skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Just out of curiosity, What's your hiring process look like?

We were a multi-million dollar a year e-commerce shop

top to bottom web app security, server ops, managing technical vendor relationships and integrating third-party modules, zero downtime rollouts, performance and architecture, metrics/instrumentation, and fully-independent backend and HTML/CSS/JS skills to build a secure and pixel-perfect feature beginning to end

Even at a lower end startup not making multimillion dollars, you've just described 4-6 engineer's worth of talents for 1.5x of a single developer's salary. I look at that list and think I'm never going to get a decent night's sleep while in your employ.
There were 39 separate business units represented among the three companies

The context in which this study was done is quite different from an early stage startup. This is not surprising since the SEI tends to focus on big engineering solutions to big problems [which is not to say that its insights and guidance aren't applicable]. But it is important to realize that they focus on engineering in situations that are relatively stable over the long term (29% of systems studied over 10 years old), and almost 1/3 of the systems studied were embedded where changing the software is particularly difficult and throwing more hardware at a problem is not cost effective.
Min. wage in California is $9. At 40 hours/week, that's $360. $3/week is less than 1% of that. Payday loans use much higher interest from what I understand.

(I ignored taxes/withholdings to make the math easier).
Well logic is a sub-category of philosophy, not mathematics. Logic and math are similar in some ways, but logic != math. Both contain lots of symbols and formal methods of getting from a to b, however the content is quite different. There is overlap however in mathematical logic, but again, logic systems != math.
A couple of choice quotes:

> PCs aren't going away any time soon, any more than faxes or mainframes did, but they are the past, not the future

Faxes and mainframes faded into corners of businesses, and this is never going to happen with PCs. Sure, maybe desktops, but everybody I know has a laptop and uses them a lot for certain tasks (some of which have been superceded by their mobile, addmittedly). There are just some things you can't do on a mobile - plug a HDMI cable into it, play half decent games, torrent, write your disseration. PC's will evolve but saying they will fade away like faxes is a bit silly IMO. Phones are also newer, change faster and are replaced a lot (once a year/2 years) whereas a laptop lasts a lot longer and people are more resistant to upgrading (if it ain't broke don't fix it, which is something that doesn't seem to apply to buying new mobiles. Perhaps it's because moving PC's is a pain if you're not technical).

> Windows had actually ceased to be the dominant development platform in the late 1990s with the rise of the web

You should tell that to the endless numbers of of .NET developers (who didn't exist in the 1990's) and enterprises that run on Windows. Having apps run in your browser is cool, but a quick glance at my start menu shows a lot of non-web software, all developed for (and on) Windows.
Keep going up until the candidate pool improves? Just a personal anecdote: Even though I loved writing software, I moved up and away from development (after 12+ years) mostly because of the salary ceiling we all inevitably eventually hit. But I keep my skills sharp and would always go back for the right price. $150K would definitely not be the right price, at least not in the Bay Area. My guess is there are tons of guys like this out there.
No, apparently it's not PCM.

>While they did not specifically state it, it looks to be phase change memory (edit at the Q&A Intel stated this is not Phase Change).

Source:
http://www.pcper.com/news/Storage/Breaking-Intel-and-Micron-...
You know what I want? I want a tag that I can use like <img> but more flexibly- I want to manage cache and authentication on images displayed in-browser, and the fact that I basically have to use URL or Cookie auth for image embeds is ridiculous. My entire API uses tokens, except for when it deals with image resources (and those images need to be protected to only display in the correct place, because they're not pictures of cats, but Highly Sensitive pictures of Important Cats).
Robotics with capital R comes with mechanics, algebra and control theory, my flatmate was building robots. They are super expensive though. I think an arrival point to go to "career" could be to stabilize a body standing still on top of a sphere or over two wheels.
3 tips on building a tech career inside the Box
I get that sense when I figure out how to make something new. I get a VERY different sense after getting to the bottom of something and finding out that someone was "moving fast" and that I wasted hours because some easily avoidable mistake was made. Busting your ass to build stuff makes you feel kinda accomplished, busting your ass because someone managed to use your time as collateral to pay for their convenience makes you feel kinda dicked over.
Cash forwards are interest free, so much less predatory.

