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ballooton I want to fix programming

Best of luck, though this strikes me as a "Everyone should have a pony!" sort of thing. You're basically asking someone to build some magic compiler that handles all the logic AND does so efficiently. It seems if this were possible it would have happened by now.

ballooton Throwing Hollywood under the bus could pay dividends for GOP

This is idiotic. Silicon Valley and all the surrounding areas vote overwhelmingly Democratic. One stupid piece of legistation doesn't overcome the fact that the GOP are science-hating religious zealots. Republicans have a LOT of work to do before many people in this region would even consider a vote for them.

ballooton We are sorry to inform you

Agreed. This reads to me like an attempt by a professor to show that his research being rejected makes him no different from all these other greats in the field. In reality, the vast majority of great papers are acknowledged as such soon after their release.

ballooton Alexis Ohanian vs NBC - Debating SOPA

But HOW is his talking point a "complete lie"? It is amazing to me that nobody either on that interview or in this comment thread can clearly and succinctly point out how the NBC exec was lying.

ballooton Alexis Ohanian vs NBC - Debating SOPA

So I'm going to play devil's advocate: The main talking point of the NBC exec is "This law will only effect foreign companies engaged in wholesale theft".

It was never refuted on the interview, and I don't see it refuted in this comment thread anywhere. Is this actually true?

ballooton Alexis Ohanian vs NBC - Debating SOPA

Disagree. I think Cotton clearly won the debate. His "The law only affects foreign companies involved in wholesale piracy" talking point is persuasive and was never refuted.

ballooton Alexis Ohanian vs NBC - Debating SOPA

I unfortunately agree. I thought it was a very strong showing on Cotton's part, and he had a very clear talking point that he hammered home a dozen times ("This will only affect foreign companies with wholesale copyright infringement").

ballooton Alexis Ohanian vs NBC - Debating SOPA

That still doesn't explain why Google is opposed to the bill.

I think there's a better explanation that is linked to the enforcement of situations such as "someone googles Pirate Bay and gets a link to the site". SOPA puts Google at fault for this, and I assume the enforcement mechanism could very much harm a US company (Google). Unfortunately, time ran out on the segment right as they were getting to this point.

ballooton Alexis Ohanian vs NBC - Debating SOPA

After watching the video, it's clear that the argument of SOPA supporters is going to be "this will never affect US companies". Google and Facebook have come out very strongly against the bill, and I assume they did so not on a whim, but on the advice of very high priced and intelligent legal counsel who think these US companies WILL be affected.

The NBC exec successfully skated around any scenario that may happen in which a US company gets punished due to SOPA. At the very end of the interview, the talk was getting there ("So Google HAS to take Pirate Bay down from search. What happens if it doesn't?") but the segment ended.

We need someone to get out there and clearly enumerate the scenarios in which generally law-abiding US companies can get burned by SOPA. This was not accomplished in the interview.

ballooton Under voter pressure, members of Congress backpedal (hard) on SOPA

What infuriates me is that both of the California Senators are co-sponsoring this piece of garbage. One of them is Dianne Feinstein, who is up for re-election this year. I'm a solid Democratic voter, but there is no way someone who sponsors SOPA or PIPA will get my vote.

Even better than phone calls would be the emergence of a non-SOPA supporting Democrat running against Senator Feinstein. I'm sure the prospect of losing Northern California to a challenger would get her attention.

ballooton Hirewolf: The pitfalls of hiring filters

Many very good engineers don't do open source. Not to mention that as an employer, ideally people you hire put close to 100% of their development time into things that benefit their primary employer. Hiring someone who is a hard core open source contributor could actually be a negative, because at best the day job will get 75% or so of his attention.

ballooton This is why I don't give you a job

The world was a way different place 30 years ago. You couldn't reasonably have expected someone to have an extensive software portfolio or have experience at a tech startup. Now, both are commonplace among top hires.

ballooton This is why I don't give you a job

A mechanic is a business selling its services. An employee is an individual. It's an apples-to-oranges comparison.

ballooton This is why I don't give you a job

Here's my minimalist definition of "top-notch engineer" in regards to Silicon Valley startups:

- has experience working in the early stages of a venture-backed startup

- went to one of the top schools in the world, such as Stanford, MIT, Harvard, etc

- has an extensive personal portfolio of software projects on which they contributed

My point is that Silicon Valley "works" because it has lots of people that meet 2 or 3 of these bullet points. There is no place in the world that really comes close.

