Hacker News Reader

omouseon I interviewed at six top companies in Silicon Valley in six days

This only covers getting the interview and potentially succeeding at it.

It doesn't cover:

- how many hours a week will be worked

- how much stock options are on offer

- what other benefits there are

- what's the total compensation package like

- what skills will be gained

- what is the office environment like

Most of those "top" companies can be skipped over as places to interview at because they aren't very good on the above topics.

For example, interviewing at Facebook in 2018? After the Cambridge Analytica scandal? (which was in March 2018 according to Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Analytica ) Even millions of dollars of compensation wouldn't be worth interviewing at Facebook during that time, not until they get their house in order. Even Google has privacy and ethical issues that make it a less-than-desirable place to work at.

Amazon also has a culture of working a lot, maybe that's fine for someone just getting started in their software development career, but for most people, it isn't great to be working so many hours.

So 3 of the interviews didn't even need to happen; he could have concentrated on acing the other half of interviews (Apple, Yelp, LinkedIn)?

Also, fundamentally, he's interviewing for jobs where he will be told what to do and will either have to job-hop to get better salaries and better positions or spend 3-4 years at minimum to work up the ladder. So selecting Apple, Amazon, Google, etc. is actually a tough choice because you have to kinda plan for the next 5 years if you want to ensure you aren't wasting time and are actually advancing in your career!

It's a great start for an article but feels like a dime a dozen at this point (I've been reading about SV startups since highschool and Paul Graham's essay): if you want to work at a top SV company, no matter which is at the top at the moment, you'll have to jump through the algorithm interview questions hoops.

omouseon Twitter warns that private tweets were public for years

This is why whenever you build software, you basically should encrypt any and all data and you should be extremely careful when it comes to permission checks. Especially if you are a company or startup, there's no excuse for not burning through a few thousand dollars more here and there to build more secure software that doesn't result in privacy blow-ups like this.

I wonder if GDPR affects Twitter in this case and what % of their revenue can be taken as a penalty for treating users like shit.

omouseon To Cover China, There’s No Substitute for WeChat

And then we have things like this, where in Canada, a Liberal Party candidate used WeChat to post a racist campaign message: https://globalnews.ca/news/4853439/karen-wang-liberal-burnab...

How can any journalists learn about this story without a WeChat account or without having some insider (local Chinese person) who has access to a WeChat account?

Multiple Internets are already here, and we've got to work at bridging them all over again.

omouseon No privacy rules needed: ISPs say Web browsing isn’t “sensitive” data

Tor and VPN up. If this is how ISPs feel we should be treating encryption/privacy as a self-defense thing, kinda like insurance or home security.

omouseon Why your startup should be a Delaware C-Corp, not an LLC

One of these days I've gotta write, "why your startup should be a co-operative".

omouseon GitLab acquires Gitter, will open-source the code

Hah, nice. Love it, love it that a whole business can run on free/open source and selling hosting/support.

omouseon Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page

Mention "unions" or "professionalism" or anything that involves giving the actual value that a developer produces to the developer and the story will disappear very quickly. Maybe that's because of the mods or maybe it's because of the flagging by readers who have the pro-state-capitalist argument so ingrained in them. Whatever it is, it biases Hacker News in a bad way.

omouseon Facebook’s code quality problem (2015)

Yes and that's the perversity of the incentives in the industry. Automation and coding are such high value activities that even the smallest, shittiest piece of code can produce a lot of $$$ that can make up for its crappiness and its maintenance costs.

omouseon Facebook’s code quality problem (2015)

Facebook's "code problem" is what really does happen in the real world with such humongous business enterprises. Lot's of moving pieces in code, in people, in ideas and the amalgamation of these results in what most programmers will see as "code quality problem" yet the market sees as billions of dollars

There's something called waste. The issue is that we don't know how much better the situation can be but we can recognize that it's pretty shitty at the moment. If they're making billions of dollars and they're a big company and have all these code quality issues, what hope does a small company have when trying to make quality software? How many more billions could have been made with less churn and less maintenance costs?

omouseon SEC Rejects Rule Change for Bitcoin Exchange-Traded Fund [pdf]

without surveillance on a regulated exchange

So we're going to have competition in exchanges, a free market of them with various rules/surveillance levels? Neat!

omouseon Why the bounce rate of AMP pages is so high

because it takes over my browser and I want to use Pocket or Firefox's mobile view -_-'

omouseon Pushing Swift to the Server

Why. Seriously. Why. Whatever happened to domain-specific languages.

omouseon Uber's 'hustle-oriented' culture becomes a black mark on employees' résumés

It's about putting a "merit"ocracy in place that encourages people to backstab and generally act like jerks in order to get ahead.