What they seem to be doing though is taking all the "excess income" and "saving" it to their accounts, which they'll give you a portion of the interest they earn on.

They've obviously worked out the math that after a certain level, "topping up" your account can even be done within the interest earned.
"Really, with stdin/stdout the sky is the limit, and there are minimal ties to any specific service since only the most generic raw cloud storage features are being used."

That's the key and that's why it's here. It's a very, very stretched analogy, but from the very beginning, we at rsync.net have tried to run rsync.net itself as a unix primitive.

After already supporting actions like this, for years:

ssh user@rsync.net sha256 some/file

ssh user@rsync.net s3cmd get s3://rsync/mscdex.exe

mysqldump -u mysql db | ssh jo@rsync.net"dd of=db_dump"

It made perfect sense to support workflows just like the one you describe above. And yes, you can indeed do just what you've written (with lz4 and openssl encryption)at rsync.net (with or without breakout to files).
Yes, it is. You can't just say "I should be able to get x for y". You are in dreamland, pure and simple.
The opinion that I wrote here was formulated several years ago after a long conversation with an accountant I met on the set of a major film, who was sent by the studio to audit the production. The inefficiencies and borderline corrupt nature of hollywood's film production spending habits are mind blowing. I would get into detail but it’s a bit long of a yarn for a HN comment.

Healthcare has some systemic similarities I suppose, but the case I'll make is that there's a historic precedent for digital disruption of creative media with books, increasingly TV, and particularly music. We think of online piracy as the main disruptor of the record business, but the record industry also lost a lot of power when artists no longer needed a major label's advance check or marketing to record & distribute a successful album. Advances in home recording technology and social media are decentralizing the music business, and if similar leaps come along in filmmaking tech it isn't a stretch to guess it would decentralize the film industry in a similar fashion
"is it possible to mount rsync.net storage with something like sshfs and use it like a filesystem?"

Yes. Thousands of people do this, and it is in fact our recommended "browsing" recipe for OSX.[1]

Feel free to email us to discuss this further - we would be very happy to extend the long-standing "HN discount" to you.

[1] http://www.rsync.net/resources/howto/mac_sshfs.html
Can't believe he's using Uber as an app that's not on PCs but smartphones, because I want to pull out my laptop to hail a car.. And those other examples like Pinterest, Instacart and Instagram are pretty silly too, don't people just use their browsers?
Phones and tablets may some day supplant the PC as the primary devices for consumption. But PCs are certainly not going to be replaced as the primary devices for creation. Moreover, almost every app you use on a phone or tablet and every web page you view is powered by a server on the other end, and those servers are going to be PCs for the foreseeable future. Phones don't replace PCs, phones create demand for servers that PCs can and will fulfill.
Better think in the Steve Jobs' parallel: the PCs are the trucks, the mobile devices are the cars.

Are there much more cars than trucks? Certainly yes. Are the cars making the trucks completely not needed? Certainly no.
When people say there's a shortage of developers, or that they find it really hard to find developers, my guess is that they have to add "at the salary I'm offering" to the end of the statement.

Or they have a hiring process and that weeds out top performers. And/or they have a hiring funnel that appeals to the bottom of the barrel.
I'm using Chocolatey to keep Git up-to-date, as at some point it was a recommendation.

Unfortunately it appears the new Git for Windows project isn't one of the packages, but we do have https://chocolatey.org/packages/git

Does anyone have any insight on whether Chocolately is still a recommendation, and if so, where we might find a 2.x package?
I don't think they're being too misleading though. If I were to do something similar, I'd weigh current pay higher than past pay too. They're topping up the difference so they need the overall math from the excess + interest to work in their favour after all.

