skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The difference being that you don't necessarily have to take the enormous risk of founding a company in order to become a partner in a law firm.

Is there a similar career path for engineers in any tech company that is the equivalent of "making partner" in a law firm? Genuinely curious.
I think the point was that riding a bicycle is fun and that's a good enough for a child to ride a bicycle.
Your points are well thought out, but I'd like to play devil's advocate to get you to expand on them, if I may...

1. Isn't this why large companies target the inexperienced, the recent college grad who is scrambling to make rent, or exploit people who can only live and work in the US if they get that job?

2. Some would say once you're a successful startup founder, you're "one of them" and the incentives become reversed. Do you think hackers who become founders still retain the hacker ethos? Why?

3. Because acquihires aren't fully disclosed, wouldn't the market function more efficiently if the compensation came through more normal means (salary and stock grants)?

4. Do you really feel like an academic path has competitive compensation to industry?
So:

- make backups

- encrypt data

- use a password manager

The holy trifecta of things that people hear about and refuse to do. And then come and preach to others when they realize that "Doh, should have listened to that troll on HN".
Essential Growth Hacker Communities
Not really. A competent freelance developer in the valley will make $150-200/h. A competent lawyer (not a partner) in the valley will make $350+/h.
we don't have ideas, we have start-ups.

what are lips for if not to pleasure your master?
Nothing, but there are more paranoid and more easily implemented systems that you could use instead if you want easy, but air-gapped backups.
FaceMaze 2D
Everyone held the anti union position because of the now proven illusion of meritocracy. You may well get your wish, all aspects of unions included.
Total Market Cap: $ 12,947,277,234 http://coinmarketcap.com/ I think they're going to need more than a quarter of a billion...
The easiest way is to network, and connect with people through your current network.

That being said, I used to be a recruiter before I ventured into the startup world. There is no reason to not use a recruiter, sure, many of them may call you, email you, "spam" you and not produce any results for you.

But who cares, you are looking for a job, this is your career, your life, and your job plays a big part in that.

What is the big loss? You have to speak to 49 recruiters (a big exaggeration) before finding the one who finds you your dream job?

Oh no... you had to answer a phone and speak for a while.

Who gives a crap.

If you really want to manage them, get a cheap pre-paid phone and a throw away email address.

There is a real bad reputation out there for recruiters, and the truth is some of it is well deserved, as they are generally hungry sales people.

But that doesn't take away from the fact that they spend their entire work week every week, working with companies who could have the potential to give you your dream job.

Also, it snot about the individual recruiter. Recruiters have access to resources from their ENTIRE COMPANY. This could potentially be hundreds of reps. Its an army of people with incentive to find you a job that you like, and it doesn't cost you anything.
That book has been on my wish list for a while. Guess I'm buying it soon.
I suppose you could put it in a safe deposit box. Another option is hide it in the margin of a book; somewhere that normally wouldn't get stolen or read. Of course then you have to worry about fires and floods... Perhaps a copy at a relatives house as well as yours. For bonus points, don't tell the relative, just jot it down in a book on a shelf when he/she isn't looking!
Sometimes you need interactivity. Yes, it comes at a price (small imo) but it's pretty useful.
At many companies, both startups and established, if you're a top performer and/or joined early enough, stock grants can easily propel you into this range (and beyond).
I'm not sure that is enough to make the case. For one, it's Lucas alone. But secondly - the bidding I think they would be concerned about would be more like the 'ransom value' of an employee who happened to be on a critical path and who could not be replaced quickly enough to avoid a significant setback.

The problem is not the market value for an employees skills and experience that will enable them to contribute to whoever they are employed by, it is that there is also a value to simply disrupting the opponent's team.
looking back into history i'm wondering why F-35 VTOL didn't follow XV-5A, i.e. placing fans in the wings

