Hacker News: hnriot

New comment by hnriot in "Salary negotiations for techies (2011)"

hnriot — Mon, 19 Jan 2015 19:36:59 +0000

maybe, but when an employee asks for a raise, or say they are quitting does that make them a horrible employee. so many people think that work is some big philanthropic organization set up to serve their needs.

New comment by hnriot in "Salary negotiations for techies (2011)"

hnriot — Mon, 19 Jan 2015 19:29:58 +0000

nobody said anything about firing anyone. That would be illegal for one thing.

New comment by hnriot in "Salary negotiations for techies (2011)"

hnriot — Mon, 19 Jan 2015 02:52:09 +0000

the real world doesn't work this way when people are involved.

New comment by hnriot in "Salary negotiations for techies (2011)"

hnriot — Mon, 19 Jan 2015 02:51:16 +0000

interesting to read all these from the engineer's perspective. from the manager's side of the table things are quite different. If an employee comes to me and asks for a raise then I begin the process to replace them. We give reasonable raises, we pay fair market value and an engineer might make a little more elsewhere but they'll be giving back their RSUs and the opportunity to work on really cool stuff. If, however, they want something else then good luck to them, people are all different and it's a free country, but asking for raises means they aren't happy so they will leave anyway, either way, I begin looking.

when someone joins, unless they are at vp level they really don't have much negotiating opportunity, we make a decent offer and they either take it or leave it. we very seldom adjust the offer.

New comment by hnriot in "Salary negotiations for techies (2011)"

hnriot — Mon, 19 Jan 2015 02:32:58 +0000

there are all kinds of intangibles not mentioned here. what if you have an idea that transforms the company's sales numbers or you dream up a better way of doing the builds that reduces integration bugs. So many ways an employee contributes intangibly.

you're right, pay is basically what your peers make +/-

New comment by hnriot in "Salary negotiations for techies (2011)"

hnriot — Mon, 19 Jan 2015 02:30:09 +0000

a 25% raise is unlikely next year, sounds to me that this was more of a salary adjustment than a raise which are typically between 3-9%. At your salary level it's not uncommon to have adjustments to bring you in line with others in your team. Possibly they started you low to see how it would work out.

New comment by hnriot in "Dijkstra on Haskell and Java (2001)"

hnriot — Sun, 18 Jan 2015 22:40:08 +0000

I'm not sure pointer concepts are very difficult, pointers might confuse people that didn't grow up with assembly language, but they really aren't very hard to understand and they are also less and less relevant. Over the years the abstraction level increases, it's far better to teach people to continue computer science to the next 21st century level, not go over stuff from the 70's again that they will likely never use. The breakthroughs in CS coming very likely won't be written in C (or assembly for that matter).

New comment by hnriot in "An easy to use iOS floating drawer view controller"

hnriot — Sun, 18 Jan 2015 07:46:18 +0000

Apple are just pissed they didn't think of the hamburger menu first. This is terrible advice, the are understood by all and the few people that don't know where this mysterious control will take them can just click it and see. It's not like it's the rm -rf button.

New comment by hnriot in "What's Stopping Me Using Java8 Lambdas – Try Debugging Them"

hnriot — Sun, 18 Jan 2015 05:30:14 +0000

it's hardly java's fault he's looking at a stack frame and not seeing the variables that belong to a different stack. This is simply a matter of selecting a frame prior to the forEach.

New comment by hnriot in "Topic Analysis of Marc Andreessen’s Tweets"

hnriot — Fri, 16 Jan 2015 23:28:12 +0000

you'll also notice some editorializing the topics (venture -> venture capital)

the lda features are already grouped, that's exactly what an LDA does, however, translating a group of words into a "summary" (whatever that is) is non trivial. You'd find need to define what you're looking for. A visual summary for example might for example be a word cloud, another might be the use of ontology tagging if you consider those a salient summary.

New comment by hnriot in "Activist pulls off clever Wi-Fi honeypot to protest surveillance state"

hnriot — Fri, 16 Jan 2015 03:59:12 +0000

you have clean water? food?

