use on desktop OSes, which is where many if not most technical professionals and students do their eTextbook reading. Nonetheless, iPads and Android tablets handle PDFs well enough, but rarely do I read technical literature other than mathematics on my iPad, because tablets are much better suited for casual mathematics notes.
If you want to be even more clever (imo) try out iodine[1]

[1]http://code.kryo.se/iodine/
I've never understood this. Since on the hardware level it's exactly 2x, so one pixel becomes 4 pixels.

Why on earth would it look blurry? There is no interpolated upscaling needed.
I love your linked article because it addresses the intangibles of imparting the mental model of the code. Many times this is the delay when a new developer comes into an existing code base. While scripts and cloud tools can reduce or eliminate the configuration overhead, the programmer still needs to understand what the actual code is doing.

The last company I worked for had this problem initially. There were multiple layers of software that needed to be built and configured just so. If there was a problem with your build, it would take an hour to get and build everything from scratch if things went without a hitch. They often didn't.

This changed once we started using a build server and automated builds. This made a complete build script necessary. The benefit was that script could be used to both spin up a new dev environment (except for installing IDE and local database servers), and syncing the dev machine. Every morning I would run this script and let it chug along while I went to my standup and/or read my morning email.

I think an automatic configuration script combined with the pair programming idea, even if the programmers are paired for a day, would greatly speed up the new dev up the learning curve and allow them to be productive faster.
"Ask HN" means no links, no images, no formatting. Good for a quick question, bad for exposition.

I think the "Discuss this on Hacker News" phenomenon reflects that while HN is a great community and discussion forum, it's a terrible publishing medium. Probably by design.
So, if I bought your service for my company, would it be running across my data network?What would happen to my "phone system" if my connection to the internet were to go down?
Anybody willing to share which unusual TLDs are reasonably reliable?
Is this some sort of extreme cognitive dissonance?

Why can't people just accept that Facebook is a fad?

It does not mean the world is going to end. It's a fad, not a solid company. We went through this before 12 years ago. Eventually the market figures it out. Move on. That's what Thiel is doing.

More fads are around the corner. Investors will keep falling for the same old tricks.

Gates and Ellison are very poor comparisons. Their software was not web-based (=ad-based), their main market was the enterprise and they went to great lengths to create long-term customer lock-in. They began in a different era, and are nothing like Facebook, which is a photo-sharing website that relies on display ads and game-playing "whales" to make money.
There really is no Seed Stage bubble because there is no market mechanism that will force a "correction".

First, if you add up all the seed investments happening in tech and assume that 100% fail, the money lost would be the equivalent to a few medium to large'ish VC funds failing. It's not a huge deal in terms of $.

But 100% failing is not going to happen. So there will be stories of some angel or seed investor making a killer return on a deal and that brings more people into the market trying to emulate that. So even though some angels/seed investors will get totally washed out and stop making investments, there will be a new supply coming in. The "corrections" will be mini-corrections, i.e. people stopping angel or seed investing cuz they didn't make money.

But there will always be someone new who fancies themselves as a "smarter picker" of companies and who will continue to make these investments.

The only thing IMO that could trigger a correction would be if all the prominent seed & angel investors came out and said they're stopping making investments. That would change the supply/demand characteristics as well as the overall sentiment towards these deals, but that is not going to happen because each thinks they are smarter than the other, has better proprietary dealflow, is more disciplined, etc.

We're seeing (my company sells data to investors) lots of people try to set up Seed VC funds these days ($25 to $100M) so this appears to just be getting started to be honest.
Details of Morotola Mobility(Google) patent lawsuit
Small suggestion: On the "Pricing & Sign-Up" page maybe emphasize free by making it all caps of bold.
>Forever free
For some reason this feels weird to me. Maybe switch it up to make it "FREE Forever".
It's neither bandwidth nor latency that I would be most concerned about (though I agree they are a problem) but the other point he raises:

> ... the amount of data included in their plans before insane pricing kicks in is frequently still measured in megabytes.

Mobile data plans are a joke in my country[1].

1. http://blog.binarybalance.com.au/2012/05/12/internet-anemia-...
10 Online Security Tips for Gen Y
EnglishCentral: improve speaking English online
I understand you need to be picky as an employer, and I still can't comprehend the crap you as an employer receive when advertising jobs and I certainly don't envy you having to go through it.

But I'm not sure you should assume a candidate who changed jobs every 1-2 years will continue doing so indefinately, especially if they have only had 2 or 3 jobs. Personal circumstances change and peoples appetite for risk generally decreases with age (and experience) especially once they pick up partners and children along their life journey. Intuitively it feels like a very bad metric for gauging if they are a longer term employee.

If you have high staff turnover the larger factor may be an environment which drives them out. Though admitedly, if you have a say on hiring and don't have a say on the employees working environment then I guess you have few options.
جلبريك 5.1.1
This is good to read. I am one of the people you alude to who come up with countless ideas, start any number of proejcts, but never get through to shipping anything at all.

I think this sentiment will help me to Just Do It™
Manchester has a half-decent startup scene. It's cheap, big, vibrant, and two hours from London so you could go to see clients in a day. Free WiFi everywhere I've had a cup of tea in.
Sure. It's at least as stable as Montenegro, a country that has only been independent for 6 years, in the least stable corner of Europe.
Who hired the Bs?
I know the subject is about brewing, but I have to agree. Loving the Rancilio.
I see facebooks problem right now more as an inability to effective monetize their users, rather than at risk of a large set exodus any time soon. Facebook is very ingrained in what so many people and businesses do now unlike any other web service has been. You see Facebook branding on most businesses ads and physical locations.

Of course it is possible to overcome these network effects but I think that if they are smart enough they can keep it going. Then it just becomes a question of what valuation they can sustain without being so invasive as to completely alienate their userbase.

On an anecdotal level I have seen people try things like Path, Instagram, the location based networks etc. Most when the mental overhead of all the social networks get to much eventually just mainly settle back on Facebook (with Twitter being the only real exception)
Two cases:

1. You work for a tech company which produces a tech product (e.g., Google, Microsoft)

2. You work as a tech person in a business company (e.g., bank, insurance)

This article fully applies to #1 where the core competency is technology. For #2, there's debate.
This is really cool. Does anyone know if there's something like this for making Bobbleheads? Most of the Bobblehead services I know require you to send them photos, etc.