Nobody is objecting that you can surely hire people cheaper in other countries, but for small companies the cheapest labor source is almost never the winner. It's far more important to have the very best engineers.

ballooton This is why I don't give you a job

Because the labor market isn't perfectly liquid. Let's say a manager randomly decides that he's firing all the blond haired people in his company. Those people will be harmed. Even if perfectly competent at their jobs, they very well may not find another job right away. It may even be the case that an equivalent job doesn't exist nearby and the employee is SOL if forced to quit without planning. Furthermore, once the company fires all the blonde haired people and this becomes known, there will be cases where competing jobs can now offer less pay because it knows a competitor is no longer willing to hire blond haired people.

Now, you might say "the company that fires all the blond haired people will eventually die at the hands of a company that gains an advantage by accepting blond haired people." True, but it's a slow bleed, and that certainly doesn't help the blond haired people who were arbitrarily fired.

In case you're skeptical, all this and more can be observed in the case of US black people up until the civil rights era.

ballooton This is why I don't give you a job

Define "top-notch". Because under my definition of the term, I would expect there to be very few engineers in Hungary that match that description.

IMHO, Silicon Valley works because it houses a hugely disproportionate amount of the very best engineers, and from my experience the top .1% or so of engineers open up possibilities that otherwise simply aren't there.

Yes, the capital is here, but I think that's an effect and not a cause. If you took Facebook and started it in any other place in 2004 (with just a handful of exceptions) with exactly the same access to funds I highly doubt it ends up as it is today.

ballooton Quick Salary Tip for Software Engineers

You say you don't mention a number, but saying "I'm in the 90's" is basically the equivalent of saying "I make $90,000" as far as the negotiation is concerned.

ballooton Quick Salary Tip for Software Engineers

Dubious tax advice aside, I've never worked at a company where the contractors are treated equally to the full time employees. I would never work as a contractor simply because you are setting yourself up as a 2nd class citizen.

ballooton Ask HN: How can I self-evaluate my programming skills?

Here's one thing I've always found reassuring: When I look at code I wrote a year or two ago, I invariably find a lot of things I could have done better that I didn't know of back then. This generally tells me that I have improved and I am looking at the code with a greater set of evaluation tools and/or a better thought process.

Where I would get scared is if I looked at code that was 2 years old and I couldn't distinguish it from code I would write today. That to me would be a clear sign that I am not improving.

ballooton Why I Won't Hire You

http://www.crunchbase.com/company/golem-technologies

Employees: 1

He's been doing this for almost a year and hasn't hired anyone. Sounds about right.

Also, the website is taking 20s to serve any page. Maybe he should spend less time blogging about how awesome he is and how everyone sucks, and instead build a website that can handle a surge of traffic.

ballooton Why I Won't Hire You

Why I won't work for you:

1) You are a self-important douche who writes lengthy blog posts on all the reasons you deem people unworthy of working with you.

ballooton Stop whining and start hiring remote workers

You seem to know a totally different set of engineers than I do. I work in Silicon Valley, and the vast majority of jobs here require on site presence. This is the case for a very specific reason - the most productive engineers work best when they can quickly and easily share ideas with others. You would be wasting a significant amount of their ability by not having them around in person.

The proof is in the pudding - every highly successful, well admired web company you can think of employs the vast majority of its engineers onsite, and those that are offsite are not core contributors. To claim that working in an office is "outmoded" is ludicrous when there has yet to be a successful case that succeeded with a team that is mostly remote. And no, 37signals and its dozen employees don't count as a successful case of remote teams. I'm talking about a venture funded company with dozens/hundreds of engineers.

ballooton Stop whining and start hiring remote workers

I disagree with a fundamental assertion you make here. I think a software engineer has a very low ceiling when working remotely. Engineers that I consider "good" or better not only must be on site most of the time, but they WANT to be on site most of the time. It's the only way to maximally impact whatever it is you're working on, and any good engineer wants that.

