marcusf

I must've completely missed that. Thanks!

Yeah the housing market is a bit of a pain, though I live (just) outside the city and the subway always runs on time. Got a 20 minute commute to work. Worse when you get to the commuter trains (especially in winter) I guess. But even with living in the burbs, Stockholm's so small that it's no real pain, compared to say London or NYC.

I think I miss the part where Pinterest got burned by Facebook? Seems like engagement just dropped off (and to far higher levels than pre-FB). How's that Facebook's fault in any way?

This might be something I've conjured up in the back of my head, but I'm certain I've seen people talking about $100k+ as a salary for an MIT grad. It's always seemed crazy exuberant to me so I'm glad to hear different.

In the comparison with Europe, it's always good to keep in mind that benefits differ wildly between Austria, Portugal, the UK, Sweden, Estonia, …. But yes, there is much to be said for at least the Swedish benefits. A five week vacation, free universities, free healthcare, harder to be fired (complete inability is more of an italian thing), etc.

I'm definitely not complaining, but with a comparable entry level salary ($40k vs $55k for me when I started), something close to comparable taxation (I paid a total income tax of about ~27% that year, what's US levels, 20%? 25%?) and all our benefits, it feels like you guys get the very short end of the stick, which is a completely different message than gets bandied around by the media.

*Edit: Just did some reading and realized I seem completely off base on my income tax estimates for the US. I'll let it stand for posterity.

True, just wanted to hammer home the point.

$40k entry level is competitive? That's a whole factor of three away from the $120k people volley around here for entry level jobs in the valley. It's really that much of a difference?

For non-EU peeps, it's a bit harder.

First, there's always the love visa -- find yourself a swedish girl and move here (you don't need to marry). On a more serious note, the easiest thing is to get a job at a Swedish company with a US presence (or vice versa) and get them to help you move. For example I know Spotify is recruiting aggressively and they have offices in Stockholm, SF and NYC. Most medium to big software companies here already has international people on staff and a lot of them has experience with the (comparatively little) bureaucracy required.

If you're any good and really serious about it, feel free to send me a mail (on my profile) and I'll see if I can help you out in any way :)

Not sure where I bashed the people working hard with GIMP/Blender/Inkscape. If I've offended anyone, sorry about that. I was merely trying to convey that ~13 year ago and a few times after that, I've been confused by the Gimp UI. Sorry if that didn't come through clear enough.

It's the same thing with Photoshop I guess; You invest heavily in the tool chain -- I know basically every keyboard shortcut there is by tactile memory -- and suddenly your definition of usability in image manipulation becomes 'The inverse of the squared distance to Photoshop'.

I'll download it and give Gimp another go.

If you're willing to move, come to Sweden. Stockholm is screaming for IT talent, we're open to immigration and the pay for someone with a few years of developer experience is quite a bit beyond that.

It's more of an indicator of negatives rather than positives; A company that pays comparatively shit (€2200/month comes out to about $35000, seriously!?) will probably not be a place that respects developers and attracts talent.

I first ran in to Gimp in what would have had to been the late 90's or early 00's, and ever since it's always befuddled me completely. I've always turned back to Photoshop, if slightly begrudgingly, because the productivity enhancements of a tool you really know far outweigh the price of it. These UI improvements seem to be a step in the right direction though.

I'd love to hear if anybody's done the Journey PS -> Gimp (for UI stuff, not photography), and if so how long it took and if it was worth it in the end?

The point he's trying to make isn't really served by the slightly derogatory tone. I've known two-three really great engineers in my day, people that could carry a company, and I doubt any of them would take the link as a compliment though some parameters certainly fit (none blog, tweet, comment on HN or apply for jobs for example...)

I must say I love the marketing focus of this announcement together with the one last week (or so) about just having three versions of Windows 8. Feels like a new kind of Microsoft.

I don't believe what he's saying about responsive design at the bottom of the article, and certainly the motivation about context and device seems trite. It's entirely unobvious to me that my intent is correlated with my device. Often as not, I slouch around on the couch or on a long trip with my iphone because I'm either too lazy or unable to use my laptop.

The article might make him a disservice though; I'd like to hear him elaborate in his own words about it.

For any other europeans, 169,000 sq ft = 15 700 m^2 (or slightly bigger than two football pitches joined up).

I don't know enough about retail space to say if this is ambitious or not? On the one hand, a ten year lease is a big commitment, on the other hand I guess AirBnB is thinking 'go big or go home', and in that case it might well get cramped sooner than that.

Run time or development time? Runtime is mostly negligible except for places with heavy congestion (caches + rendering) where you can turn the heaviest operations on and off as needed -- in our case the call to `System.getCurrentTimeMillis()` is usually too expensive to do unless we really need it.

