skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In my somewhat anecdotal exposure to salary data over the years, it seems the best thing for straight cash is to specialize in moderately out-of-date technologies. Big, stable companies with lots of money need people to fix and maintain their legacy systems and the ranks of skilled/interested/breathing tend to thin out faster than the demand declines.

At some level of leadership it seems to me that having broad experience is better, but in my experience first-level leadership roles usually go to specialists and second-level roles to go first-level leads etc.
Start by moving to weekly billing.
It looks like it's getting real close. You can track progress here: https://github.com/twitter/bootstrap/pull/6342
Does "unemployed" qualify as "underpaid" ? I have to essentially work a few hours each day for free, just to not rust and to have some portfolio to show. If you let yourself be lax (i.e. don't work in the same hours you would if you were paid), it starts snowballing. Being unemployed and actively seeking a job is a tough job.
The right thing to do would be to grandfather those users and move them off the plan by trying to upsell them in someway. This is an okay solution, but I'm still tainted by the thought of arbitrarily changing terms instead of grandfathering everyone.
What's launching next? Upcoming startup aggregator
You should be scared... what's with the hardcoded login info exposed on github?

https://github.com/Machtap/_ctv/blob/master/_www/model/commo...
I think a lot of people would argue that composability is what "functional" code is really interested and many of the other things that are normally associated with it are actually side-effects of the emphasis on composition.
Ask HN: Any good reason for HEAD and BODY tags in HTML?
I'm working on an HTML template language and it seems like the HEAD and BODY tags are just noise.

The element types in head are invisible--title, meta, link, script--so should I skip the extra head indentation level?

This is probably a dumb question, in fact I think the spec makes them optional, but curious if there's a good reason to keep them around.
Dude, you don't ask for a raise. You need to know your worth and go grab it. Either at the current company, or elsewhere.
@nijiko,

Your posts are appearing as [dead].

nijiko 3 hours ago | link [dead]

Hello! I am the author of this, never expected to see it here! I was extremely surprised when my friend mentioned it was on here and Hacker News wouldn't let me comment.
If anyone has questions or any feedback let me know as it is a work in progress! Thank you for all the kind words!
And this is why I've expanded my horizons beyond Southern Ontario. Our cost of living may be lower, but it's not that much lower to justify this difference in salary.
According to wikipedia: "The core CPI index excludes goods with high price volatility, such as food and energy. This measure of core inflation systematically excludes food and energy prices because, historically, they have been highly volatile and non-systemic. More specifically, food and energy prices are widely thought to be subject to large changes that often fail to persist and do not represent relative price changes."

The Core CPI is used to calculate "Core Inflation," which is the main thing that the Federal Reserve tries to monitor.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_inflation. So although there are alternative CPIs which do include food and energy prices, they are not as important to the people making monetary policy in the United States.

I'm not really sure what you're trying to show with that graph of deflation probabilities. If I'm reading it right, the probability of deflation through 2017 is currently 0%. Since the year is currently 2013, the "probability of deflation between 2008 and 2012" is also 0%, since I just lived through those years, and... it didn't happen.

The reason why people were buying treasury bonds in 2008-2012 is because the rest of the economy was imploding and they wanted a safe port in the storm. I lived through those years and so did you. You ought to know this already.

I don't really know what else to say. If you think it's a good idea to buy a bunch of treasury bonds with super-low interest rates in 2013, knock yourself out! I think anyone with an ounce of sense can see that our government is going to inflate away its debts over the next few years. In the meantime, you'll be helping to keep USGov in the black, so... thanks, I guess.
In my experience a MSc often pays more, but a PhD sometimes pays less--some people equate a PhD with someone who prefers theory to shipping code.

Personally I value work experience, solid demonstrable code (ie, what you've posted on Github), and a good attitude above degrees.
Twitter Just Became Every Mobile App’s Best Friend
Google Glass, meet ‘Baidu Eye’
Mobile app deep-linking and new Cards
The startup options game is a funny one.

