sethg

21 ms·

61.
by sethg 14y ago
Before Eduardo Savarin was a US citizen, he wasn’t a productive foreigner; he was a teenager who had been targeted for kidnapping in his native Brazil. ( http://pandodaily.com/2012/05/12/what-eduardo-saverin-owes-a... ) His father was a we
62.
by sethg 14y ago
From reading PEP 3131 and UAX 31, it looks like the only non-ASCII punctuation mark that would be permitted is U+2040 CHARACTER TIE (⁀).
63.
by sethg 14y ago
In a tech bubble, capital does not chase engineering talent; it chases whatever shiny thing resembles the last shiny thing that made headlines. And when the bubble bursts, the entire sector goes hungry for capital, even companies which, in
64.
by sethg 14y ago
”The position just wasn’t a good fit for me any more.” Imagine yourself on a date with someone you barely know, and listening to that other person go on a long rant about his or her ex. Does that make you more or less likely to want a seco
65.
by sethg 14y ago
In the cases I’m thinking of, “depends on what?” was met with more vagueness, or, in one case, “depends on what the client wants”. (This was at one of those companies whose business model involves a very small core product and a lot of per
66.
by sethg 14y ago
I (fortunately) didn’t build up a very large sample size, but there was one junior guy I spoke to who started his answer with “a normal engineer will show up at 9:00 and leave at 6:00...”. He did backpedal a bit when I questioned him more
67.
by sethg 14y ago
Unit tests was just an example. The issue is deeper than that. When I ask a question in a job interview, it’s because I want to learn something about the company, because I want to know whether its corporate culture and its philosophy of h
68.
by sethg 14y ago
Another thing to watch out for: (6) during an interview, if questions about work environment (e.g., “how do you manage unit tests?” which of course is code for “do you have unit tests?”) are answered with “that depends on the project/produc
69.
by sethg 14y ago
The last time I did a job search, one of the questions I started asking in interviews was “what distinguishes an employee at your company who meets your expectations from someone who is truly outstanding”? If the response was phrased in te
70.
by sethg 14y ago
Speaking as former Nokia employee (they bought my employer in April 2010, I bailed at the end of this January), I think all the discussion about Nokia’s strategy is missing a very big factor in Nokia’s decline. Their corporate culture is de
71.
by sethg 14y ago
80% of the children surveyed said it was OK to buy and sell the robot, while 50% said it was not OK to put him in the closet. The authors of the study speculated that “we are creating a new ontological being with its own unique properties”
72.
by sethg 14y ago
I was in one interview at a local startup where there was a whiteboard in the room, but none of the engineers who interviewed me asked me to touch it; they were satisfied to ask questions of the form “what do you know about Java Foobar Te
73.
by sethg 14y ago
I think dynamic and static type systems will eventually meet somewhere in the middle. Haskell has a “Dynamic” type for those times when you really do want to include dynamic types in your program. And some researchers have experimented wi
74.
by sethg 14y ago
People have been writing murder mysteries for the past hundred years, and some people are still writing murder mysteries, and some people write them in the hope of selling millions of copies. There’s nothing wrong, in itself, with writing
75.
by sethg 15y ago
One factor here is that the people running Hollywood studios assume that men don’t want to buy tickets to a movie where the main female character is anything but the romantic partner of the main male character. (Yeah, the success of the
76.
by sethg 15y ago
Regarding the hidden point: I think there’s an expectation in contemporary American culture that emotional intimacy is women’s work, i.e., they provide support and counsel and do other semi-therapeutic for their boyfriends, their husbands,
77.
by sethg 15y ago
As a character in an Orson Welles movie said: “A policeman’s job is only easy in a police state.”
78.
by sethg 15y ago
Libertarian, except for the “gangsters who control the fruit market... running a price-fixing cartel” mentioned on page 3.
79.
by sethg 15y ago
When you hire a structural engineer to design a bridge, you aren’t worried that your enemy has hired his or her own structural engineer to undermine your bridge at its weakest points.
80.
by sethg 15y ago
Well, in theory, this is true for any country. If you ship widgets to a customer in Madagascar and those widgets violate some obscure Malagasy law you never heard of, the Malagasy authorities could prosecute you. But if you didn’t have an
81.
by sethg 15y ago
Amen to what Steve says about a work queue. I've been in environments where, more than once, a dialogue with my manager would go like this: Me: "My to-do list is empty." Manager: "Oh, umm, let's have a meeting to talk about that... [consul
82.
by sethg 15y ago
I agree with the general point that you can’t give a blank check for anything, but I think your specific point about cancer is off-base. Some quick google-fu teaches me that in 2008, $90 billion was spent in the US on cancer treatment. Dur
83.
by sethg 15y ago
My cynical opinion is that most voters would rather have their poor neighbors go through an intrusive welfare system than simply receive checks, even if the simpler system would be cheaper. There’s a perverse sort of transaction going o
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by sethg 15y ago
At best, company policy will prevent those terms from being negotiated because they're standardized. If you frame your counteroffer as “I would take this job if you gave me $X more base salary or Y more vacation days”, then the guy across
85.
by sethg 15y ago
One question I’ve been asked, interviewing at startups, is: “how do you feel about cash vs. equity?” For my personal financial needs, this is a no-brainer: cash is king, baby. But other HN readers might be in a position where their market
86.
by sethg 15y ago
I was once in a situation where two companies were interested in hiring me, and when the hiring manager for one of them found out I had nibbles from elsewhere, he said he didn’t want to make me an offer until I was absolutely sure that his
87.
by sethg 15y ago
I believe the proper euphemism for this situation is “I am looking for new challenges”.
88.
by sethg 15y ago
I spent approximately the past year looking for a new job (and accepted an offer this month). From my salary research regarding people in my situation, it seemed like a 10% pay hike makes the difference between a median salary and a 75th-p
89.
by sethg 15y ago
If you don’t think your current salary is relevant to what you are worth to your next employer, then you don’t have to answer that question. Really.
90.
by sethg 15y ago
I don’t know specifically how to manage this procedure with recruiters, because in my most recent job search I found a position without using recruiters entirely. But my general attitude regarding salary negotiations in the early stage is t

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