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1XkJXSoTTb4

50 years ago plane looks more capable as VTOL than F-35. Modern powerful engines allow to drive the fans from the compressor shaft - as F-35 shows - and that would fix the main geometry issue with jet engine placement in XV-5A where fans were driven from jet exhaust.
You can raise the highest amount you've heard to $3mm: http://finance.yahoo.com/news/google-programmer-blew-off-500...
The exact values for the axes are proprietary to Facebook. (in fact, in ggplot2 which he used for the first 2 graphs, you explicitly have to tell it to not show the units on the axes, and it's very unintuitive)
Mark Ames loves overusing the word "dreary" and its variants: three consecutive times in as many short paragraphs. PandoDaily needs a copy editor rather badly.
Then perhaps back up the <10 Gb of stuff that would really screw you up if you lose it. For example, I keep all my bank account info, passwords, personal documents on an encrypted hardrive and I further encrypt the files. I keep this off site at a friends house which I can SSH into and transfer what ever I need.
For anyone curious about the author of this post... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Develin
What does the market cap of bitcoin have to do with the cost of getting government to legislate so that it isn't viable?
Tech engineers get pushed around by upper management and have failed to professionalize like doctors because too many of them lack social and political savvy. It's a clear personality trait in the profession. Look at the way so many programmers choose to dress and groom. Can you imagine a top lawyer looking like that? The importance of projecting a serious professional image to the broader society doesn't seem to even occur to most software people.
Thanks. I had not noticed it. I will definitely ping him!
It's a joke. For grown-up people with a sense of humor. This is the internet. If you don't like it, vote with your mouse and don't click on it.
A new idea for Real Estate (demand based transactions) - Seeking feedback
I recently went through the process of searching for a home. I started looking in early 2012, primarily around the Jersey City and Hoboken area. As many of you around the NY area probably know, inventory started to be very constrained around that time.
A realtor we were working with mentioned she would reach out (by mail) to each unit of a particular building we were interested in. I don't know if she ever went through with it, but the idea sounded interesting. There are times when an owner may not be motivated enough to list a property, but would be interested in a transaction if the right offer came through. There had to be a better way than sending letters to everyone though.
Fast-forward a year or so, and I put together a site to enable buyers/renters and owners/landlords in a slightly different way. Potential buyers or renters post their "wanted ad" on a map, and sellers/landlords/agents reach out if they have a property to offer.
You can check it out at http://www.howalis.com
Thoughts? Would you use it? What would you change about it?
> If learning more about 3D rendering means I'm going to end up being disappointed by donut.c, I think I'm going to put off learning more about 3D rendering.

A topologist: "You can easily screw yourself up in three dimensions, but you need at least five to unscrew yourself."
1. This is not a zero-sum game. The incremental value gained by a large company defrauding their employees may be the same dollar amount, but to the employees it makes a much larger subjective difference. Also the company that gets caught colluding once will have a much harder time regaining its good name.

A tech employee gets offered $300k/year + options? He jumps.

Google's "double irish" has $3 billion more in revenue? Ho hum, just another day.

2. Since it is not a zero-sum game, it makes sense to avoid the corrupt, lazy actions that Jobs, Schmidt, et al. have embraced. Hackers don't need to "band together" – all that means is appointing some PHB and blindly following him. Society's behavior just serves to convince us that the hacker ethos was right after all.

Each of us will make our own decisions.

Each of us will weigh the costs, benefits, and ethics.

Feel free to start a union or just go straight to a political party.

We are decentralized. No thank you to all forms of government.
This isn't really a "confession"... just someone gushing over a programming language in a terrible looking font.
I remember reading that these pacts don't apply if an employee initiates contact with another company.

Seems like that would be the best way to get salaries closer to market rates - simply be proactive and always talk to other companies and get your company to increase your salary to stay.
I don't do cold calling much, but the few times I've done it have produced almost everything good I've ever achieved professionally has come from a few well targeted cold calls or emails

I'm an LSAT instructor, and author of LSAT explanations. Here's the result of my cold calling

1. I contacted a small company in Toronto that did LSAT and SAT instruction. I'm in Montreal. I called and asked the secretary if they would like to be in Montreal.

She handed me to the founder, who said yes, interviewed me, and I'm still doing work for them. I've traveled the country teaching courses, added new tests to my skillset, and been able to build a private tutoring practice based on things I learned from them.

2. I emailed the guy who runs LSAT Blog, the major blog in my niche. As a result of a few back and forth emails, he asked me if I'd like to write LSAT explanations he could sell.

This led to royalties from him, and manuscripts I later turned into print books, which pay me even more royalties. I now sell the explanations through other online affiliates as well, and turned them into my own site

3. I emailed the founder of another LSAT prep company, just to say hi, after his company experienced a setback.

This led to them bringing me on board for a six month term. I learned a lot, and now they refer me tutoring students.

I think there may be others. But given that these three are 90% of my business success, I probably wouldn't even BE in business if it weren't for cold calls.

The key to all of them was that I was somehow relevant to the people I contacted. They could help me, and I could help them.

The more targeted, the better.
I agree, but I wasn't talking about my own opinion. With people like Curtis LeMay around, I really can't figure out what the sentiment would be.
I bought their phone (920) because I like the UI, I don't have to put a case on it, I like the camera, and it can run programs that I write. I didn't pay for it; I traded my iphone 4s with a friend for it. I am going to upgrade for a 1020 once I'm eligible with my carrier.
In case it's not clear, the quote was a part of the hyperlink and so this link is broken.
The System i was folded into the POWER server line along with System x (midrange unix) a few years ago. It seems like they're trying to kill both lines with one stone, sadly.

