skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The difference here is that a software engineering job at Google is widely considered one of the best corporate software engineering jobs in the world. There are thousands who'd love to be in her place; as she notes, the external pressure to like your job at Google is tremendous.

That she had the courage to uproot her entire life, despite the pressure, is impressive.

(Granted, you could replace "engineer at Google" with "position X at a top company in field.")

Edit: As noted below, Elle wasn't a software engineer at Google, but an account manager in the media/marketing department. The point stands, I think.
Yes. That's definitely middle class. Especially living in an expensive area like San Francisco.
Ah, Rule 34, by our own cstross: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_34_%28novel%29
The title is "Why I left Google". You should expect a discussion of self.
See the same problem in Austin, Texas. People that have lived here forever (justifiably) aren't thrilled with the fact that rent has gone way up as a result of the city's boom. But the very same people actively oppose the construction of new housing.

I really don't think people understand that if the demand increases, the way to keep the cost form increasing as much is to increase the supply.
Absolutely Mac. I'm a front-end developer previously use windows laptop and I'm satsified enough using Mac. If you need windows you can install windows on Mac too, yes?
Ummm...also because they like to get toasted.

I think this plan is discriminatory.

"under my proposal, only adults age 21 and over would be allowed to possess up to one ounce of marijuana"

Why shouldn't 18-20 year olds have the right to blaze up? Those are the prime toking years.
If you haven't even finished college then you don't have enough data to work from. Keep listening to the voice, but be prepared to be confused a lot in your 20s. That's normal.
The technology may be great, but at the end of the day, you're still working for a company whose main business is selling ad space. Definitely not a surprise that many people find this less than fulfilling. The amazing thing is that Google has managed to sell an employment experience whose most outstanding feature is creature comforts to a host of smart people.
Reading this makes my brain feel greasy and dirty. It's not that I think he's wrong, it's that I feel myself believing what he says without him presenting much in the way of evidence. It's disconcerting.
Ask HN: What should I do? Leave or stay?
I'm a guy 24 years old and also a freelance front-end developer. Beside doing my freelance work I also work in small design studio that I found with my friends. Now the design studio is growing, got more income monthly (from contract with a client with NDA project) make us think again to hire some people who want to join with us and spread our wings to make products or get new clients.

Now we have 3 new guys joined with us. We will make an app with beautiful design and I'm happy when I saw the design that made by them. But the problem is me. I began uncomfortable work with them when we decided to recruit more people. I don't uncomfortable with the new guys, I enjoyed work with them. I don't know exactly where is the problem that make me feel perforce to do my work. I just feel uncomfortable to work with them anymore, sometimes we have different opinions and I always give in.

Now I also do collaboration with other developer to make our passive income solution (making theme). When we are chatting or talking while doing our collaboration, I feel we have same opinion about everything. That's one of my reason why I want to leave my current team, even though I don't know he want to join with me to make a new team or not. The other reason are I want to be more famous, collaboration with other people who have same direction with me, share freebies and share everything from my head without any wall that can stop me.

When I decide to leave my current team (design studio) so I choose to be a freelancer again and leave my monthly income (it makes me doubt to leave, but maybe I have to). I have a wish to make a small team with just 3 guys who have same direction like a guy who collaborate with me now.

Because of that problem I want to ask HN what should I do with my current condition?

Many thanks.
Portland treats the homeless well and its definitely not due to fabulous wealth.

The homeless are not who we should focus on when talking about wealth inequality. Even though it makes a good visual, there are too many other factors at play such as mental illness.

It's the working poor and the rich that are the true divide.
Well, since this seems to be really more of a personal meditation on what is effectively aimlessness in life amidst a world of endless career building, I don't think the focus on herself is unjustified here. This wasn't really about Google, even though the name featured prominently in the article.
Yeah, for somebody so bright and talented (she can't help mentioning her spotless cursus honorum), her writing is incredibly dull.

I expected useful insights in what Google was doing wrong, losing such acclaimed talent, but... nothing. It's all about her wanting to fuck up for once, after a life of unmitigated success. I guess this means Google is actually doing something right by losing her, lest she fucks up the company just because.
Perhaps they will all be incredibly conservative and religious. It's a cheap trick to claim that your own view is the view of the future.
Every neighborhood in the U.S. mapped along racial lines
"The large ball crashed right through the table because it was made of Styrofoam. What was made of Styrofoam? (The alternative formulation replaces Stryrofoam with steel.)
a) The large ball
b) The table"

And a very large styrofoam ball can crash a comparatively small table made of wood, all depends on relative definition of 'large' right?

I think the problem is that everybody can pick his favorite feature and define it as the key of 'general intelligence'. Some say Anaphora, some say machine learning; I like Hofstaedter he says that it is all about analogy. http://www.amazon.com/Surfaces-Essences-Analogy-Fuel-Thinkin...

