locklock

I've only listened to this one, but...

1) You sound very anxious and/or nervous. Which is normal, interviewing isn't fun and can be stressful, but it does not come across great. See if you can relax a bit?

2) "Why do you want to work here?" is one of the most softball questions you can get in a phone screen... they want to know that you've done 5 minutes of research about the company, their tech stack, their values, basically anything. It doesn't have to be your dream job but you have to sound like you're somewhat familiar with what they do and at least partially interested in being a part of it.

"I don't actually know what your company does, sorry, I just sent my resume out to a bunch of places" is about the worst answer you can give here. Why would a company want to hire someone who doesn't know anything about the company and doesn't even pretend to care?

You can ignore a record spinning on a turntable while you're having a drink, it's a bit harder to ignore a live band playing in the same room

And if you're getting a $365k bonus you are likely already so rich that the money is only going for luxury things while for someone making $7.25 it's quite literally the difference between living in a car or not. I wonder if you could apply this to the rest of American society...

How did you get into freelancing, specifically in Germany? Do you get most work from Linkedin? I really don't like that site for various reasons but if it's necessary for freelance work I might have to sign up...

It all falls under the same umbrella, which as you accurately described as "rich guys who don't share anything" and as far as I'm concerned any amount of elevated consciousness around that is a good thing, even if strictly speaking taking money from Bezos the man and Amazon the company are two separate types of taxation and two different discussions. Bezos and his company Amazon both make almost unfathomable amounts of money and don't pay anywhere near what I'd consider a fair share of it back into society. As Amazon's PR people point out this is legal, naturally, but this article does a good job of contrasting Amazon using every tax trick in the book with normal human beings who aren't able to deduct their expenses for cancer treatment. Likely because the lobby representing the financial interests of individuals with cancer is not all that strong.

"Amazon doesn’t pay taxes, but I pay taxes" is a very good sound byte from this, even if the reasons why that's the case are obviously more complicated.

I'm fine with outrage-inducing propaganda against people who have tens or hundreds of billions of dollars since that class as a whole spends so much time putting out propaganda in their favor. I'm not particularly interested in the details as long as it elevates consciousness about the inherent problems with a society that allows Jeff Bezos to have more money than he could spend in ten thousand lifetimes while millions of people aren't entirely sure how they're going to afford food next week

One of @jason's tweets in the same thread says

"#996 = 6 days a week, 9am to 9pm

The same exact work ethic that built America!"

Given that slaves built most of America, he kind of has a point, but not for the reasons he wants to have a point. It's so laughable to see venture capitalists appeal to some imagined moral imperative ("democracy vs. communism," which as DHH points out might have been a bit scarier in 1950) when in reality they're just arguing for shaping the system in a way that will ultimately make them more money.

There's a difference between these tests (has this person smoked weed at any point in the last month, roughly?) and breathalyzer tests (is this person currently drunk?)

Showing up to work drunk vs. showing up to work two weeks after smoking weed are relatively different scenarios, to say the least.

I've been using Mac products since I was a child (thanks, dad) more or less happily and the removal of the headphone jack and the requirement that you have these adaptors has been the first thing to make me seriously consider going elsewhere. I probably won't, due to years of lock-in, but to rephrase it's the worst experience I've had with anything Apple in my lifetime. I've had three adaptors, two Apple ones that broke in separate ways (one would keep firing commands randomly from the control buttons on my headphones, the other lost the right channel entirely) and a crappy third party one that just fell apart. Even when the adaptor works, having a dongle sticking out of your pants pocket is a total pain that nobody really asked for. It solves no problem, it's in no way better than the previous alternative, and it really just reads like a massive "fuck you, pay me" from Apple to their customers.

I settled on non-Apple bluetooth headphones, which have their own set of problems but at least I can reliably listen to music during my commute (for the most part).

Kind of, but not for the reasons they want me to like it. The redesign itself is terrible in almost every way, but in being so terrible it really drives a point home I've been thinking about for a while: the "best practices" of modern SPA design and implementation can really lead to drastically reduced functionality.

It might look slightly easier on the eyes (debatable) but other than that, actually using the redesign is worse in almost every way. It's slower than the previous version and there's way less information on a page, yet this is the app you'd get if you followed all the "common wisdom" about building a web front end in 2019.

Compare this to something like craigslist, or pinboard, or HN, which are all theoretically "ugly" but all very fast and very easy to use. Content notwithstanding the user experience on craigslist is infinitely better than the one on new Reddit.

So yes, I like the redesign, but only in the sense that is has highlighted all of the bad parts of modern web design to me in a very concrete way.

A couple million dollars a year [1]. It's always interesting to me how relatively little money it takes to make life objectively worse for everyone else in the country while making a small number of people richer. For the cost of a nice house or a low-budget indie film you can make sure taxes are difficult to file for everyone. Of course there's more to the influence these companies have than the dollar value they spend per year but still, it ain't that much money.

[1] https://www.propublica.org/article/filing-taxes-could-be-fre...