They are most certainly targeting people who are bad with money though. But then again, so do lotteries and designer jeans makers.
I really appreciate this frank advice.

I think your discussion of business risks has best reflected the reality upon me: because he is a cofounder, he can't just be simply fired.

(Incidentally my original title was "[How] would you fire..", i.e., I have doubt about the very question.)

The focus on programming chops underpinning your argument
and clawing at a little pie instead of making the pie bigger
suggest a narrowness of view that seems to be missing the
bigger picture.

Well, I'm bringing a binary/myopic-seeming view of the problem to HN, when in reality it's far from my biggest day-to-day concern. All of my time is spent "growing the pie" and even working to cultivate this engineer.

It's an experience worth learning from.

Indeed..
Let's imagine that someone started a "free pizza service". Every single day, rain or shine, a pizza gets delivered to users of the site. For free! Pretty good, right?

But then the VC money starts to run low, and after a few experiments with printing ads on the box, the company announces the end of the service.

It would be easy for me to then write an outraged blog post. I might say stuff like "who's doing this to my free pizza service?" I might plaintively suggest that there has to be a business model that allows free pizza to continue. I might even say that I'd pay a reasonable sum ($10/month, perhaps?) in order to keep the daily pizzas flowing.

But, you know, there's no right to free pizzas, it's not my free pizza service, there is no business model that makes free pizza viable, and my willingness to pay clearly does not extend to the point of actually covering anyone's costs.

Now, the author is talking about Soundcloud, not pizza. But I think the onus is on her to demonstrate that these examples are different.

> There have to be business models that allow the creativity of sites like XKCD, Reddit, SoundCloud, and Tumblr, to flourish.

1) No there doesn't "have to be". Free pizza is awesome, but it doesn't mean giving anyone who asks a daily free pizza is viable. Maybe SoundCloud's old ad-free model is viable; maybe it isn't. The answer doesn't depend on how much you wish it was true though. If you want to talk about business models but you're not going to talk about bandwidth costs and user growth and capex, you're not being serious.

2) Also, XKCD seems to be flourishing pretty damn well. So is Tumblr and Reddit, despite the overly-publicised prophecies of doom people keep tossing around. (Sure guys, this time you're all going to switch to Voat. No, I totally believe you.) The only one I don't know about is SoundCloud, and I'm pretty sure they'd love to be "failing" the way Reddit is failing. But sure, maybe they really can't make the numbers work. In which case, they're going to go under, but that doesn't tell us much about the internet, just about the economics of streaming media in a world where bandwidth is a scarce good.

What this article seems to be looking for is a solid example of people taking a profitable service that delighted users, and making it more profitable in a way that annoyed users. What it actually has is examples of people taking an unprofitable service and trying to find a way to make it viable so they can continue to serve users. The former would be a useful stepping off point to a discussion of greed and public services; the latter is not.
The Codeless Code Case 33: Fear
"$3/week is less than 1% of that"

That's 1% for one week !! In comparison, current CD yields are close to 0% per annum
> Would this be easy to scam if I know in advance that my income will be decreasing, especially if it will decrease incrementally?

They're using a non-disclosed algorithm to calculate an "average" that's not really an average, and holding on to all the money above that, and charging you $3/week for the privilege. If they haven't already constructed the algorithm so that its nearly impossible for them to ever be giving you a "boost" other than from your own deferred wages that they are holding on to, I'd be surprised.

> However, the insurance companies are also great at modeling their customer's risk.

Insurance companies also have to disclose the terms and conditions, including, particularly, the specific events that qualify for a payout and the amount of the payout; Even does not disclose this.

> It is a natural information assymetry and I'm not sure how Even could have a better idea of a customer's future earning then the customer.

