skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Disappointed by the lack of any numbes at all. No revenue, salaries, funding numbers... Expect to learn nothing from this article, and you won't be disappointed.

While we're at it though, letting employees set their own salaries is stupid. It seems like a short term gimmick, absolutely plagued with problems as a company grows. I don't even believe it's true - you'd end up leading people to the number you require, and it's like declaring the organization is flat, then leading it with subtle manipulation and hidden cliques.

In a weird paradox, startup CEOs love to avoid leadership, blog about it, and say it's a hip new approach.
I'd be careful with this: this "democratic" budgeting has a similar feeling to "democratic" scheduling--that situation where you tell people to work "whatever hours they like." Everyone sees everyone else putting in extra hours "for the good of the team", and so you get a team slowly whipping itself into a death-march no one actually wants or needs, and resenting anyone who tries to just stick to the (healthy!) 9-to-5. Similarly, in this situation, I'd strongly bet on there being a ratchet effect, where salaries are voted down in tough times, but not voted back up in good times.
Rocket Fuel Labs + Codeship = AWESOME via BuiltinLA
It's neo-Puritanism; H. L. Mencken famously said that the original is "The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy."

In this modern version it's "The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be making money." Hence the obsession to the exclusion of all else on how well the nebulously defined "rich" are doing, no matter that one of the biggest problem our poor have is obesity.

Not that that's limited to the poor! It's just that advocates for them are reduced to worries about "food insecurity". And unlike the situation that led to the Federal school lunch program, too many F4s among WWII draftees, after FDR's own Agricultural Department who's major focus was on keeping food prices high found that 1/4 of the nation was malnourished, the government can today get away with fads that starve children during the day because they'll at least make up their calorie deficit when they get home (not that that's at all healthy).
Make Money On Craigslist Posting only 3 little ads a day
Wrong part of the government out of control. As someone else pointed out, Zazzle is most likely more scared of the lawsuit that may or may not come from this.

If the NSA had an issue with it, CafePress wouldn't be selling the same shirt.
Note that every device submits its change with an expected "parent revision." The server checks the change against the server's current revision, and the change is accepted if and only if the server revision matches the parent revision of the submitted change.

So when devices d1 through d10 make a (simultaneous, I assume) change, they all submit their change with the same parent revision. Assuming they were up-to-date before they submitted that change, exactly one of the device's changes will succeed (whichever reaches the server first). For example, if the previous revision was 100, they'll all submit changes with the parent revision 100, and the first one to reach the server will succeed, at which point the server revision will be increased to 101. When the other changes come in, they'll all fail because their parent revision doesn't match the server.

I have to slightly revise your scenario and say all these devices went offline and then made a local change. This may be what you meant, but I want to clarify that the changes were queued up locally but not yet sent to the server.

So in (i), where the conflict resolution strategy is "remote," what will happen is that one device's change will win (whichever reaches the server first), and all other devices will throw out their change in favor of the change that made it to the server. It's not the case that everybody's changes are rolled back.

In (ii), the first device to connect submits its change and is accepted by the server. Subsequent devices submit their change (with parent revision of 100), see that they're out of date (server revision is now 101 or higher), and resubmit their change with the new parent revision, effectively clobbering any changes that have been made on the server. So each device in turn clobbers the value on the server, and the ultimate value is whichever change was submitted last.

For (iii), really don't do that. Having different devices use different conflict resolution strategies is a bad idea, and I can't really think of a valid scenario fro that. Can you?

So to sum up, (i) would mean "first change to reach the server wins," and (ii) would mean "last change to reach the server wins."
This assumes your last subscription was in the last 7 days and you know when the money gets withdrawn. Some subscriptions are not monthly, so you end up having to search for a specific subscription you know of to click on to get to the secret My preapproved payments page.

Of course, the polite way of handling subscriptions would be having a link to this page in the menu. Sort of like how there are links to all of the other things you can do.

Does this feature honestly not seem hidden to you compared to the other things you can do on PayPal?
The McKinsey Mystique
Probably not a Bonaparte quote. The below is an interesting history of how that quote got into the hacker consciousness.
Mostly from the Jargon file.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon's_razor
"Hot" is fashion, not engineering.
Create your own Fishbowl: An NSA Approved, Secure Telecommunication Network
All platforms can be thought of as positioning themselves for rent seeking - that is app stores, linkedin, and yeah airbnb.

Things that require a network effect, after they get it, are in a super leveraged position that they can cash in.

That said, the platforms that choose not to cash in on this tend to not be as successful. Couchsurfing wasn't. Cash and the promise of cash for investors allows a company to spend a great deal to market and secure with insurance this sharing economy. These are important functions to make the public understand and get used to this new weird future.