It's fairly unlikely the startup you're in is really going to explode. I mean sure it happens and if you're holding a big pile of options when you hit a billion dollar IPO, that is going to be a good day for you.

For most startups though, you get a fraction of a percent of a common or option pool which will perhaps accrue some value later on if the company doesn't fail utterly.

So before you count any options as money in the bank, you need to know a whole bunch of stuff (and I am totally an amateur at this but I've done startup rides once or twice. I am, shockingly, not filthy rich from my piles of options.)

1) What percent of what pool do you have options to?
The number of options you have is irrelevant, since the size of the pool is a number which is more-or-less randomly chosen when the company is founded. 5000 options sounds like a lot until you find out the option pool has 25 million shares and is 10% of the company.
2) The strike price of the option, that is what your option will cost to buy after it vests. Having 10,000 options to buy at $5/option is not really that great if they're only worth $3.

3) Remember your options can be diluted at basically any time. The company runs out of option pool and wants to grant some to new employees? That'll dilute your options. Or if the company raises more investment. Etc. The answer to point 1 and 2 is changing all the time (well, hopefully not that often!)

4) Since options are common stock, they're paid out last. Investors (usually) get preferred stock. So for example, investors hold $50 million worth of preferred stock and the company sells for $51 million. The investors take their cut first, and people holding common stock get paid out of the remaining $1 million.

Anyway, just a random option rant. Probably inaccurate in all sorts of ways. All that said, I do love doing the startup thing. It's just so much fun! I aim for that, rather than some possible future value my options my get me.
What if you've been doing software development, by all rights, since you were 10--it's in your bones and blood, as much as the feeling of wanting to be an entrepreneur is--but you would also like some fuck-you money anyway?

Is the answer, perhaps, "start a SaaS financial services firm"? ;)
I make significantly less than $100k in San Francisco and net significantly more than $4200 a month. I don't have a retirement plan, but I doubt that would be enough to cover the difference.
It might be a simple solution, but that doesn't make it a good solution. The number of unintended consequences will be enormous.

For example: Will you tax diesel as well? If not, then people will switch to that, with poor results for our air quality.

If yes, then suddenly every since thing you buy will be more expensive, since it's all shipped.

And those are just the first two things that popped into mind - there will be a LOT more consequences.
The utility of Bitcoin doesn't change even if its value drops close to zero, unless you can't buy anymore Bitcoin to facilitate your trade, in which case the price of Bitcoin will go up because of more demand. It can't fail while there is demand for virtual trade on the Internet.
I'm confused about what we're talking about now. My definition of meritocracy has no moral content either.

I'm not saying meritocracy is the same as natural selection. Meritocracy is the system which aligns itself with natural selection. Merit is assigned by humans, and if assigned perfectly well it should align with natural selection. However, humans are error prone and therefore can never create a completely meritocratic society so meritocracy will never be on the same plane as natural selection.

I guess you can say meritocracy is natural selection emulated by humans. However the universe ultimately forces the selection by merit (perfectly, as whatever the universe chooses is fair) and the humanly chosen merit is gauged by how accurately it aligns with it.
How the Internet has radically changed Sci-Fi movies
Title should be renamed to reflect that revenue is $127.7mm, thought this was going to be an article decrying the crazy valuations some tech companies get.
I oppose Bitcoin for the same reason I oppose money not based on gold or other valuable physical resource. It lets one entity to produce money out of nowhere, at the drop of a hat.

There used to be a video in higher quality, but this will have to do. Hans Hermann Hoppe gives a concise, high-level explanation of money:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gizetn5VuA0
I avoid reading all patents for this reason, even ones that are linked to by HN for being absurd.
Do this!
Whoops! Unfortunate typo. Hopefully a mod will fix
As someone who lives in Seattle, where housing prices are getting pretty ridiculous, the running joke is "at least we're not San Francisco"