Also: The problem is that these statements can't be proven; it is all about opinions and dogmas; I think the argument is s question of power: the one who wins the argument has the power over huge DARPA funds, or whoever else gives out grants for this type of research. The run after defining problems (expert systems, big data) in AI might have something to do with the funding problem.

The 'Society of Mind' argument says that there are many agents that together somehow miraculously create intelligence. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Society_of_Mind
This argument sounds good, but it makes it hard to search for general patterns/universal explanations of intelligence.

On the one hand they have to focus on some real solvable problem, on the other hand that makes it very hard to ask and find answers to general questions; I don't know if there will be some solution to this dilemma.
No, a lossy algorithm can be idempotent, and in fact any optimal encoder is necessarily idempotent (because there is no need to further degrade an already compressed image). While it's true that most encoders are not actually optimal and often add noise when re-encoding, it's not a theoretical necessity.

The correct mathematical term for "lossy" is "non-surjective": at a given encoding setting, not all inputs can be represented.
What happens when life doesn’t go exactly as planned
but why did she leave? what is the reason?
But the reward is so great that we can't dismiss the possibility of finding the special wings that are appropriate for that priceless plane.

Think about it: we dont' just get very cheap labor working 24/7 without moral issues or personal needs. We can also make the robots take our jobs very efficiently, and technological progress will be unstoppable (particularly if they can improve themselves). It's the essence of singularity.
Lego Wants You to Unleash Your Inner Modernist
Trusted Root Certificate in Java
I'm with you. The occasional building is fine, but this business with whole neighborhoods gets out of hand. The landmark commission recently created a landmark district in the east village. The east village is an ugly neighborhood of undistinguished walk up buildings. It's no historic Penn Station, that's for sure.

The justification was that it was historically important because generations of immigrants had moved through the area. Generations of immigrants had moved through the area, because at the time it was built it was high density housing, and so was affordable. So to honor that history we are going to keep in as a museum that no one can afford to live in. Brilliant!
OP is not a software engineer, she worked in media/marketing department

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tBZRzn1Mci8
oh... yeah... way to too verbose. hardcore engineers love to be precise and to the point.
"Look for the color thumbnails. They identify the completed animations. Use the prev and next links (above right) to browse the thumbnail pages"

http://507movements.com/mm_140.html
Engineers average less than 6 figures in a major city like Chicago?
The Amazon link in the article has an affiliate tag, if that matters to you.

What should matter more is that the price on Amazon, via resellers, is more than the price via the Lego online store.

Now, I think this is really sweet, but not so sweet I am going to shell out US$150.

But still sweet.
Agreed. Getting to 'the top' corporate job in your particular field, is quite the achievement.

Finding yourself in that position ... realizing it's not what you want out of life. Then taking the leap of faith, to turn your entire life upside in an attempt to find the fulfillment you're looking for takes a lot of courage.

I tip my hat to her.
That's a silly argument. She's not looking to maliciously screw something up. She's looking to take a risk—to make a decision that, for once, doesn't lead her down the "safe" path to success of good grades, good college, good internship, good job.
These are the years it's most likely to tip certain folks over the precipice into mental illness. A tiny minority are at risk, but those are the years.
Ugh, they handled his disclosure like such typical dismissive nerds. Disgraceful.
Probably because 21 is the minimum age for buying alcohol, too (I think).
It's wayyyyyyy too high in orbit to get up there, past the moon. Not even remotely worth it.

They are doing the same thing with the Webb.
There are two approaches to solving political problems. Make incremental improvements where you can; or let things get so horrible that whatever you are opposed to collapses. The latter typically has far worse side effects.
That is so strongly implied as to be pretty much obvious though.
> An actual bomb is beyond the capability of anybody but a nation-state.

And so one danger is that the material makes its way to such a nation state.

> I have to wonder if (a) this info was declassified to support justifications for the NSA

And there's one of the dangers of running a program that supposedly[0] depends on utter secrecy, requiring the government to outright lie about it: the inevitable leak exposes the government as liers, further eroding trust in government.

[0] I say "supposedly" because I think the main danger to the programs from exposure is knowledge that what they're doing is illegal or reprehensible. The programs are now exposed, and I assume they're going full bore, producing exactly the same results as they did pre-Snowden.
More qualified people will correct me, but I think there is more to it than dropping a piece of fissile material over another. I think the trick is to keep the pieces together long enough before the forces of explosion rips them apart.