In the end, we need those rent-seeking-seeming fees to jumpstart this whatever-you-want-to-call-it sharing economy. We don't get an airbnb without a large commission on every renting agreement made.

I believe that once the public is comfortable with 'sharing economy' as an integrated part of our lives, then the race to the bottom platforms might start happening - when companies are competing on price and features. Of course, those incumbents will fight tooth and nail to keep their monopolies and may well succeed. We'll see.

Right now is the golden age for these types of companies.
Richer because they by and large aren't worried about access to clean water, where their next meal will come from, or having a roof over their head when they sleep. Their transportation and entertainment options are essentially no worse than those of "the rich", if they go to an emergency room they must get treatment, etc. etc. etc.

(Please don't go into a riff about the homeless before you subtract the mentally ill that have been dumped on the streets, plus addiction is a big, but not at all new, problem.)
I really wish people talked to others working in the medical industry before jumping to conclusions about medical practices and norms.

Surgeons are increasingly portrayed by the media as greedy and worthy of increased oversight. The reality of the situation is that surgeons are just like you and me - in fact probably better than you in me in a lot of ways.

The vast majority assume a crushing amount of debt and go through 10+ years of schooling for an intensely demanding job that places them in life-or-death situations on a daily basis. And that's before dealing with the lawsuits, shrinking income due to insurance cheaping out on procedures, and the general distrust from the public.

The bottom line is that situations like these are rare. And instituting a system geared towards knee-jerk reactions is going to dramatically affect the ability of good doctors who make genuine mistakes. It's going to scare away intelligent people from the field who want to do good, but would be legitimately afraid of losing their livelihood in a lawsuit or protracted legal process. And it's going to affect the public, who will be likely left with a lower-quality medical system.
Market heavily distorted by governments wanting to fund science as a source of national pride. As you well know, number of PhDs correlates to national greatness.
Can you point me to any government jobs that will pay you $100k right out of college? That's the sort of salary available in SF/bay area, and the sort of numbers that graduating students are looking at when considering getting a government job.

Also, from a sibling comment:

>No one accepts a lower paying job just because.

Some people accept lower paying jobs because they think the work is more interesting or that it is helping their country. Anecdotally, I've heard a good number of employees are leaving NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL) to get (higher paying, faster moving) jobs at Google or SpaceX.
Maybe the homogeneity of STEM labour is what the myth is.
Yes, absolutely, except for goods that cannot produced in USA.
I agree. Thank you tokenadult!
limited supply of capable workers, yes. 100% agree. But if you have an oversupply of workers in general, out of which it's difficult to tell which ones are capable, then what?
my thoughts exactly. posts like this make me wish for a downvote button. Or are there for users with very high karma, like there are for comments?
I don't want to downplay this because these conditions are terrible.

But I once worked in India for 3 months, in Mumbai, and I can tell you that on a global scale, this is nothing.

My commute in the morning consisted of driving, for 1 HOUR, through the largest slum in the world. 20 kilometers on a side big.

So while its terrible that this exists in Silicon Valley, on a global scale we have much bigger problems.

For me, that's the biggest reason I hope Bill Gates keeps on doing what he's doing.
Is it stupid? It's working for his company, and he says it's a good fit for now, and doesn't know if it'll keep working or work for anybody else. Have you ever tried it? Can you point to scholarship where it was tried and failed?

And the 'subtle manipulation and hidden cliques' is how human reality works - a flat organization structure just allows that to be the natural environment, rather than trying to force that natural human nature onto a strange arbitrary structure. You only get one set of politics and handicaps to fight, instead of 2 counterposed sets.

And finally, making decisions by fiat or decree is not leadership. Read literally anything about leadership, stretching back centuries of human thought on the subject, and you're realize how off the mark you are. He LEAD the company to the voting process, he LEAD the company on deciding how to develop/deliver/market (successfully, apparently). He's definitely a leader.
I wonder what kind of scale or 'type' of organization this would work with.

It's effectively a re-worked version of what partnerships (law/CPA/etc) do for the partners themselves (vote on how much of the profit to take, vs. paying employee bonuses/etc.).