Because of the non-disclosed "average" algorithm, there's an additional -- and potentially more significant -- information asymmetry working in the opposite direction of the one you describe.
Seriously. Virtually all people complaining about hiring are way off base on compensation. If they were to increase (sometimes they literally need to double) comp, they'd see things get a lot easier.
Are you implying someone should help you find a job before they help someone in Uganda?
Have you tested it recently? I just received a picture and it shows up as expected in hangouts, which handles my GV texts now.
Thanks! We're very glad to be serving you.

As a reminder to folks reading this, email us about the long-standing "HN readers' discount".
Ask HN: Just tested 200 gov websites and 2 were SSL-encrypted. What should I do?
I just tested over 200 websites from my country that are using our local .gov domain.

Only 2 (yes, two!) of them were properly SSL encrypted. About 50 of them used self-signed certificates, but none of those 50 tried to enforce SSL encryption by default. The rest of them cannot be accessed using https protocol at all!

The most interesting example I found was a site that has a self-signed certificate which expired in January 2013.

Some of them (30+) have contact forms posted on their sites. Most of those who have contact forms don't have any kind of CAPTCHA recognition what so ever. About a third of them has newsletter subscription option and I found two unencrypted sites with login forms.!

I want to do something about this, but I want to be ethical about it. Of course, contacting every single one of them is not an option, since there's far too many of them.

I'm thinking of writing a paper where I will address this issue and mimic some of the ways someone could exploit this fatal flaw like MitM-ing a .doc file coming from the server, MitM-ing contact forms and rejecting contact requests, injecting rogue HTML code etc. Of course, I would do these examples on my local network by using my secondary laptop as a victim and my primary laptop as an attacker.

But the thing is I'm afraid that my hard work will come to nothing and nobody important would read it nor do anything about it.

I would classify my country to be somewhere in between first- and third- world countries.
At $150/year, this sounds like a service for people are so bad at managing their money that they'll pay $150 for someone to meter out their paychecks.
That's less than 1% over one week. The APR would closer to 15-20% (depending on salary, pay frequency, etc.).
Surprised not to see this [1] cited next to the Yale study for the sake of completeness.

[1] http://www.pnas.org/content/112/17/5360.abstract
Sorry... It's a new website design and we are working out the kinks. I don't like fancy hip scrolling either, but somehow it seemed very nice as we prototyped.
I agree, "punt to QA" is a cop-out I resist and detest during hiring.
> I can do better than native.

No, you can't. Not even close. Just because you only ever use a subset of what can be done in a native application doesn't mean the rest of us don't.

Also, which "native"? Win32 != OSX != X11 != mobile != ...

> I can update web apps without troubling the end user,

Which makes you the source of one of the most common types of user frustration: apps that change without their authorization, sometimes breaking important things that used to work just fine.

> ... processing ... done on my servers ...

Ahh, so you just want to lock people in using Service as a Software Substitute[1]. Trying to do an end-run around "1st sale" rights to insert yourself as a middleman where none was needed previously is terrible, sociopathic behavior.

> I can store immense data in the cloud freeing the end user's machine from any such junk, aside from maybe a cookie, and stream it on demand.

The user also has to trust that you will handle their data sanely (and not "monetize" - including using or selling the analytics of their usage patterns). They have to trust that you will not betray them and hold their data for ransom. They have to deal with the fact that you will hand over any of their data in bulk when the government shows up with a national security letter. They have to trust that you are competent at programming and have not stored passwords or allowed their data to be stolen.

The trade off being made by storing data remotely is huge, stop pretending it doesn't exist.

> Navigate to URL

And when internet access isn't available? Don't believe for a second that this isn't a problem. The reasons why are far too numerous to list; it would require a lot of wilful ignorance to pretend otherwise.

> Why should someone have to install anything

Because they like to actually use all of the features a native app can provide?

Because they don't want to risk their data with an external service?

Because they don't want to depend on the availability and whims of an external service?