As far as I know there have been several examples of accidents were scientists did actually drop a fissile blob over another, and the material did go critical, but thankfully the scientist(s) involved were fast enough to separate the pieces so that no catastrophes ensued. They themselves died as a result of exposure to radiation. As I said, more qualified people will be able to fill in the details and citations.
I expected a discussion of Google, personally.
That's part of the problem, living an authentic life is an entirely internal process. People end up paying attention to the external things of what this "seems" to mean, and how people got there.

But an authentic life is doing things that accomplish your values in life. A lot of living like this is wanting to communicate in a clear and "authentic" way so you end up with little communities of this stuff.

As for your problem - the problem is you don't really know what your values are in life. You are letting external requirements drive what you are doing, and you aren't thinking strategically, or agent-y.

I'd suggest checking out the book "Focusing". You will be able to help yourself a lot better after you learn how to what the book describes. Also consider http://rationality.org as well
Corporations are already paying taxes pretty much the world over, for a very long time now. Why characterize this normal, standard, nearly universal policy as "incestuous and tense"? Why is this "seizing" and not just normal tax paying?
It is not good to have this story come up for the rest of your life whenever someone googles your name...
- I say that you should stay and work out your differences. Why do you feel uncomfortable?
How to Be a Great Host
Good call—thanks!
There is risk involved, but you could be a trader. Lots of successful algorithm traders are one person shops that are later bought by banking firms like Goldman Sachs. I'd trade forex because it's simple. Two simple strategies are trading at ema crossovers and arbitrage. As a programmer, you have power to play with data and build automated trading systems (bot or assisted trading). I recall from a book on stock/futures trading that around 70% lose money, 20% stay the same, and 10% make money. Also, 10% is the average annual return rate of the stock market, but you also need to calculate taxes. This thread is a great resource on exploiting bitcoin trading, which is applicable to forex in general. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=60501.0
I moved to SF from Boston. The taxes in California are sky-high compared to most other states. Yet the environment (other than the weather, that is) is significantly worse. One has to wonder where all the public money is going.
Lots of great advice here - as someone looking to apply to YC in the future, I took away a lot from this.
You talk about this like if it was easy. I don't think it is. For a single person which choose to resign from his / her benefits to pursue a distant dream, how many will not have this courage ?

Of course we're on hn, so there is here a lot more people prepared to this than anywere else but still. I like this kind of post, which reminds us that we should be able to focus on what really motivates us.

Of course I'm still pretty young, it could seems obvious to you or others, but if it's in frontpage I assume that I'm not the only one inspired by these posts.
We've all read and re-read all the reasons why corporate work can be unfulfilling. In my opinion this short essay wasn't about that, it was about the personal implications of this unfulfillment. Lacking confidence in social interactions, feeling the overburdening need to belong, the realization that it gets harder to steer your life as you age, and the strong will required to turn the wheel.
If they did legalize it, what would happen to the thousands sitting in jail / probation for pot offenses. Oh were sry, it's ok now?
Didn't catch that, it was a quick hack of an edit, thanks.
A Sucker Born Every Semester
Writing is cathartic, of course, but I also didn't walk away with any better understanding of why she specifically quit her job at Google (or her college boyfriend, for that matter). I can read between the lines that Google has become a place that's finally lost that nebulous feeling of individual fulfillment. That I could easily imagine, but the article is really about "finding herself" and not really about Google.
> As she works to reverse the fortunes of a failing Silicon Valley giant, Yahoo’s Marissa Mayer has fueled a national debate about the office life, motherhood, and what it takes to be the CEO of the moment.

Why should she be at all relevant to such a debate? She's a unicorn compared to the rest of society, as is every other CEO of a billion dollar company on the planet. She has her problems, and they are superficially our problems, but the solutions available to her may as well be extraterrestrial for the rest of us.

Congratulations on her success.
Heh, you missed the drama of the whole "fair share" taxes debate that Google, Apple, and others are embroiled in both in the UK and the US? How about the Amazon sales tax debate?

Corporations do pay taxes, governments around the world are girding themselves to demand they pay even more taxes. That was the 'tenseness' of which I spoke.
Love his commit to Rails master: https://github.com/rails/rails/commit/b83965785db1eec019edf1...
DDK
Using DDG, and it is the best thing out there since Wikipedia and pre-privacy invading Google on the internet. Great work! I am just worried about two things. I think if you don't get a buy out offer you can't refuse, then this is going to be a big success story. But I wonder if you will get big pressure to sell. The other issue is if you start getting a lot of traffic, others will find ways to shut you out, so you'll have to get your own indexing. Third is what if the NSA "demands" they get real time data from you so as to prevent you from really making our searches private. They might just do that if they haven't already, and with all the gag orders would you pull the plug like silent circle or what?
I left Salesforce.com last year with very similar feelings.

In other words, it's called being a twenty-something.
That's for damn sure!