My gut assumption is that this will work up until the point where you have more than 2 'layers' of employees, or in any organization where all of the players involved are not highly skilled individual contributors (what would your secretary or janitor vote their salary to be, in an office of coders/etc?).
That's easily solvable. Make the instruction, "Work whatever hours you like with a cap of x hours. Cap cannot be exceeded unless exceptional circumstances happen."
To be fair: they did just ratchet up in a good time. They've not been given the opportunity to cycle down/up though, to your point.
If i may butt in: Yes. Many times with clients too. Just this week I was in a meeting with project managers and consultants from GE, Honeywell, Prysmian and Schneider electric and it was as if everyone was trying to one up each other on the 'fuck' count.
Is starting salary the best thing to look at though? We are all aware of the 'non-programming programmer' problem, and therefore graduate salaries will be accordingly risk adjusted from the employer's POV. Maybe a better indicator would be salaries for roles requiring 5 years of professional experience, where the danger of hiring someone completely inept should be more remote. Or maybe you need to look at a more sophisticated measure like the range of salaries being on offer for programmers in the same age group.
> Back when I was a teenager, I dreamt up that the women's rights movement was ultimately a ploy by the capitalist class to dilute the value of labor in the market.

This is most certainly a dream, because in reality women's rights and feminist movements are in part about getting women actually paid for the labor they perform.
Asynchronous Error Handling
Except some employees work long hours and love it. Those are often your best guys.
In addition, they claim that he purchased the 32.99 subscription. That step is unethical plain and simple. If you take 20 dollars from me and then claim I only paid 10, you bet it's going to look bad.
Can you give a review on my code? Mainly JS and little bit CSS
This is a curious idea but I don't know if this solves any existing problem.

The motivation of the employees is to choose the red dot (employees' choice) not so high that you have to overrule their choice, but otherwise higher than the blue dot (employer's preference) and the white dot (current salary). Looks like they were successful this time :)

This would be more interesting article if employees were willing to reduce their own salary in lean times, or to relinquish a raise in good times.

I think a low red dot would illustrate a healthy company where employees have great buy-in to the success of the company - to the point that they are willing to protect the company's cashflow at their own expense - but this technique is going to create that situation.

I'd be interested to come back to this experiment in 5 years time, let's say.
Good luck!
Her interview on David Letterman in 1986 is quite impressive: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-vcErOPofQ
Libertarians agree with you: practicing medicine isn't my right unless I can find someone willing to pay me to do it. Customers determine whether I get the privilege to sell any good or service. The question is who else should have the ability to make such a decision.
You always have tradeoffs. Which tradeoffs make sense depend on the culture you want to foster, the size of your company, and probably a hundred other factors.

Transparent criteria for salary mean that you avoid the politics associated with salary negotiations. And making even a single exception typically breaks that, meaning that now everyone at the company is incentivized to get higher-paying offers and bring to you, asking for more money. Ben Horowitz wrote a great post on this: http://bhorowitz.com/2010/08/23/how-to-minimize-politics-in-...

Personally I would say that you should avoid ad-hoc raises. I really like the idea of matching salaries to titles and matching title changes to a bi-annual performance review (for companies over a certain size.) And it gets a lot of the advantages you want-transparent compensation, no incentives for politicking, ability to pay people differently, and the ability to adjust the pay for the role according to market rates.

Edit: Fog Creek's compensation system is a good example. http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000038.html
I intellectually really like these experiments, but one of the things virtually every startup advisor tells you is "only innovate when and where you must" -- basic things like how you do accounting, offices, etc. should be standard, so you don't screw them up, so you don't think about them too much, etc. Big companies with spare resources can afford to experiment on non-core things, and a 0.1% improvement in A/R efficiency would be material to GE, but not to a $150k/yr revenue startup.

There is an argument that hiring is one of the "core" things for startups, and it is hard to do, so innovation might be warranted. Something like this experiment in setting salaries is only good if it makes recruiting/retaining/utilizing more effective. If you're doing it for any other reason, you probably have the wrong priorities. (The other part of this, paying everyone the same, actually does make a lot of sense in early stage startups, too.)

I think bringing people into the organization is probably harder than retaining them, though. (at least for the first year or two) I'd personally be more inclined to experiment with "set your own referral bonus" rather than "set your own salary". (I think in SFBA right now, for engineers, that number should be USD 20k. USD 10k might be justifiable. In a lot of cases, people like gifts more than the equivalent amount of money, so maybe USD 10k + USD 10k in travel/gifts/etc. Charity donations might also be valued more than money in some cases.)
Federal government entities cannot copyright, everything they produce is public domain. They can hold trademark, but usually do not since they are not trading anything. USPS is a rare exception. NSA of couse has no goods or services.

Thus the need for a specific law, as cited, to act in stead of the more familiar protections. Which law, it must be said, seems quite reasonably narrow, and should allow parody amongst other uses.
RetroShare is completely decentralized/p2p/OTR.

EDIT: @JshWright - Not sure I understand your question, but RS does "real-time voice communication" (besides the other things like chat, messaging, file sharing, forums, channels...)
I am in the same boat. I just launched an app myself. I wish you luck.

I would be sure that you are listed on as many sites as you can. Ask bloggers for reviews. Be sure that your page is as readable by google as you can be.