In terms of development, it's not a lot of work continuously, but it took some while to write up, test and benchmark standard libraries for eg monitorable semaphores. In general though, what it does is raise the entry threshold for new developers a bit as you need to have a feel for when something requires monitoring and when it doesn't.

Sounds cool. Are you working on anything in particular where you use a mobile projector today?

This does carry the hallmarks of disruption (in the true Christensen sense of the word).

If I were a projector company, I'd invest heavily in designing low power projection chips to sell to handset makers / make phone-sized projects to integrate with handsets. Maybe that already exists (beyond this phone)? I have to say I'm not well read on the state of the art here.

I guess this goes without saying, but view them in Firefox. At least the OS X one looked thoroughly screwed in Chrome.

Slide 54 is insanely important. At my current place we've invested tons in instrumentation and metrics. Every IO operation is guarded with a semaphore and access is monitored and exposed. Every cache in the system logs everything from hit and miss rate to volume etc. Every async operation logs operation trails. We also ship a ton of tools for everything from bread and butter stuff like stack dumping, pinpointing long running threads etc. to more sophisticated stuff like being able to break in to a page rendering and profiling various element hierarchies, either over time or following specific users.

As I said, we've invested so much in getting the entire stack monitored very granularly, but every time our customers run in to issues it pays dividends.

For reference, we run on the JVM which is very pleasant. A ton of tools interop with it and basic things like MBeans being integrated in to JVM makes monitoring a lot easier.

I'd hope it'd help to further flame innovation in Europe and Asia. Crippling US innovation with onerous IP laws (like this might lead to) would probably lead short-term to a dip in global tech innovation (and a correlated rise in IP law expenditures :)) until money and talent moves elsewhere on the globe. One can hope.

On the other hand, the US has always been good at exporting copyright provisions and IP laws so worst case, we'll all be at the behest of rent-seekers like Oracle, etc.

I think it's a very positive thing that people invest this much time in nurturing staff; That said, there seems to be some companies whose sole purpose is to convert VC money in to full stomaches? I'm not knocking on Ridejoy specifically (I thought the whole community manager shebang a while back was very entertaining, and I like their idea) but there's a lot of posts on company eating on HN. Hackers and Gourmands?

With the Fernsehturm at Alexanderplatz in the background, I'd rather wager Berlin?

I would like to meet one of these fantastical java-only OO-proponents that are often brought up in posts like this, claiming that Java and OO are the end-all of programming. To be honest, I never have.

Some people seem to have a disposition to modeling problems with objects, but I fear I'm too young to have ever met any Java zealots. To me they seem more like straw men invented to help set up posts like this one.

I'm sorry to be skeptical, but this seems both redundant and pie-in-the-sky.

In the presentation they say they're looking for "Computer Science Engineers" make me think this is a bunch of aggravated designers. On the other hand, there is code on GitHub. But it's C++, which makes it feel like this is a bunch of aggravated developers who can't stand having to do HTML or CSS and want to do "real engineering" (usually defined as non-webapps). This seems to pop up every other month. All the while people keep making awesome web sites, applications and libraries with the stack we have today.

A small group of people is usually all it takes to change something, on the other hand, I don't think is change people want or need.

That said, I wish them all the best.

I predict several Techcrunch headlines on this newfound "payment" option disrupting ad-financed services across the globe.

Well, there's always the pricing: https://accounts.google.com/b/0/PurchaseStorage?hl=en_US

"You can't fake passion"

Honestly though, this gives a decent three step template for how to get yourself on the top of the pile in about ~1-5h worth of work:

1. Register a GitHub account, fork some projects that look cool

2. Register a domain, set up a yourname.github.com page for hosting, and add your contact info and link to github, whatever. Set up a mail redirector.

3. Upload your own project. If you don't have one, probably a good idea is to replicate some basic utility. How about pretty printing JSON using python from the command line?

Bam! Passion, done. For extra credit, create a blog and write two-three posts on why Java is verbose, something on getting started with node.js on your machine and a benchmark of your json utility and another one.

In all sincerity, when I look at candidates I also look hard for passion, and a blog, github, stackoverflow, etc puts them at the top of the pile.

As a counter anecdote, I've worked with tons of really, really good developers who went home at five, and came in at nine, and brought it every day. For most of them, life happened and with two kids it's harder to be prolific or show resume-friendly passion.

On the other hand, I doubt any of them will ever need to send in a resume anyway.

I agree that feedback is massively valuable. However, there are different ways to express said feedback. In general I find the tone at HN quite colloquial, and calling something "really useless" felt unnecessarily harsh.

There's a few things to object to in the plugin (like a comment below I find that removing ads together with asking for donations a very distasteful combo), but honestly, what value does your comment add except trying to put down the authors?

There are ways to critique something without calling it "really useless".