I could replace half my data center with a POWER box and manage the other half with it. Amazing machine if you ignore licensing...
Except somehow, Austin, Boston, Chicago, Portland, and Philadelphia all manage to do it despite none of those cities having rent control.

http://www.nmhc.org/Article.cfm?ItemNumber=53961
Imcache : New version released
Sum bug fixes for offheapcache.
Is this the first negative thing you've read about him? None of them are flattering at all, and most of them are at the scumbag/crook level.
Interesting. Is that entirely comparable? The lawyer is equivalently a lone freelancer, not part of a specialized organization? The comparable developer would be part of a boutique consultancy.
Or in other words - we need to move from art to engineering
The Most Beautiful Art Based on William Gibson's Neuromancer
10% of these companies are from Y Combinator: Stripe, Airbnb, and Dropbox (out of 30 total)
That all depends on whether you think a tech company that has the business model of a law firm is still a tech company. Silicon Valley does like hits.

On the other hand, have you asked any newly minted lawyers about their "career path" recently?
You missed my point. The cost of losing a particular employee at a particular point in time can be far greater than the individual contribution they will ever make. That cost is transient because it depends on the state of a particular project. The value of the employee becomes the value of disrupting the project to the competitor. Matching the offer would be an option, but it would cause massive distortion within the company since the retained employee wouldn't be contributing that much more than their colleagues.

I don't see any justification for your statement that better products would result from this.
You should read the book. It will challenge your imagination.
As a H1-B myself, I think I'm pretty much a modern-day slave without the physical shackles. I hate going back to my home country and I love the intellectual, rational environment here. But I'm stuck with my current company until I get a green card which isn't bound to happen in the foreseeable future. I read his book on this and I agree with one of Matloff's points that H1-B should be solely for talent and I also agree with the reforms he suggests that there should be laws against exploiting them (ex: don't imprison them with the whole green card ruse which could take 6-8 yrs for some countries).

However, I disagree with his generalization that H1-Bs are talentless compared to Americans (Just look at Goog). And that somehow they're paid lower wages. All big companies (MSFT, FB, GOOG) pay H1-B candidates the same salaries as their American counterparts. And they all go through the same interview process. Personally, I went to a top 20 uni here and paid $100k in tuition alone. It is true that bringing more talented H1-Bs will drive down wages, but isn't that a competitive advantage ?(None of the European companies have this advantage really and I think it's one of the main reasons for the valley's growth.)

What we need to rectify is fraud of H1-Bs. Come up with a white list of companies that can use H1-Bs and make sure there's no cheap, talent less labor. Don't let body-shopping, consulting and outsourcing companies like Infosys, Wipro be issued H1-Bs. Most people in the operations group running our service for instance are on H1-B and frankly, the work they do can be done by any average American working at a BK/McDonalds. The pie that outsourcing companies are eating into is really a gold mine that should be used to expand the American middle class. But the outsourcing companies themselves seem to have powerful lobbying in place (NASSCOM). So it is a hard problem.
dude, listen up, I had a similar situation and went with the small startup. BAD MOVE. you're going to be expendable. Doing some time at megacorp-x yet learning production level java does not sound like a bad move (my alternative was not as cool)
> The real surprise is that Google joined them.

They've acquired a company that builds military robots [1]. I think it's safe to say their sense of ethics is all but gone. The only question here is when exactly they became "evil" (in their own terms).

[1]: http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-12-16/google-just-...
I think the intention behind these agreements was to stop Steve Jobs throwing a pile of burning crap at your house. It's like sweet valley Fortune 500.
Announcing Pwnium 4 targeting Chrome OS
It was largely rhetorical. :P A lot of the comments on this are related to how do you keep important data both always available to you, -and- safe from anyone else getting ahold of it. I was just pointing out the bootstrapping issue; having one password/phrase/key that allows you to reset the passwords/whatever to your digital life still requires you to find a way to keep that one word/phrase/key safe yet accessible.
HTMLBars is rendering to DOM instead of to string, to enable React-level performance: http://jsfiddle.net/Ut2X6/10/
My brother is a US citizen and left Zappos (Las Vegas) for Soundcloud (Berlin) last year and his experience was seemingly very smooth. I think Soundcloud helped a lot with that, but it doesn't sound difficult to get your visa. With that said, he did mention that his college degree helped with that process.
I cheered out loud when I first started tinkering with Julia, tested whether multiplication did the right thing with matrices and vectors, and saw that they did. Multiplying two row vectors should give an error! Element-by-element operations should get their own operator, not the other way around.

But as a long-time R user, I'm hesitant to bet the farm on Julia for a project at work where it would be ideally suited. Maybe there's a way to squeeze it in on the side.
Scare prank
Nicole gets scared at 3am in the bathroom. i put a dead tarantula on the toilet paper role.
http://www.SupportFu.com is my primary focus.