As I am sure you know, you just need traffic.

I am having 1/100 of what I expected. I can only deal with reality.
What idiot could be so confused as to believe that this t-shirt is really being sold by the NSA, or that the seller is claiming to be the NSA, instead of as a parody?
A fair question. Use research-based hiring procedures

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5227923

to sift through the many persons with degrees (or even without degrees) to find the smaller number of persons who can actually do the job. Key idea: use a work-sample test to hire for any job.
Yes, but you can usefully protect point-to-point communications using Diffie-Hellman or similar. You can't if you know someone is decrypting in the middle, even if they are using a common symmetric key that can be recovered by subpoena or NSL.
I know I characterized your argument a bit harshly. It's probably true? In some cases? All? I don't know. The paper doesn't rule it out. It does purport to show that causality does run the other way [as well].

Anyway, I just think it's important to keep in mind how much the macro environment affects which bad decisions get punished and how much. The same mistake that might have got you a nasty email from the boss in the late 90s might have got you fired in the late 00s. The sorting effect you hypothesize might happen, but there's significant variability in how harsh it is, at least a portion of which we have control over.

As for inflation and unemployment, basically all mainstream economists agree that there is something called NAIRU, the non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment. It's the rate of unemployment below which inflation starts to accelerate. The Wikipedia article isn't very helpful but here it is:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NAIRU

and related:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phillips_curve

Here are Excel files of historical NAIRU rates targeted by the Federal Reserve:

http://www.phil.frb.org/research-and-data/real-time-center/g...

Here is a paper on NAIRU (opening section is a reasonably good general introduction) by Greg Mankiw, who is not my favorite economist but very widely respected [pdf]:

http://scholar.harvard.edu/files/mankiw/files/jep.ballmankiw...

The section on why NAIRU exists basically concludes "nobody knows." Unfortunately this is macroeconomics so there's a lot of just-becausing.

I'm not sure if it's a good theory or not but it's widely believed by economists, especially central bankers. So if unemployment goes above a given rate, which changes depending on circumstances (I think the latest estimate is 6.5%), they're going to tighten the money supply anyway so that growth and especially job growth slow down.

So essentially, it's an unstated national policy in almost every country not to have full employment.
DOJ Drops Demands for Dycrypting Hard Drives
Doesn't this open model proposed by Joel Spolsky make much more sense?

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000038.html
Is that logo screened on there crooked?
> It is a democratic country, apparently the majority don't mind this ban on homeschooling. Now yes, I am speaking from a far away perception. Anyone from Germany please help us out here. Is this this seen as such an egregious abuse of power people's power is just not enough to overturn it or is this what most would agree with?

In Germany, no-one cares about homeschooling. Other than some neo-nazis, religious cults, and some Christians who believe their children's minds would be poisoned if they were exposed to regular children, that is.

In Germany, this is seen as religious wing-nuts not getting their way, nothing more.
> The police were not involved until after the plaintiff fell through the skylight.

The plaintiff was committing a crime. He needed to elude the police. When he fell, he was located where he was in order to avoid observation and arrest.

> I disagree. The commission of a crime should not automatically revalue one's life and health to $0.

Now that you're making my arguments for me, I think we're done here.
Anecdotal evidence, and looking at outliers like Standford grads (not even 15yr vets mind you) should be tossed aside.

Neither represent the overall technology picture. Wages have stagnated, so "Boo, got to take a pay cut" won't happen, but you may not get a raise for 1-2-3 years which in effect is a pay cut.
From the article: " I entered my credit card number with spacing like 1234 1234 1234 1234 and all the other information as necessary. After I clicked “Submit your order”, the form returned an error and asked me to fix the credit card number so that there are no spaces ..."

Why do so many web developers insist on forcing me to enter a 16 digit number _without_ spaces when a computer is excellent (and fast) at removal of spaces and I am not so good at validating I've typed a 16 digit number correctly when that number lacks the spaces?
There is no such thing as unprocessed digital photograph.
That's Retroshare. It's also the only one as far as I know that has P2P "e-mail", too (besides Bitmessage, which is still quite new and unproven).
Here's a video from that ship wreck BASE jump site: http://youtu.be/YSuo0j2xsj8
> This is most certainly a dream, because in reality women's rights and feminist movements are in part about getting women actually paid for the labor they perform.

The idea that capitalism subverted feminism in the pursuit of cheap labour is shared by some feminists, and isn't necessarily inherently antifeminist.
Swearing works best in moderation, with good timing. Children can't usually grasp such subtlety, they dilute its effects through overuse.

Many adults do too, but that can't be helped.
Harvest looks really great. Love the slickness of the invoicing feature. The credit card payments with Stripe are simply great.