I love the bay area, but you're right, it's pretty deceptive to look at a dev salary in SF at 100k and compare it to a dev's salary in the rust belt.
http://blogs.jetbrains.com/idea/2010/04/native-file-system-w...
There is a hard limit to the amount of Bitcoins however.
Survey reveals UK 'now has seven social classes'
Because next year's smartphone will be too large to fit in your pocket, and will make you look like this:

http://www.mp4nation.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/Ano...
I'm 4 months into my first year out of school, and I'm making $75k same area. just for comparison. but my plan is to start a side project and eventually run my own business anyway.
I just added the m subconsciously.
Ask HN: 5 years later, how would you change YCombinator.com/ideas.html?
Not sure if this has been discussed before, but: "Startup Ideas We'd Like to Fund" at http://ycombinator.com/ideas.html is almost 5 years old. Surely the world has changed -- HN, what would you add, what would you remove from the list?
I'm thinking about reserving, but it seems a bit too expensive given all the unknowns. Want to test drive one though.
That's true. I should have wrote "continue to improve".
Having used it, I know the debugger works. I didn't get into the more complicated stuff much.
Sure, but in that case you've decided to take a path that is less likely to get you "fuck you money," which means you must have overriding goals. This is assuming you are making rational, informed career decisions.
I can't seem to get the chat example to work on OS X. Does anyone know if it's limited to working on Linux?

[Edit] I was using nc 127.0.0.1 so I'm not sure if netcat can't communicate with lo. Also tried SSHing into a Linux box I own, now I get "Connection refused" on the client side (OS X).

[Edit Again] UDP works fine!

Server: nc -ul -p <Port>
Client: nc -u <IP> <Port>
One thing this forgets to mention is that you can't compare freelance and employee direct like that.

First you have to consider taxes, as a contractor they don't cover half your social security, so about 7%. Next you have to consider healthcare, varies but often 4% or more. Stock options and 401k can add 10% if you are at the right place. 3 weeks vacation is another 6%. So benefits are about 25% of your paycheck (this sounds low to me...)

Stability is a huge deal on both ends, knowing I don't have to pay you forever lets me pay you more and knowing you have a job to come back to means you will accept less. Assuming 10% each way you get to a 50% swing ignoring skills completely.

Given that he quotes developers getting 100% more as a huge deal, and half of that is just from freelancing, it isn't quite as a big deal as he makes it IMO.
Wow....this is not what I expected, but it is surprisingly clever.

I accidentally bought it - and immediately thought....oh crap, I am going to regret it.

But...after seeing the clever use of the top menu, I don't.

Good job!
I use Qt Creator and Visual Studio 2010 on the same medium size code base and Qt Creator has a much faster UI.

I find that compilation in Qt Creator is possibly slower if you are on windows (using mingw) but on Linux its around 10 times faster (through the use of ccache and make -g4).
Yes, you probably are underpaid, but not by the delta you'd assume based on the original post.

Both of the sources cited are talent agencies. Talent agencies make their fee based on the signing salary of their candidates. It's in their interest to drive the market value higher, even if with speculation.

On the other end, I'm on the hiring side, so it's obviously in my interest to try and keep those numbers down. I also know I can't hire if I can't pay a competitive salary (among other things), so I need to accept the data when it's there.

Both of these surveys [1][2] fail to provide any meaningful data to support their results and I'm struggling to rationalize how these can be accurate averages. I've been hired and hired others in Portland, Minneapolis, San Antonio and Chicago. From what we've hired at, what people have been hired away from us for, what friends are making, what friends at other companies are hiring at, I just don't buy it.

I get it. I'm making an argument that they don't provide data and I'm waging my argument on anecdotal evidence. I think these reports are useful for demonstrating where demand is, but I'd caution people from walking into their manager's office (or an interview) and citing this as supporting evidence.

...namely because these two reports are featured on a blog that "is teaching freelancers and consultants how to build a sustainable and high income business." Freelancers are taxed differently, pay their own benefits, and have a completely different set of expenses.

[1] https://grouptalent.com/blog/how-much-developers-make-per-ci...
[2] http://rivierapartners.com/2013/02/12/2012-engineering-salar...
Oh, another tip, discuss salary with your co-workers, only good can come out of it.