On the other hand, this is the second positive article on this plane to hit the top of hacker news in 3 days [1]. A trillion dollar plane that is notorious for costing way too much probably has a pretty decent marketing budget behind it, and it's not very difficult to assume that these articles are part of that somehow.

For an article that came out before this recent press rollout began, try this one: "The F-35 Is a $1.4T National Disaster"

article: https://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/the-f-35-14-trill...

HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16869679

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19506763

it's "really cold" if you're from southern california and "beach weather" if you're from a lot of the rest of the world

at this point in time you need a job to pay rent and buy food (and, if you're american, have a chance at decent health insurance). for coders it's easy to find a job, for people without such "in-demand" skills maybe not so much.

so any retail or food service job replaced by a robot means one fewer job for someone who might need it. in a just world that would be great, the whole point of doing work should be so that we have to do less work, but that's not how society is structured now. an american barista who loses their job to a robot has more or less no safety net at this point. the only benefit in this story is more profit for whoever no longer has to pay a human when they can pay a robot less for the same job

I'm really thankful I haven't yet had a job where all I'm developing is new ways to force people to see ads. Imagine working on a 'feature' like this for weeks or months, and the end result is simply that people who don't want to see ads now have to see ads.

People actually do use Pinterest to collect images, I think, but I agree with you on the other points

I oftentimes find it difficult to balance actually attempting to be successful with finding time for the backlog of Medium posts and other blog articles about "How To Be Successful" that I assume I have to read in order to be successful in the first place

For curiosity's sake... we know now that Theranos was never anything more than hot air and marketing. What caused you to defend them at the time?

Facebook is a very good contacts app attached to a very good events app. The problem is that these things are attached to a massive surveillance advertisement network run by what appears to be a very shady company.

Since deleting FB of course I've missed out on some parties, and I've lost touch with a couple of people I only spoke to on Facebook. But the upside is that I'm no longer on Facebook and I think that's an extremely fair trade. If you're worried about it, slowly move your contacts onto another messaging service and have them contact you through there.

Personally, the upsides are much greater than the downsides. If I run into an acquaintance at a party it's actually a nice surprise, and I don't already know everything they've been up to since we last met, I have to ask questions to find out.

This is a relatively cynical point of view and seems to assume that nobody cares about your CV. I think the main point if I can find it is that promotions can be simply a bargaining tool on the company's part and that it's your responsibility to make sure you're actually progressing in your own career, but treating all promotions as a trap seems a bit silly.

Doing interviews for practice is good advice if you're planning on looking for work in the near future but as someone who's happy with their job the idea of doing job interviews just for kicks is about the last thing I'd want to do with my free time.

That term generally means "it's not my decision to make," it does not necessarily have to do with how much anyone gets paid. In this context he's saying that he did his part, discovering the device, and from that point forward the decision to pursue legal action (or something else) is not his to make.

It's a testament to the propaganda that VCs set up in the last ~20 years that this is even a newsworthy article. Since the first dotcom boom, basically, the popular idea of a startup has been synonymous with taking venture capital and then building your business based on making the VC firm fabulously wealthy in the relatively near term. Of course there are a million other ways to build a successful business, but for a while this was the predominant one in the startup world. I'm glad it's changing.

Having moved out of America, it's the one thing that would have to change before I ever returned.

Especially now, having spoken to people from all over the world (Europe, mainly), who simply never worry about any of this. Six-digit bills, insurance premiums, copays, in- vs. out-of-network doctors, these are all things that are completely unknown to people who live in countries with functional healthcare systems. I would suggest that any difference in care quality--which it seems like doesn't exist, but if it did--is immediately ruined by the emotional and economic overhead of having to worry about all of the aforementioned.

You can certainly buy a nice house in Berlin for it though!

To echo everyone else: practice. Last time I looked for work I immediately went after the job I really wanted, and since I hadn't interviewed anywhere in years it didn't go very well. I then did a bunch of interviews for places I didn't necessarily care about and after a handful I felt much more comfortable with the whole process.

Interviews seem like they should be something you should naturally be good at, but it's a very specific type of situation and it helps a lot to have recent experience in that type of environment. Even just hearing the types of questions other companies are asking for a similar position will be helpful.

What good is a company that is not sustainable enough to pay its employees enough to live?

I feel like I've read this article plenty of times, just replace the scooter company with a rideshare company or a delivery company or anything else from the "gig economy." And after a few months or years, how many of these jobs remain stable and well-paying, if they still exist at all? Of course it's good that someone who was homeless is given a chance to reenter the workforce but looking to these incredibly volatile startup/gig economy companies to provide that seems like, after all the recent examples, a bad idea.

I don't think German Blue Cards are tied to a specific employer. As far as I know you only have to let the authority know if you change jobs less than a year after getting the card, and beyond that you just need to make above the money limit and you can work anywhere.

reminds me of Social Roulette [1] which was also brilliant. this seems like a much more involved (and potentially life-ruining) version of that. cheers to making something interesting!

[1] http://socialroulette.net/

is there any chance facebook will improve in the future, in any way? both the increasingly terrible user experience and the company's shady practices seem like features rather than bugs at this point and to fix either would require a fundamental shift that i can't imagine happening.