Also, many of the things you are talking about are red flags that would cause me not to hire an engineer (FWIW I'm a lead engineer). If I'm paying you a good salary to be on my team, I don't want to structure our work arrangement around letting you work on various side projects. We pay well, we expect a lot, and you should deliver as such. And I have consistently found the only way to make that happen is to enforce physically spending the majority of your time with the rest of the team.

ballooton Stop whining and start hiring remote workers

I would be surprised if 37signals value is .1% of Google. Google's market cap is a little over $200B, so .1% makes for a $200M company.

ballooton Stop whining and start hiring remote workers

May I ask what open source products you view as "magic"? Linux is great, but I guess I don't view an OS that has been in development for 20 years and is still mainly constrained to server apps as "magic". And there's very few other open source projects that are used vanilla without some dedicated team sanding down all the rough edges (Unix -> Mac OS, Webkit -> Safari/Chrome, etc)

ballooton Stop whining and start hiring remote workers

I don't get what it is about software engineers that make so many of them think they're entitled to work remotely.

It seems to start with the fact that many engineers think 100% of their job is coding, and therefore they can get "more" work done when working remotely. This is absolutely dead wrong. Engineers also should be accomplishing the following in order to maximize overall productivity:

- teaching other engineers

- learning from other engineers

- coordinating engineering tasks to minimize duplication

- doing what is necessary to ensure the software is what is needed

- communicating with others any insights that may be had while developing

- working with other departments to make sure everything is in place to build whatever it is you're building.

This is just what I can come up with off the top of my head in 2 minutes, and each of these things takes a significant hit when the engineer is working remotely. Any engineer I would want to hire has quite a bit more to offer than coding skills, and as soon as you require more than a basic automaton blindly building a product exactly to spec, you need human interaction with that person to maximize potential. We already learned this lesson a few years ago with the total failure of "all software can be outsourced to India!" I don't see why we need to learn this again.

ballooton Stanford Free Classes – A review from a Stanford Student

I totally agree. I felt a number of the Master's level CS classes were more like hazings than classes. It was like some professors were most interested in making their particular field of interest seem insanely difficult at the expense of students comprehending the material. Or alternately, some profs were primarily concerned with creating material difficult that most of the students would falter, and it would become clear who the top 3-5 students are. Then they would know who to invite to their research group. Neither of these made for a particularly fun experience.

But at the same time, some of the classes had very difficult subject matter and the professors were actually interested in teaching students instead of torturing them. So it wasn't totally a bad experience.

I guess there is some value in having these online classes because they motivate professors to make their subject matter more palatable. I just don't want my degree devalued by people who aren't as astute as yourself when it comes to the gap between the online courses and those taken by Stanford students.

ballooton Stanford Free Classes – A review from a Stanford Student

Wow. They didn't require knowledge of calculus? I took the actual CS 229 at Stanford and a class that doesn't require calculus at all would only be able to touch on a small fraction of topics.

My worry, which is similar to the worry of the student in the linked post, is that these lectures may be devaluing the in-person versions of the course. CS 229 was one of the top 5 hardest classes I have ever taken. I would rather not someone else take it via a dumbed down online lecture and say "I did that too! It wasn't so bad!"

ballooton Launching the Kindle Fire was a mistake

My problem with this post is the assumption that the Kindle Fire would have blown away the iPad with a few more months' development time.

Lots have companies have tried to beat the iPhone/iPad. Nobody has even come close. This guy's whole worldview centers around the fact that since he worked at Amazon, all their engineers are clearly the best. And if that engineering team releases a bad product it's clearly a reflection on someone other than the engineering team.

What is far more likely is that Amazon's engineers weren't going to approach the iPad no matter how hard they tried or how long they worked. It's nothing to be ashamed of - they have lots of great company in this regard.

ballooton Death to .DS_Store

I am a software engineer who works mainly on a Mac. I am fully aware of the existence of .DS_Store files, but it has never bothered me nearly as much as it bothers this guy.

IMHO, this falls into the category of "it's much easier to criticize someone else's design decisions than to make your own." How about you build an OS over the course of 15 years and then I can pick it apart and write hyperbolic rants about all the design details that annoy me?