skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Looking For Work: Move First, or Wait For Offer
I would just like to hear, from both an employer's perspective and from people who have been hired who were in this same position, what your opinion is on trying to find work in a new state or country.

Just for some background: I currently live in Vermont, U.S.A., which isn't exactly teeming with tech/programming jobs. I subscribe to a couple of job board feeds, and it seems like a fair number of jobs which seem exciting to me are based out of (surprise surprise) the bay area or other parts of California.

My question is, what is your opinion about trying to get hired (or hiring) for jobs that are outside of your country or state? On the one hand, it's a big risk to quit my job and move out west with my wife with no guarantee of a position. However, I realize that if I were trying to hire for a position, I would probably look at local candidates before considering out-of-staters or people from outside the country, unless they looked like stellar candidates. Is it your experience that people from out-of-state are considered equally with people in-state, given the same skill sets, or do you think they usually end up on the bottom of the pile, so to speak?

I should also mention that, given an opportunity to take an exciting position, I would not expect to have my move costs covered by the company, and would, for the right position, be willing to travel to visit the company, meet face-to-face, check out the offices, etc. Basically, I wouldn't be looking for a free ride out to California, as obviously I wouldn't be the only person taking the risk.
It's a well duh, but still most people fail to test restore. This may be the greatest thing about distributed version control. Every clone is a restore. A limited restore but still a restore.
During my last job search (this past summer), I was contacted by several recruiters. I had phone interviews with several, and an in-person interview with one. I found them to be unhelpful and a waste of time at best, and demeaning and condescending at worst. They treated me like fodder, and were obsessed with keyword and "years of experience with X" matching.

In my entire programming career so far, I have always been hired by principals who valued my intelligence and problem-solving ability over my experience with particular languages or frameworks (e.g. I always get hired to do something I've never exactly done before -- though not intentionally).

I plan to never work with a recruiter again, since their approach is completely orthogonal to mine. I suppose the author's point about higher-level/management positions might be worth considering, so I might reconsider my position on recruiters if/when I cross that career bridge.
China has some odd laws in terms of how Chinese subsidiaries work from what I understand. It is isn't quite like opening a subsidiary in say, England. I think there is a rule about a local chinese partner company being involved where you get your employees through that chinese partner company. In the example I witnessed, it was difficult to dictate culture in the chinese office as they were working through an intermediary. Can anyone else with more experience on this comment?
Common sense and obvious. In the 1980s I worked on a large DARPA project where a huge hit was taken because our admins never tried to restore from backups. It is the kind of lesson that is (hopefully) learned with just one bad experience.

This is another reason why I like EC2 deployments: it is fairly easy to take your backups (automated deployment scripts, application, data) and spin up another copy of your whole system (except for flipping the DNS). Make sure those EBS-backed EC2 AMIs are really bootable and functioning :-)
Completely reasonable response, forgive me for being an inarticulate noob in my post.

I thought delayed replication was one of the main strategies they advocated in that book. I don't have it on hand. my mistake.
This is the incremental backup script I use on my Linux box at home, a quick-and-dirty imitation of what Time Machine does. Obviously $HOME/backup is a different physical disk. Feel free to improve on this.

--------

#!/bin/bash

HOME=

date=`date "+%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S"`

rsync -aP --link-dest=$HOME/backup/current /home

$HOME/backup/back-$date

rsync -aP --link-dest=$HOME/backup/current /etc $HOME/backup/back-$date

rm $HOME/backup/current

ln -s back-$date $HOME/backup/current

#see if the disk is getting full

FREE=`df -lk|grep sdb1|awk -F" " '{print $5}'|awk -F"%" '{print $1}'`

#alert me if the backup disk is getting full.

T=80

if [ "$FREE" -gt "$T" ]

then

df -lk| mail $myaddress -s"disk alert $T% capacity"

else

echo "backup disk is less than $T full"

fi
Most start-ups can get away without a written business plan because the founders have everything that would be in a plan in their head. In larger organizations you absolutely need to use them as the people deciding what businesses to be in aren't the people executing the ideas. So "Don't write a business plan [if you're a start-up]" is what the title really should be.

One thing to consider, write big goals / milestones down and ask yourself each day, "Is this activity getting me towards our next goal?" -- if not stop doing it. Without planning you can quickly get distracted by shiny objects and short term revenue.

If you're going to spend significant time on something that isn't a current goal have a quick chat with your team and get agreement to change the goals -- this isn't "writing a business plan" but this is "business planning" -- just because you don't do the former isn't an excuse to not do the latter.
Just curious, have you guys tried reaching out to Microsoft at all to get this resolved before going public with it?
I fear that this show of support will only help in the short-term. I hope Rich can gather some sort of more predictable income, be it via solid corporate sponsorships and the like. Donations can be deceivingly flaky.
It's generally better if you try to avoid putting your business partners or employees down in public.
Doing your own backups isn't rocket science. Why you would outsource such a valuable thing is beyond me.
Setting aside the database, file problems are fairly easily solved via svn, .snapshot or a good configuration engine.