I still get a chuckle at how the former Mars Bar's upstairs residents got such a sweet deal got their fancy new apartments for $10.

http://ny.curbed.com/archives/2013/06/18/jupiter_21_launches...

I don't mind this though. That old bar was a f'in dump and the rest of the block with it.
>I thought of that Dijsktra quote too. It sheds light on what's wrong with the OP's proposal: in return for less nesting, it worsens the conceptual gap between the program (in text) and the process (in time). A poor trade.

That's like saying that "by using FOR instead of GOTO we worsen the conceptual gap between the program (in text) and the process (in time)".

Only we don't worsen it -- we just abstract it to a level in which we can reason about it better.

Higher level is not worse -- except if you consider "more distance from what is actually happening at the CPU" as worse. Which is not: historically the higher the distance, the more programmers got done.

We don't need to keep track of the actual low level process in time -- which with callbacks we're forced to. We just need to know how the steps of the process relate. Which await and co offer in a far better form than callbacks.
Where Have All The Female Directors Gone?
Oh, wow, wikipedia says its actually in a heliocentric orbit. Yeah, not happening.
He couldn't have proved without doing that .
Thanks! Your comment and my edit must have been posted concurrently.
The real bottom line here is that the author doesn't really know why she left Google yet. She is still discovering this.

I really strongly believe as a left-coast culture put a lot of emphasis on amazing out of the ordinary experiences as THE ONLY WAY to get "perspective". But the reality is if we learned more about how our brains work, we'd be able to get that sense of perspective in daily life on a regular basis.

This is why I'm more impressed by people who meditate every day while maintaining their previous life, over people who attend a yearly meditation retreat but don't do anything different. The hardest part is changing your daily life without going highly radical.

Because to make society better, having everyone defect and leave to a monastery is not going to be a good idea. We still need people doing their "normal" jobs and getting things done. I need lunch damnit!
Quite so. In the cold calling business people hanging up on you is par for the course...
Obligatory George Carlin Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvgN5gCuLac
Our view today is by definition the conservatism of tomorrow. If my children want to be religious they would have to be progressive religious because I am going to be the conservative atheist.
OK - so I work on a security team at Facebook and sometimes help with reviewing Whitehat reports. To be clear, we fixed this bug on Thursday. The OP is correct that we should have asked for additional repro instructions after his initial report. Unfortunately, all he submitted was a link to the post he'd already made (on a real account whose consent he did not have - violating our ToS and responsible disclosure policy), saying that "the bug allow facebook users to share links to other facebook users". Had he included the video initially, we would have caught this much more quickly.

For background, as a few other commenters have pointed out, we get hundreds of reports every day. Many of our best reports come from people whose English isn't great - though this can be challenging, it's something we work with just fine and we have paid out over $1 million to hundreds of reporters. However, many of the reports we get are nonsense or misguided, and even those (if you enter a password then view-source, you can access the password! When you submit a password, it's sent in the clear over HTTPS!) provide some modicum of reproduction instructions. We should have pushed back asking for more details here.

However, the more important issue here is with how the bug was demonstrated using the accounts of real people without their permission. Exploiting bugs to impact real users is not acceptable behavior for a white hat. We allow researchers to create test accounts here: https://www.facebook.com/whitehat/accounts/ to help facilitate responsible research and testing. In this case, the researcher used the bug he discovered to post on the timelines of multiple users without their consent.

As you can see at https://www.facebook.com/whitehat, in order to qualify for a payout you must "make a good faith effort to avoid privacy violations" and "use a test account instead of a real account when investigating bugs. When you are unable to reproduce a bug with a test account, it is acceptable to use a real account, except for automated testing. Do not interact with other accounts without the consent of their owners." Unfortunately, the OP did neither of those things. We welcome and will pay out for future reports from him (and anyone else!) if they're found and demonstrated within these guidelines.
I'm not 100% sure if that was tongue-in-cheek or not, so I'll clarify: I was disagreeing with aortega. This is not a typical PRNG, where the seed generally marks the initial point of the same sequence. Choosing a random generator matters, because we want a different permutation every time, not simply a different starting point. It is akin to running a block cipher in OFB mode with a different key each time.

What they are doing modulo 2^32 + 15 is IMO the simplest way to achieve that goal. Yes, you could do it without overflowing 2^32 using a binary field; you could also cook your own mini block-cipher. But that increases the complexity of the code and is not really faster everywhere.
Its quite the middle class. Especially if you avail yourself of public transport and live out in Queens half an hour away.

Yes, its a great hardship to have to take the train. But thousands of people do it and have quite a comfortable life at 80 to 100K.
The entire narrative is intensely self-focused. You have to keep in mind that she is basically writing in the same dialect that driven careerists think with. Having so freshly made this decision, you can't expect her to relate the transforming experience in any other way.