I don't know why you put meritocracy in quotes, because that's what it is. The merits that are rewarded just so happen to be acting like jerks. In general society that is not a merit; but in the company it is a merit therefore Uber is a meritocracy.

omouseon Ask HN: Developers with kids, how do you skill up?

I don't have kids but the answer is: slowly with bursts of focus and concentration.

omouseon CIA malware and hacking tools

The best offense is a good defense. Improving the quality of software in general would be far more beneficial than developing zero-day short-sighted tools.

omouseon CIA malware and hacking tools

The bigger issue I think is when the prosecution of the CIA leakers happens. If the material is unclassified, they're just distributing materials that are public domain and definitely in the interest of the public. If it's classified, it's a breach and they should be punished in some way.

omouseon CIA malware and hacking tools

I'm sorry but I didn't realize it was a requirement for spies to exist to have a free society.

omouseon The Job Interview Will Soon Be Dead. What It's Being Replaced With

The answer is!!!!! Clickbait. That's what won't ever go away.

omouseon A right to repair: Why Nebraska farmers are taking on John Deere and Apple

I think legally requiring the producer supply OEM parts is a bit of a stretch.

It's not a stretch. This is equipment that should last a while and you should be able to get replacement parts. This isn't a single-use phone that will be thrown out and recycled.

omouseon Sexism at Uber from Female Management

I would highly recommend this. I didn't understand why a WBS made sense to do or how to keep a list of risks, but after attending a project management class it made sense. Not only that, but as we worked through a project in the class, it enforced how tasks and communication work properly for projects.

Basic finance and negotation are a must.

It's amazing how many people don't have much training in these skills.

omouseon Promising Startups

It's because you can only fool your customers/clients for so long before they realize your product is garbage. If you have poor quality you need to have a lot of support staff to deal with the calls/emails or you need to have deep pockets to offer discounts and refunds repeatedly.

It's so fucked to read about VC-funded startups and read Paul Graham's earlier essays because he pretty much summed up a startup as "move as fast as possible to build a product that your customers want" and emphasized quality. Somewhere along the line, getting VC funds somehow has dwarfed that goal.

omouseon I've been a software engineer for 10 years and I can't do interview questions

The dream was to make your own rules (which includes a ferrari, a private office and all sorts of perks). Getting bought by Google, Facebook, etc. is the new way of getting "fuck you" money.

omouseon Promising Startups

There's a list of companies that have raised money but it doesn't appear that there's a list of companies that are profitable. Disappointing that only VC-funded startups are highlighted.

Quid began with a list of around 50,000 private companies that had received venture capital or venture debt in the past three years

Ohhhhh. There's the problem.

omouseon Why super-smart people may be drawn to a life of crime

omouseon How Uber Used Secret “Greyball” Tool to Deceive Authorities Worldwide

The next step is the tech becomes available to everyone; unfortunately that won't happen anytime soon when it's so lucrative to create tools that can only be used large teams and megacorps/multinationals.

omouseon Sexism at Uber from Female Management

Surprise surprise, managers behave badly and it doesn't matter what their background is.

Usually engineers have to go through rigorous interviews; maybe it's time that was stepped up for managers with better behavioural questions.

omouseon Like startups, most intentional communities fail. Why?

It sounds like since they aren't creating more wealth, either through increased productivity or lowered costs, they start to worry about the dilution of community assets?

This in turn makes joining the community less attractive.

That sounds like it just hits the natural limits of a community? Doesn't sound too bad.

omouseon Google Hangouts temporarily won’t support phone/video calls on Firefox

lol thanks man, I know I'm an old-man in Internet years, I'm sure that it works now but then why is the Google Hangouts team temporarily not supporting it?

which sites are you using webrtc on firefox?

omouseon State.of.dev – Explore the current state of development

I would trust the ThoughtWorks Radar over this but it's nice to see a competitor and a different angle. The market has room for more providers of this kind of information, it just has to be higher quality.

omouseon Google Hangouts temporarily won’t support phone/video calls on Firefox

I was working on a WebRTC client in Angular a few years ago and basically Firefox was weird.