As far as the database goes, I'm big on stored procs + archive tables, but i'll leave that to the grown ups ;)
Yea, but how is "my friend/business partner recently lost his entire blog due to poor backups, and it got me thinking..." not 'timeless?'
While I'm glad to read that kind of things (for looking young myself ;) ), I'm surprised that the study was limited to 70+ year-old twins.

It feels a bit specific to draw such large conclusions.
Selling to Sun would not seem to me to be a move directed by such careful consideration.

Hindsight is 20-20, of course, but still - I don't remember thinking of it as a good move for the future of MySQL at the time.
But you've got the additional bonus problem that users can skip Last.fm tracks at any time, so there's a pretty high probability that you won't need all that data anyway.

(I used to work for Last.fm and we spent a fair amount of time working on this issue without a great amount of success.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_vs._MikeRoweSoft

Plurk should sue and win. If M$ could have had issues over phonetically rhyming domain name and take the kid to court, why not plurk taking microsoft into court for something serious. You just can't excuse yourself by saying someone in my company's xyz office is responsible.
Clojure is the greatest piece of software I've seen done in the last several years. I will donate. I would much rather see Rich hack Clojure than waste time on consulting gigs.

If you doubt this is the right thing to do, just listen to the man, any of his presentations will do.
In my defense:

"Melanin helps protect the skin against effects of the sun such as skin cancers and premature aging. In African American skin, melanin provides a sun protection factor (SPF) approximately equivalent to 13.4, compared to 3.4 in white skin. This discrepancy illustrates why skin cancer is more prevalent in Caucasian people"

http://www.skincancer.org/skin-cancer-and-skin-of-color.html
> Force should be used when it will yield great benefits for society.

I agree with you that force should be used when it will yield great benefits. But I would define the greatest benefit to be liberty. Force should be used to defend liberty. The freedom govern one's own life and make one's own decisions is worth a lot more than the benefits of open-source software.

The irony is that societies that value freedom over more tangible benefits like software tend to have more of both than societies that give up freedom for material benefits.
Analysis of the Google Phone
> he only thing you can do on your part is keep your own backups, independent of them.

That's just common sense. What happens if your hosting company decides to be dicks about some billing dispute and holds your data hostage? Even the if hosting company-powered backups work, you're still hosed without your own backups.
They should have a firewall rule up soon unless they want to bait some free loaders first.
Look and feel is really hard to pin down legally. It's similar to the fashion industry. You just can't copyright a design -- and that is why there are so many knockoffs.

But that's just how it is in the design industry -- new designs come out quickly, so it's usually not worth the effort to fight knockoffs.
Toyota Will Sell Plug-In Hybrid Prius in 2011, Urban Electric Car in 2012
The cost of commoditization of computing: infrastructure and software (2009)
I just started working for Microsoft so that I can be a voice inside the company for startups. I'm forwarding this thread to my legal contact.
1. I agree with all your points.

2nd, as someone who makes his dough with writing copy, let me tell you this: the really good writers do use those tricks of the trade without you noticing it. It is similiar to good typography: it doesn't get into the way.

You may want to check out the writings of Gary Halbert or John Carlton to see it in action.
I want phones that lots of people use so that they become appealing alternative development platforms to the iPhone. So, I DO want my phone to be a fashion accessory, so that some of the 17 million iPhone users will switch.
Offtopic: Is really Plurk #1 microblogging service in Asia?
Several years ago, I was refused a job interview: the interviewer told me "we only hire people at least 16." I was 20 at the time!!
Did you actually read the article? They ripped off the code as well as the UI.
this is the first knol article i find useful :) actually the first i read..
In the article, I wrote

"If you’re running a web service, you need to be able to show me that you can build a reasonably recent copy of the entire site, in a reasonable amount of time, on a new server or servers without ever accessing anything that was in the original data center."
There are realtor firms in the US, like Century 21. However many of them still use pictures of the realtor, like "contact Jane Doe, your Century 21 representative".

I don't know much about this, but I believe most of these firms in the US and Canada are running franchise operations. There may be a nationally advertised logo, and some listing and referral services, but it still all depends on the realtor. They split the commission with the agency.
D'oh, I hadn't considered that.