I feel this doesn't apply if you make more than them for the same position because you negotiated better.
Spectacular night city by HTML5 webgl
Asking for telecommuting, equity, and time to work on other projects is ridiculous.
I've gotten these requests from developers who have only done basic Rails projects.

Do you think you deserve a better quality of life than say, a teacher? a doctor?
I fail to see how even comparing yourself to them is not entitlement, especially if you're not a CS major.

The whole productivity bit is crap, I've been on that side and I know it.
You may be more productive, but for very selfish reasons. The business is not more productive, and you isolate yourself from everyone else.

Businesses don't generally fail because of bad tech, they fail because they're not nimble enough to adapt and test ideas quickly.
H-1B holders can transfer jobs even after applying for permanent residency. American Competitiveness in the 21st Century Act allows for this specifically. There are provisions:

New Employment must be the "same or similar" classification
Form I-140 has been approved or is approvable when filed with I-485
Form I-485 has been pending for at least 180 days

The employee needs to file a Form I-129 and will need to provide their new employer their original I-94, passport, and Form I-129 filing receipt to properly document work authorization.

Most HR departments fuck this up and many immigration attorneys fuck this up but it's completely possible.
Programming Games in C
> With your fat bank account, you can start a new, independent company.

It takes years to build a great company.
Running a great company was better than having the potential to start a new one.
Amit at Forbes has been covering startups in Michigan quite a bit - awesome to see.
If US average spending on gas is $368 per person per month, that's 100 gallons of gas per month, or 1200 gallons a year. Typical car these days gets 30 mpg, so that's 36,000 miles a year. Even if driving a gas guzzling SUV that gets only 19mpg, that's 22,800 miles a year.

Yet according to the US DOT Federal Highway Administration, the average annual miles driven is 12,334 per year.

So the $368 that CNN claims is a lie.

Except it was per two adult/two car household, and taken at a point in 2011 when gas prices were at $3.98 a gallon.

Here's more recent numbers.

http://dailycaller.com/2013/02/05/report-u-s-households-spen...

"The Energy Information Administration reported that the average household spent $2,912 on gasoline in 2012."

Note that the 2012 number is a secondary high record (2008 held the record), and uses the actual final numbers for the full year, rather than a CNN number that cherry picked a momentary peak and extrapolated to the whole year and then never published a follow through with the actual numbers. Typical CNN! Not reliable to cite.

Anyway that's around $1500 a year per adult/car, or a bit over $100 a month. $1500 buys 408 gallons of gas, which gets you 12,240 miles at 30 mpg. Now these numbers make sense because they match what we actually know about how far people drive.
thats a really really durable robust company profile. Congrats to them.
Unless you've swapped CapsLock for Esc. Then it's easy as pie. In ~/.Xmodmap:

! Swap Caps Lock with Esc
remove Lock = Caps_Lock
keysym Escape = Caps_Lock
keysym Caps_Lock = Escape
add Lock = Caps_Lock
> Ten times out of ten, he'd take his buyout over again.

How do you know that?
> Your peacock with the giant butt-feathers from the other post is not meritorious but lucky that the butt-feather-eating predator hasn't shown up yet.

I never said it was meritorious. In fact, I'm saying the opposite. It's probably going to die off because it doesn't deserve to live, assuming giant butt feathers have no real purpose.

> And your peahen that chooses to mate with the peacock with the giant butt-feathers, rather than the one that can fight off predators, is stupid.

Exactly. The stupid, useless, inane, will die off and be selected out of existence eventually.

> Take a look around and you'll see the universe is not ruled by meritocracy but by (often self-perpetuating) stupidity.

