Probably the best HN redesign I've seen yet to date.
Some light criticism:
1) decrease the padding between each story space, there's juuust a touch too much white space
2) the big attraction to HN is indeed the comments, so accessing or invoking the comments should be really easy. In your version, I have to click the comment icon or the comment numeral count link... why not instead have the entire space (excluding the story link) open up the comments?
> For the planet, sure. But for economic analysis its irrelevant.
No, for economic analysis overpopulation is very relevant. Maybe not in the extremely short term, but in the long term when overpopulation strains the finite supply of goods like energy and raw material, this becomes very relevant. In addition to the fact the reversing man-made climate change would also take incredible capital and resources to pull off, it's actually probably one of the biggest things to be seen in economic analysis.
> Given that it's impossible to produce more senior developers in a 1-2 year timeframe, what alternatives do people suggest to immigration?
Why do we operate under the assumption that these companies are entitled to as many unicorns as they want? Why shouldn't they just go out of business?
After the whole collusion ordeal when it became abundantly clear that on one side there are VCs, founders, and C-levels who work to suppress our wages -- and on the other side, us, I actually want to see them lose and get hurt after all the terrible things they did to us.
> because while you bear the costs of training, your competitors can then poach your trained employees by offering a salary that is less than your total cost for that employee but more than the salary you pay that employee
I tell everyone that in this day and age, the company is not loyal to you -- they will get rid of you very easily if they need to, and so you should not be loyal to them. However, if the company starts investing in you, training you, then you should be loyal to that company. I would't go to a competitor that pays higher in this case (if they pay higher than 2(X + Y), consider it :)).
Of course, you can have that without getting married. But you see, more than anything, marriage is really a cultural institution. It has a strong symbolic power. It's an excuse for a big party, a signaling of commitment, etc.
We humans do a lot of things based on tradition and culture. Marriage is one of those things.
Because come on, if we don't have culture, what do we have?
I think it's crucially important to note that even if folks watch porn, it doesn't mean they can't have a successful marriage. My thinking is it would actually probably help to make a conscious decision to stop watching porn or at least reduce to a healthy minimum (insofar as it is an activity that may make a man and a woman more distant and aloof), and look instead to rebuilding a healthy physical relationship [1].
The reason I feel the need to emphasize this is that I think it's pretty much a matter of fact these days that many people watch porn. They should not start thinking now that they'll have trouble with marriage because of their porn habits, rather they should focus on what can be done to prepare for a successful marriage and commit to that.
[1]: Somehow I'm expecting people to get nitpicky on me on this, so let me just preemptively say: if within the framework of your relationship watching porn is acceptable to you and your significant other, then bless you both, keep doing it.
> I think marriage is fundamentally an economic institution.
I don't like that reduction of marriage. Having known several couples who've made it for over 50 years and above, it really makes things clear to me -- they let themselves be totally truthful and vulnerable to each other, they rely on each other in the other's time of need, they find joy in doing things as one. Like most things, marriage is what you make of it, if all you want out of it is economic benefits, it can be just that.
Moreover, people who say they don't eat sugar don't mean they'll never ever eat sugar in any amount. I don't eat sugar - but I'm okay with a desert once per month or something. I'm also willing to eat things which have minute amount of sugar on a regular basis.
I wouldn't say he's a quack -- that implies incompetency. Dr. Oz is actually one of the best heart surgeons in the country, it's rather just that he sold himself for money.
The fascinating thing is, you can't stop the ads on HN from the big big players, because it's effectively accounted as being real news. Zuckerberg held the second public Q&A session the other day, that promised him some news. Then there was that article about a woman engineer at Facebook, the story appeals very appropriately to current events and the emotional zeitgeist of the tech industry, and there was that whole campaign by Sheryl Sandberg in the last few years (which she has dialed down now). So, astroturfing is an amateur's game, the big boys actually launch massive campaigns that give them a nice PR image, they do big actions that ensure coverage. All of this is done very carefully to ensure that the news is framed in a way they want to consumers. One of my favorite pg essays is about this, about the fact that a lot of journalists are lazy and fishing for a marketable story. Make the work easy for them, give them a marketable narrative (communicate it to them not by giving them money/bribing them -- no, that's an amateur's game, you give them the narrative in a socratic manner, you give them selected bits and pieces and trust they'll fill in the blanks). But money/bribing/soft extortion helps too. E.g., if you slam Apple, you don't get invited to their conferences and such. And everyone wants Apple stories... and if you can't report Apple stories, you lose viewers. So you just keep giving out nice Apple stories and you can remain confident you'll continue to get a nice stream of goodies from Apple. Etc. etc.
What? I did not say that Jobs was not a smart businessman, that's not what I'm contending. His quotes in this article are probably very valid and prescient, none of this is what I take issue with. I'm just saying he was a bad person who frequently did illegal and immoral things, and thus he shouldn't be the person we should look up to. Wozniak is a better role model figure for us all.
In the case of MLK, his womanizing activities were quite separate from his civil rights work. Steve Jobs very much got to the top by screwing over people. He was mean at work. And frequently did illegal things. There's a good argument to be made that were it not for him conspiring to prevent competitors from poaching employees, we'd be able to make more at our work places. I will absolutely never respect him for his streak of immoral/illegal acts. Wozniak is of course more the hacker we should look up to.