Backbone, Ruby, MongoDB, ElasticSearch, Redis. Everything lives in EC2
I know I like to talk about Haskell, even if it's too dense for me to grasp at a level where I could put it into production without jumping off a bridge.
Then the definition of "embracing Bitcoin" makes little sense to me.
:) Well yeah, but though you and I aren't exactly dying of shock, word seems to spread slowly about what Google is like now.
Not if they contract a different flu... then there is a higher chance you'll get that too, and be sick longer.
Why your sass is bad and you should feel bad
What if it's Apple, and not Google, that's invulnerable?
There's a couple of examples of them getting fired for not going along with it. I don't think "following instructions so as to keep your job" is as bad as "willing to screw you over".
He's still the chairman of the Microsoft board. I read bloomberg for most of my business news and lots of op-ed contributors there stipulate that this is making it harder for Microsoft to find a replacement CEO.
There are several reasons why software engineers are underpaid compared to their performance. Keep in mind these are generalizations and therefore you will find exceptions to what I outline below.

-Software developers typically aren't comfortable negotiating, nor are we well versed at it. Therefore, we accept job offers for less than we know we are worth and accept raises offered rather than negotiate raises based on our actual performance.
-We have no collective bargaining capability, and anyone can enter the field. In Canada engineers have a professional designation, the software industry is typically not a part of that collective. Lawyers have the bar exam to pass before they can practice. These restrictions restrict the labor supply in those industries to ensure higher wages. In our industry anyone can join, even foreigners, or employers can even outsource the labor to another cheaper country. This has the combined effective of raising the labor supply, and reducing our ability to negotiate as a group.
-It is difficult to measure the performance from one developer to another. Look at sales as an industry, it is very easy to measure a top performer. If we were better able to demonstrate performance it would be easier for a developer to earn 50% more than his/her peers. Where I live some shops that hire refuse to pay even 10% more for a developer because they are filling head count and treat developers somewhat like a commodity.

The above realization has left me a little jaded. I love this field, but realize that I can earn more selling software than building software.
Bullshit.

4500 undergrads, 1500 graduate students, and hundreds of faculty, and you think that every little paper they give or study they conduct is a product of the whole in a meaningful sense?

The study was practically just a thought experiment by two grad students looking at something outside of their expertise. It _only_ got any attention, because it was about Facebook, and so the media saw a chance to sell more ads. For the same reason, they used the metaphor of pars pro toto as a rhetorical ploy, because Princeton vs. Facebook sells more ads. Like many among the unthinking masses, you got punked by it.
Are you actually complaining about 240k? If that isn't myopia, idk what is. Most people would kill for that salary.
I'd say it's up to her to build her case, not me. There aren't any sample pages, and what I saw focused more on story than programming concepts. They're not mutually exclusive, but her video seemed to me basically an emotional puff piece, a bit short on concrete details.

You're certainly very good at suggesting your criticism should be taken seriously, because you preceded it with praise.

I think you're over-thinking it.
I've been pleasantly surprised using SBT... it's been doing the job for me for a year now and I haven't had any problems.
Facebook takes a lot of flack: it's today's standard whipping boy. In this case, it did respond to a fundamentally flawed research paper, but I doubt it would have bothered if that paper hadn't been so widely and so shoddily reported.

I though it was quite generous of Facebook to resort to gentle mockery rather than shred its numerous stupidities.
My 2 little dachshunds create a nice ruckus anytime a stranger comes near the house. They wouldn't protect me, but at least they'd wake me up.
Comparative Analysis on Modeling and Implementing with MVC Architecture [pdf]
We should be blaming the human race then! Shame on us.
Cooking the books.
What? No Hootsuite? I'm sure they are missing a lot of others as well...
Anil Dash said that everyone should do more, and the only reason NYC tech workers don't get as much flack as SFbay tech workers is because Wall Street is right next door to look so much worse. Essentially: the upper middle class doesn't understand why the lower middle class is angry at them for catering to every whim of billionaires? "Don't be mad at us, be mad at our boss. No wait, don't be mad at our boss, blame our boss's landlord."

I believe when you said "votes" you meant to say "lobbies" because otherwise you're saying the real villain is democracy?
Low hanging fruit: A/B Testing Transactional Sales
> Society's behavior just serves to convince us that the hacker ethos was right after all. … We are decentralized. No thank you to all forms of government.

Well, I'm certainly convinced that pure optimism will trump powerful interests with huge financial reserves and far more influence with lawmakers and the media. How could this not succeed?
Dianne Feinstein is way over on the side of the surveillance state, while the BRIC market share withers out from under her constituents' companies. You have to wonder where that is coming from.