If this were true, society would be going backwards. This is not true though. Evolution was my example because of this. The more deserving to live will always have more probability of living, otherwise evolution wouldn't work. Sure stupidity exists, but only because a perfectly meritocratic society is quixotic. The universe is non-determistic, which means even if humans could be perfectly meritocratic, it wouldn't be perfectly meritocratic. And if the stupid around you seem to have more probability of perpetuating... then perhaps you should redefine who and what is stupid?
Well then you'll be happy to hear that Bitcoin does NOT allow one entity to produce money out of nowhere.
Of course not. That's why you put in the contract that you can raise prices with 30 days' notice.
Employment stability is actually a myth, especially these days.
I posted this above but that's not true at all. If you can find another employer to hire you at a competitive wage with a similar job classification you are free to transfer your H-1B. H-1B holders can even transfer jobs after applying for permanent residency if they follow a few basic guidelines thanks to AC21.
I applied for one of these positions a few weeks ago. I got a generic "we'll let you know after we look at your stuff!" email in response, then nothing.

So the site looks nice, love the videos and whatnot, but more transparency after submitting your info would be nice.

I also see that the job I applied for is months old, so maybe it's not actually open.
"Go Ive!"

It's almost as if no other mobile ecosystem has tried, or indeed is using, a flat UI.

But I'm sure this will be lauded as a brave, revolutionary step by many in the Apple world.
Interesting PR spin...

"...the new course called Wiki Scholar, designed by psychology professor Steve Joordens, who believes that by learning to write and rewrite research until it makes sense to the wider Wiki world, students are forced to grasp ideas more deeply — and produce research that is useful..."

http://www.thestar.com/yourtoronto/education/2012/07/23/wiki...

"Cognitive psychologist Steve Joordens, from the University of Toronto Scarborough in Canada, believes the APSWI provides students with effective practice for solving real-world problems. 'You can do it in any class,' he said. 'It’s really a good thing to enhance deep learning skills and another tool we can use to keep our students in the mental gym.'"

http://dev.psychologicalscience.org/index.php/publications/o...

"Using Wikipedia in a Mega Classroom: A 1,700 Student Case Study

Steve Joordens, University of Toronto Scarborough, Canada

Students in our Introductory Psychology mega-class could earn bonus marks by signing up to the APS Wikipedia Initiative and making minor edits to two psychology-related Wikipedia entries. We describe our implementation of such a large scale assignment and report data depicting the rate of participation, the quality of the edits, and the larger impact on both students and Wikipedia Psychology content. We also highlight some of the difficulties we initially encountered and our attempts to minimize them in efforts to hone the 'many small edits' approach to answering the APS Wikipedia Initiative."

http://www.psychologicalscience.org/index.php/members/2012-w...
The existing businesses were nurtured and optimized reasonably well. I was lamenting the loss of the creative spirit that generated those two businesses in the first place -- the larger, more valuable core of the company.
Yes the definition is continuously changing.

A meritocratic society must still constantly issue its merit accordingly though.
I just spoke with a friend about a time when his company was approached by a patent troll.

The patent in question was granted in 2002 [1]. He had himself worked on the technology under "patent" in 1998, and was able to find someone who had published material as far back as 1995, and who was willing to send supporting documentation and to, if necessary, testify.

He talked with his attorney, who agreed the prior art he'd found was spot on, and that in legislation they'd be almost certain to win. But that it would cost ~$3m.

The patent trolls also were going after names such as Amazon, Facebook, and other huge companies. The troll was asking for $200k for a license from each company. As far as my friend knows, they ALL settled (or at least many of them had).

There were 15-20 names on that list. If they'd simply put the $200k-$300k of "licensing fees" into a common pot and used that money to fight the troll, then it would have done a small amount of good in defeating one troll's patent.

But really the whole system does need serious reform. His suggestion was to cause the patent trolls to have to PAY for legal fees if they lose a patent challenge, though that would just encourage them to sue from individual corporations that would declare bankruptcy on losing.

But I think software patents should simply be disallowed, or the bar raised (somehow?) to exclude anything vague and hand-wavy. One thought I've had was to require an implementation of the process being patented. Then it would be far harder to claim that your patent covers something only vaguely related, and the patent would actually be useful for its original purpose, which was to put the knowledge into the public domain when the patent expires.

[1] I wouldn't swear to the dates; they're from memory. The approximate order/scale is correct, though.