Because they are tired of the lies and doublespeak the computer industry has been saying about "the cloud"?[2]

[1] http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-se...

[2] https://projectbullrun.org/surveillance/2015/video-2015.html...
This is the future, the only thing is that building black boxes that can do these complicated mappings to learn higher order abstractions and relationships between the data.
I once helped a little boy who was struggling by pushing him to safety as I walked by, felt great the rest of the week.
I'm assuming they've done enough math on this that they know the overall break even point given a 5% default or whatever the case may be.

If they figure your "allowance" is $400, and you get paid $150 from your "final check" because you got fired, I'd imagine the max loan would be $250. Odds are after a few months you are already covering 75% of this anyway with the "savings" they are putting away.

I'm sure for what they eat they more than make up for in an algorithm that forces them to be in the black on each active account.
Esther Derby’s Six Rules for Change
"E.g. You have to compile a test and create a mechanism to load the binary into your testbench memory or whatever."

God, that's always the hardest part about these things. The core takes you a weekend, but the connection to the outside world takes forever.
You mean monads? His "identity of indiscernibles" that gets referenced in QM? He predated what most people refer to as "quantum theory".
You know, as a technical co-founder I honestly hope I never encounter your "type" as things progress through stages of a company. Have you talked to him about it at all and gotten his point of view?

You have to understand that when he first started the company, it was him hustling and grinding away to even get it to where you could even be hired. Without this co-founder the company was literally NOTHING. This isn't to excuse his performance or the implications, but I feel like you're severely lacking some respect for the situation. As a company grows the role of the founder starts to change. And he should recognize that there are specializations and areas that he's lacking in, which is why he's looking to diversify the team in the first place.

I'll be the first to admit that I'm not the best at certain tasks, but I'll be damned if some engineer I've hired comes in and wants me "fired" because they are somehow better at doing a certain task than I am when that's the exact damn reason I've hired them. It's one thing if he's grossly incompetent and actively harming the company, but what you seem to be describing isn't the case.

If you're first thought is that he should be fired because of his programming chops aren't as good as yours then I think you're missing the entire point. The CEO has already acknowledged the situation and offering solutions that you all can mutually work together with. Is it compensation? Or just this perception that the CTO must be the better than you to respect his decisions?

/rant
Summary:

Esther Derby (@estherderby) presented “Six Rules for Change” at LeanWX NYC 2015 “The Design of Purposeful Work”

1. Congruence.

2. Honor what is valuable about the past and what is working now.

3. Assess the current situation and system.

4. Ascertain who is trusted and who people turn to for advice, and weave them into your network.

5. Guide the change. Consider where global principles apply, and what can evolve locally.

6. Design experiments in collaboration with people who are involved in the change.
Pollution tech company equips Google cars to deliver hyperlocal air quality data
Pretty much. But that's a hell of a lot better than those people using payday loans.
I looked up the safe, and it looks very expensive, and something that's stored in a locked, video taped room? Something the average employee/theif would never even get a chance to play with?

These security hacks are cute, but sometimes I feel they are nothing more than advertisements? Don't we always have one of these "golly gee, I had no idea?" hacks around this time of year?

If I didn't have a company to promote, I don't know if I would come foreward with vunerabilities? Especially for a theiving bank? (I don't like banks these days. The fees are a slap in the face, along with pawn shop/Payday interest rates they charge us, and in return give us 0% on our money in most cases? $1500 minimum balance in order to not pay a monthly service charge? And, yes--I wished we let them suffocate in 2008. The myth of Capitalilism?)

IMHO--the biggest deterrent to crime these days is the proliferation of video cameras. They are everywhere.
Why You’re Stuck on a Plateau and Not Making Progress
To continue to abuse that analogy, Trucks are probably selling better now than 20 years ago because they are "cheap" luxury cars. In this analogy, perhaps the "gamer PC" is the "truck" of the computer age?
Huh? Is this service for people who can't get bank accounts?