I'm also wondering what moved them towards the SLC-based Intel drives as opposed to the MLC-based ones (that offer a much lower price-capacity), since in terms of read performance IOPS they're almost identical.
People just don't always grasp the big picture. People that see RAID as a backup strategy are only looking at 'hard drive failure' as potential scenario. The same for machine replication. They are only trying to prevent against what happens if 'the machine dies.' As long as they realize that this doesn't protect against, "I accidentally deleted the files," then it's all good.
I'm fairly certain that the higher-ups probably weren't aware of this. However, the company is responsible for the actions of all of it's employees. I mean, sure, Balmer had no idea about any of this is, but that doesn't mean that Microsoft isn't responsible... even if it was done by subcontractors. They are responsible for what they publish on the web, just as anyone else is.
I've only been using Apple products for about 3 years. Currently I have a MacBook Pro and 3GS. The main reason I switched, since most feaures I cared about could be found on multiple platforms, was build quality. It would be hard to deny that the unibody laptops Apple makes are incredibly solid and long-lasting. Same goes for an iPhone with a basic amount of care. The side-effect of this is resale value. Of course the iPhone's resale value is inflated due to the unlocked market, but even the laptops have insane resale value. It's nice to know that when I need to upgrade I can pay for 30%+ of a new model with the proceeds of selling my current one. Go out and pay $2000 for a plastic laptop, use it and abuse it for a year and try to sell it. Paint will be rubbed off, there will be squeaky loose panels, people will only laugh.

Again, these are just my personal reasons for choosing Apple at this time, I am more than willing to give other companies a chance if they can manage to make great hardware to go with their great software. So I really don't feel myself held hostage by anyone but AT&T and I am definitely not in love with them, so no, there is no Stockholm Syndrome here.
Don't use url shorteners here. You still have time to edit your post.
Well, Jeff was asking his host "do you back up?", not "can you restore?". That's what the post is about. (Reading comprehension FTW!)
I don't think it is a straight forward widely accepted idea.

It's an extreme ideal that would be insanely problematic in practice.

How does the government decide who gets funding to do 'open source' and who doesn't? How much are they allowed? How is their 'success/worth' measured? How does the government ensure they're getting value for money? What if the project becomes commercial? Do the government own some of that? Should they get some of their money back?

Personally, I would be against government funding of OSS. Government is involved in too many things as it is. We don't need them involved in OSS as well.
This reminds me of the Kayak/Bing Travel issue from July and similar incidents before that. It's easy enough to blame some contractors at a distant outpost but the frequency with which these things happen around Microsoft certainly leads to the conclusion that they are bad actors and poor citizens.
Are you saying it may not be sexism? What then?
This sounds horrible. Microsoft shouldn't be blamed for this entirely though. Why wouldn't the team that created this think through before?

From what I know, people inside Microsoft make sure they don't get in to any legal trouble before they make use of any code or idea that's already available.

Anyways, this episode is a blatant disrespect for IP. Copying the code is something awful. I believe this case deserves the attention of authorities at Microsoft.
"When Amazon started out, their datacenter couldn't have been nearly as big as those of top hosting companies. I can't imagine it would have taken more than a handful of Google-style shipping crates to host the site."

If you're talking about when EC2 first started (2006), then I think you underestimate Amazon's scale by a couple orders of magnitude. For example, it's been a long time since Amazon has had "their datacenter" rather than many large datacenters around the world. [Note: I was an Amazon employee from 2005 to 2008.]

Consider that Amazon had $10 billion in revenue in 2006, (how many pageviews does it take to end up with that many orders?) and has a lot of very complex processing under the hood (over 200 distinct services called just to render the home page; search and recommendation engines; payments; inventory control; fraud detection; etc.). Then you can start to estimate just how much infrastructure they require.
may be people around the mediterranean used to eat more fish. the same goes for the japanese phenotype.
Legal compliance is VERY important at Microsoft, so much so that we aren't supposed to even read Open Source source code.
Am I the only one here to whom this does not apply? :'(

I'm 21 and people are constantly surprised to hear I'm a day under 28. Perhaps it's the full beard or something, but I actually enjoy it - I spent the first 15 years of my life dying to be taken as seriously as I felt/thought and my age was always an obstacle in intellectual discussions or business matters.... so I for one am glad to be considered 7 to 10 years older!
Random Promotions and the Gervais Principle
Non-gendered handles are a standard trick for women in hacker forums or channels.