New comment by hnriot in "Google Glass sales halted"

hnriot — Thu, 15 Jan 2015 22:57:47 +0000

not a big surprise, they've all but completely disappeared from sight around S. Another Segway, but I doubt Google were ever serious about Glass, it was a demonstration of Google as committed to being a futuristic hi tech company.

The problem with the product is that people like the compartmentalization of the smartphone, you take it out of your pocket to take a photo, nothing surreptitious. And to be honest, the smartphone just does a lot more. This is going to be the challenge that the Apple Watch will also face, it competes with the smartphone for your attention and has to add enough additional value to justify the product segment.

Meanwhile, it's no big deal, products come and go and some end up with much smaller target customer base, although I suspect Glass is (as Segway was) being considered for a few specific markets but over the coming year or two will just vanish only to be revisited in a decade but with holographic projection (a la R2D2) and streetview-like surround-camera and built in plethora of biometric sensors that all feed into the big post-Singularity GoolgleBrain to provide it's eyes, ears and voice...

New comment by hnriot in "Show HN: Timeline.com"

hnriot — Thu, 15 Jan 2015 17:10:42 +0000

https://m.timeline.com/bower_components/angular-facebook/lib... Failed to load resource: net::ERR_BLOCKED_BY_CLIENT https://www.google-analytics.com/analytics.js Failed to load resource: net::ERR_BLOCKED_BY_CLIENT app.js:4 Uncaught Error: [$injector:modulerr] Failed to instantiate module timeline due to: Error: [$injector:modulerr] Failed to instantiate module facebook due to: Error: [$injector:nomod] Module 'facebook' is not available! You either misspelled the module name or forgot to load it. If registering a module ensure that you specify the dependencies as the second argument.

Chrome/Linux Version 39.0.2171.95 (64-bit)

New comment by hnriot in "Show HN: Building terminal dashboards using ASCII/ANSI art and JavaScript"

hnriot — Thu, 15 Jan 2015 04:54:37 +0000

Helicopter FTW

New comment by hnriot in "Google's new bus is for the people"

hnriot — Mon, 12 Jan 2015 23:08:56 +0000

Isn't this the city's job? I actually think it's kind of creepy that Corporations are taking the role of the City. The general idea is the City collects taxes and uses those to provide services like buses.

New comment by hnriot in "Don't Talk to Corp Dev"

hnriot — Mon, 12 Jan 2015 22:19:32 +0000

This seems to be written very much from the perspective of a VC backer and not the company itself. There are lots of reasons to sell a company, many are ignored by this blog article which does little more than make the M&A guys look like a bunch of used car salespeople. Having been on both sides of the arrangement, getting acquired (twice) both times by Fortune 50 tech companies, and then buying companies I really haven't seen the robber-baron tactics. Obviously every M&W guy worth his salary will try to get the best deal for his company and any CEO getting bought out should have the experience to know the way deals go down. If you're worth X to one Fortune 500, odds are you're worth that to another, meaning the acquiring company has leverage to walk away. This either helps set the price, or the price was artificially inflated in the first place.

There are a lot of very naive startup CEOs out there, that's the real problem, from the Fortune 500 side of the table it's like babysitting most of the time.

New comment by hnriot in "Java 8: No more loops"

hnriot — Mon, 12 Jan 2015 17:28:18 +0000

actually this is not true, what you're not noticing is that the parallel() use is akin to Spark, basically these streams are just map functions and if you can put the closure onto multiple cores/machines you get much better performance without any additional programmer intelligence.

If you think that api is complicated then I don't think programming is for you, this is a very ordinary and usual construct in programming.

New comment by hnriot in "Show HN: App for Falling in Love"

hnriot — Sun, 11 Jan 2015 19:40:08 +0000

where are the interview answers? it's no good just having the questions, I won't know what to say!

New comment by hnriot in "East of Palo Alto’s Eden"

hnriot — Sun, 11 Jan 2015 04:36:21 +0000

it simply means the opposite of local and really I think that's what the parent comment meant. The issues in EPA are local and not systemic.

New comment by hnriot in "MongoDB Is Raising Another $100M"

hnriot — Sat, 10 Jan 2015 00:19:32 +0000

an opinion that has been touted since the 90's. still just as wrong.