> That'd be the internet's automobile to the big labels' buggy whip. But people don't want indie content, they still want the buggy whips.
I generally want indie content to get a large user audience, I don't want the "buggy whips" people ostensibly are interested in to gain as much of a user audience, that is, things like, Anaconda, Wrecking Ball, Blurred Lines are supposedly what people want, I'd rather they not.
A friend of mine who had been playing the viola since age 6, took his craft extremely seriously, and played for about 10 years with an orchestra, recently decided he was done with it, he's not able to pay his bills. He's one of the nicest guys I know, it was depressing to see him finally resign. While our industry is rebuked for sexism, we see Eminem succeed again and again by repeatedly talking about raping, assaulting women in his songs, it's kind of disgusting really that this has sort of become his trademark marketing and branding strategy[1]. It bugs me that beautiful art perfected over generations is lost and left aside to shit made by producers with commercialization more on top of their mind.
I want to see the music industry to really just come to its knees (when I mean music industry, I actually really mean just the big record labels). I want it to become an unprofitable business, where it doesn't have much of a value, because that might be the last thing that deters record companies to stop making stuff that's formulaic and trite, using cheap misogynistic tricks and so on. Maybe then we can get back to having a piano or a guitar in the house, and making music ourselves, with friends and families.
> The genius who comes from Nigeria to the States to write some code is going to pick up skills and connections that will prepare them to go back and have a tremendous impact back in their home country.
But that's not going to happen. More than 95% of Indians who come here (and can stay here) will not go back to India. And that makes sense on the individual level, they're not going to find back home the safety and the quality of life they can get here so obviously they'll make the decision to stay here. But I'm not sure if we should base the policy on the liberties and considerations from the scope of the individual, we should ideally base the policy on what widely makes for a stable, safe, healthy world. I understand that a nation's job is to look after its own constituents, and nothing more, but I argue in this day and age we should recognize how interconnected the world is, and what magnificently deleterious ramifications our seemingly-benign actions can have.
> But hey: any one of us could go spend our lives living in and trying to improve a third world country.
That's going from, what is in my view, an active-bad action (siphoning talent from abroad, much to the detriment of the nations that are giving up these individuals), to a passive-okay action (letting Nigeria have its smart Nigerians) to an active-good action (we Americans going to Nigeria to make some good changes), aka philanthropy. As a nation responsible for its own constituents, we are not strictly obliged to do that, but we do -- and it's great that we do, we should continue doing it more.
They are almost never worthless. Small startups who are not experienced with interviewing may get a few bad apples, but companies like Quora (and the others on the list in submission article) don't make those mistakes. Sure, they may not all be Alex "Im-a-core-dev-for-Pypy" Gaynor's, but generally they'll be worth every penny of that 90k and another 90k more.
This brings up an interesting question. The reasoning for bringing talent over from abroad, does it make sense ethically? I'm greatly irked by the idea of a young and ambitious Indian/Nigerian/Chinese/Russian guy or girl coming here to... optimize ad targeting at Facebook, he/she should stay in India or Nigeria, because by golly Nigeria NEEDS that person much more than us. We can do fine with Facebook advertising algos working a little less efficiently, but Nigeria and India need these young men and women to actually create important, infrastructural changes. It seems highly unethical to be just siphoning the world's talent like that. India's culture of valuing education produced those competent engineers, India should get its fruits, India should use those young men and women to make India better. We're sitting here ignoring our recent graduates, they're burdened with massive debts... and we just ignore them. How about the companies that are sitting on billions spend a few dollars to train them, if they're not up to snuff? I've mentioned this elsewhere -- this is not the spirit of America that Emma envisioned, this isn't something to be proud of.
"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"
> Just a few hours later, Vox published an article titled These tech interns are probably making more than you are where they shared a tweet showcasing candid salaries at various tech companies, some larger, some smaller:
That is a kind of a bullshit argument though isn't it, that "hey look, the interns (supposedly half-able, incompetent newbies) are getting paid so high!! We have such wonderful salaries in tech!"
It's a lie, a total misrepresentation of the facts. The interns are usually super programmers themselves. I mean, for instance, when Alex Gaynor was "interning" at Quora he ported Quora to run on PyPy. He's a really big contributor to projects like Django and PyPy. When he's "interning" at your company he's probably more able than a lot of other folk you could find, and he should be getting very big bucks. So this argument is really just complete hogwash. A good amount of times I see the interns training employees rather than the other way around (as it should be).
Secondly, they're interning in the valley, where "boarding" costs are about equal to costs of getting a mansion in a midwestern city in a reasonably safe and fun neighborhood. When you're "making 90k" in the valley you have the quality of life worth ~60k in a midwestern city. If anything, they are underpaid.
edit: minor revision on figures for clarity of argument; though I do agree with moc down below when he says "If you're comparing suburbs (Silicon Valley) to suburbs, the discrepancy is much greater and I'd say that $90k/CA ~= $40k/Midwest"
Hey guys, the cover image is not properly displayed, it's very often clipping the image in bad spots (e.g. the head is completely missing here: http://www.femalefounderstories.com/shruti-shah.html - and in most other images the too much of the forehead is gone). I recommend simply clipping the images, won't take that long.
It’s likely guessing based on previously typed history.