I was once publicly upbraided for revealing someone's gender -- all the regulars knew, but she wanted to be incognito for the legions of net-geeks, lest she receive zillions of come-ons every time she posted anything.
Evaporating easily. Xenon boils at -108 deg. C. Given the chance, it would tend to rapidly escape from liquid fuel at reactor temperatures.
Winning in entrepreneurship is a marathon - not a sprint
Past data on the houses they've recently sold, and for how much? :/
Damn, nobody liked it when I submitted the exact same link with the exact same title 2 days ago. :(

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=991197

Oh well. Still glad to see that people get to read it. I was especially impressed by push in technology that Cameron has made. I had no idea he was behind a lot of the push to get 3D projectors installed in theaters and how much he did to influence the creation of the 3D cameras used in filming this and other movies. There are many technical accomplishments that have been made with this film that most people watching it will never know (or care) about.
This effect definitely works on IRC. Create a female-sounding Twitter account with some pretty girl in the picture, use that nick on IRC, get instant help. (You need to make sure the name is actually girlish sounding, of course. Otherwise nobody will bother to check you out.)
That seems a somewhat knee jerk / extreme approach to the problem :)

Risks stifling innovative code?
Checkout the slicehost documents too if you want a different approach. They are equally good and maybe better.

Edit link: http://articles.slicehost.com/
Yeah I know. And if they decide to make use of any 3rd party application or code internally, they make sure they don't unintentionally mess up with legal requirements of the software. This certainly is an isolated case which needs serious investigation.
No, he explained Pearson's Chi Square.
I'm speculating, but I'd guess this was the fault of poor management of an external contractor or partner. We don't know for sure who actually developed the code, just who's hosting it. It's not like similar things haven't happened before:

http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2009/11/microsoft-pull...

I'd personally never heard of Plurk until now, and wouldn't have known myself that a contractor had ripped it off had I commissioned the work.

It's still an egregious violation, but I doubt this will even need to go to trial. Microsoft stands to gain little from alienating startups in this manner. If it comes to it, I'm sure aggressively shaming them publicly will be far cheaper than suing and eventually as effective.
I had no idea that Rich got anything from the screencast, that's great :)
You can always try to clear out the cache. This was causing me lots of trouble with firefox and opening up a new window. I seem to remember there is a faq entry on the chrome site that prescribes this solution for your exact problem.
The Book of Xen
I have a friend who works as a copywriter, and I have to say that it sounds like a shitty job. My friend talks excitedly about the pinnacle of copywriting being "direct mailing", which we all know as pre-email spamming. I think the appeal is that they get royalties on a per mailing basis.
and who's to blame, the designer or your browser?
I'd like a link to my submissions on the top navigation bar (instead of under my profile) or it should be combined with threads
Fair point, and yes it's quite informative from that point of view. I didn't like his approach however, he seemed to be beating around the bush a lot with phrases like

I'm here to rescue you with a statistically sound yet incredibly simple formula

than giving a more honest 'hey, what you need is Standard Deviation, and here's how it works!'
I would take a look at SendGrid (By one of the Techstars groups), or AuthSMTP.
Both are about the same price, although the fact that AuthSMTP prices are yearly disguises this.

Good Luck!
He is falsely equating writing with thinking. Writing is a manifestation of thought, just as other forms of expression are.

His claims and logic come across as supercilious, too.

Language is just a standard for communication amongst group. Thought, thinking, etc., is an individual process one in which we use language to convert thought into terms that can be understood. The diffusion of ideas, thought, etc., by way of language in writing, reading, speaking, hearing can stimulate thought and even introduce new forms of thought. But language will never be thought.

If his claims are true, then he is casting out gifted individuals in music, dance, sculpture, and other art forms; people that love dancing but may never write an article on the philosophical implications of their art form in their entire life! These are and are not intelligent, thoughtful, original, and interesting people!
Culture saved them in this case.
Web Development Today (SproutCore, Cappuccino, and GWT)
I don't think it's an extreme approach. It would otherwise be nearly impossible to prove that Microsoft's code is not derived from GPL'd works. At least without revealing their code.
Learning Computer Science From Scratch
The very definition of being a 'pg' means that they won't want to work for the government, right?
I don't have the italian language skills to evaluate the theory, but it seems plausible.
Attributing it to a young da Vinci just seems silly though. Much like how every interesting quote is attributed to Churchill, Twain and Einstein.
The JS code was obviously unpacked/prettified. All internal vars have shortnames like B, C, D, etc. Everything that interacts with the outside has long names, as in the minified plurk code.

Astonishing.
There was a section in Freakonomics about this. Most of that chapter is available here. http://www.slate.com/id/2116449/

An empirical study concluded that "black" names had no effect; it was background. On the other hand, it's only people with a certain kind of background that name their kid "Shaniqua" (middle class blacks usually adopt generic North American naming standards). So I'm not sure if that contradicts your point.
Only when implemented naively. Why not transfer the whole 5-10MB file at once into a buffer somewhere (on-box, in a proxy, whatever) and then stream from there? DRAM is vastly cheaper than trying to get a seek-heavy architecture to scale on seek-limited devices.

But then, moving to flash is sort of a complicated version of the same solution...
Facebook is the new Compuserve
Good blog post, particularly since it agrees with something I noted a little while ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=990903