Site that provides lists/rankings of startups.. - <AUTHOR>

hi..
trying to find out if there's a comprehensive list of startups.. a kind of digg for startups, that rates/ranks startups using various criteria..
i'e been looking/high/low with no luck!
thanks
tom <comment><USER2> tom if you are interested in working on the project then email me at mklein1 at babson.edu

</comment><comment><USER2> seedtrackers.com but it is under development</comment>


The Internship: Not the Movie - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/09/opinion/sunday/the-internship-not-the-movie.html?_r=0

<comment><USER2> Friedman is a hack[1]. Aside from the fact that his primary source for this article seems to be a New Yorker _cartoon_ , he seems unaware of federal law on unpaid internships, which is quite stringent.

[1] [http://nypress.com/flathead&#x2F](http://nypress.com/flathead&#x2F);

<comment><USER3> Quite stringent and largely unenforced.

<comment><USER4> This article was written in 2005. I've read Friedman's columns since, and they haven't gotten any better.

Look at this [1] piece in the _Columbia Journalism Review_ about Friedman's ramblings two years ago about a "radical centrist president".

Friedman lost a lot of credibility when he advocated for the Iraq War.

[1]: [http://www.cjr.org/campaign_desk/tom_friedman_still_wrong.ph...](http://www.cjr.org/campaign_desk/tom_friedman_still_wrong.php)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It remains unclear to me how I was able to get an entry-level Software Engineering position in the DC/Baltimore area with nothing but a BS in CS from UMBC and no internships or relevant experience.

Also, Tom Friedman was a really boring commencement speaker.

<comment><USER6> Because SE is not a sexy a job as being a "journalist" or working in the "medja"

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Nice follow up

</comment><comment><USER8> Lol Dwight. Read article. Watch Vince Vaughn.

</comment><comment><USER9> w00t hireart 4tw. although wth is friedman writing about?</comment>


Cult Figures - <AUTHOR> http://www.pimco.com/EN/insights/pages/cult-figures.aspx

<comment><USER2> For a pretty good analysis of problems with this, see Brad DeLong's take: [http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2012/07/equity-returns-and- the...](http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2012/07/equity-returns-and-the-size-of- the-economy-bill-gross-makes-a-distressingly-common-error.html)</comment>


Samsung Launches Offensive Against Apple - <AUTHOR> http://www.osnews.com/story/25174/Samsung_Launches_Offensive_Against_Apple

<comment><USER2> "so it's refreshing to see the company go on the offensive. "

No, it's sad to see that the company HAD to go on the offensive. But the only way to stop the bully is to bloody his nose.</comment>


Big Company vs. Startup Work and Compensation - <AUTHOR> http://danluu.com/startup-tradeoffs/ <comment><USER2> 250k a year in 5 years at a big corporation, really? Yea if you're lucky to work on a project/team higher-ups care about and are also willing to bust your ass working long hours to meet insane deadlines. Also, you better be someone who is excellent at communication and charismatic if you want to get invited to the table of interesting work.

There are a lot of brilliant hyper-competitive people who work at these big companies and you will be a small fish. So I think this article is spreading a myth that there is guaranteed piles of money to be made by working at Google, Facebook, Apple, etc.

<comment><USER3> This doesn't undermine the author's point. As another commenter said, people are really underestimating the likelihood of earning a $250k salary at a large company. It's really, really doable at a large company within 5 years if you hit senior level and live in a metropolitan area.

The author's core point is that you are much more likely to become a senior engineer at a large company (and thus earn ~$250k in salary) than you are to hit the jackpot at a startup.

If you were to take the set of people who achieve senior tier (or comparable) at large tech companies and the set of people who earn at least $250k as a lump sum payout for working at a successful startup, you'd find that the former group is vastly larger than the latter.

If you were to do the same exercise and replace the second group with folks who actually got "rich" (for any reasonable definition) working for a startup, you'd find that it would not even be visible as a pixel next to the former group.

Statistically, you are simply better off trying to hit senior at large tech company if you want to optimize your career for wealth. This is so doable within five years that at large companies like Google and Microsoft you are expected to hit senior level, and if you don't it begins to reflect badly on your record. More explicitly, "senior" is the last level that everyone is expected to hit, and at which you are "allowed" to not seek further promotions.

<comment><USER4> > It's really, really doable at a large company within 5 years if you hit > senior level and live in a metropolitan area.

If, if, if, if. Just by numbers, most devs don't meet these criteria. And even in the periods of time which I personally have, I still was not making anywhere near this kind of money.

These numbers are inflated and out of reach to the vast majority of developers in the workplace today, full stop.

<comment><USER3> Yes, there are if's involved. It is not certain that you will achieve senior tier at a large company in a metropolitan area. But you are also not certain to earn anything from your startup equity.

I will reiterate - you are more likely to reach $250k working at a large company than you are to earn it (in salary or lump sum) at a startup.

This has been corroborated by numerous individual's experience in this thread, including my own. I personally interact with companies that pay this on a _weekly_ basis.

<comment><USER5> You need to quit saying "a metropolitan area" when you mean "Silicon Valley and a few places that have satellite offices for companies based in Silicon Valley," is the thing.

Show me the companies in Columbus, OH that pay that way. Or Milwaukee, WI. Or or or.

<comment><USER6> New York, Philly and DC exist. They all have tech markets that are not at all dependent on SV.

<comment><USER7> It is my experience that these figures are well on the high side for Philly though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'd recommend anyone looking for their first job out of university to consider strongly a job at a startup. Consider it a 'finishing school', where you'll have the highest chance to touch as many different technologies and tasks as possible (from system administration, to backend to frontend work), as opposed to the 'Big Company' where (especially for a first job) you'll be focused on one task.

The important thing is to _leave after one year_ , no matter the compensation you are getting. Teams have a tendency to give the shittiest work to the most junior member, and there's very little inertia to replace that person if they are doing a stellar job at that shit work, but once you leave that startup with bankable experience under your belt, you'll have a much easier time interviewing and negotiating yourself a cushier position at either another startup or a big company.

Most big companies have a much better career 'ladder', where you'll be on a path to more interesting work once you've proven your worth, but I suspect you'd still be in a better position coming into the company one or two years in, rather than starting the treadmill at a lower salary/title.

<comment><USER9> I went about it the opposite way, and can definitely recommend that as well: big company first, then small. The big company experience shows you a ton of things, like how to interview, build, and deploy at scale. The small company can benefit from your ability to bring order to chaos, develop tools which are obvious in any big company but strangely missing from every small one, and more.

Maybe it doesn't matter which one you start with, but you should give both a try at some point.

<comment><USER10> This sounds great when you envision that big company as Amazon, Google, Microsoft or Facebook. It sounds less so when you envision that company as Oracle, eBay, Yahoo! or SAP. Some large companies are mostly going to teach you politics, byzantine process and spending money as a means of scaling bad software.

It's important to differentiate skills learned at big companies. Some are very useful, but others are coping mechanisms that have no place in a startup. Meanwhile, the scrappiness and well-rounded skill set learned at a startup will almost always have a place in larger businesses.

My own personal recommendation for early career workers would be to prefer the cream-of-the-crop mid and large companies where you'll get useful experience you can't find anywhere else, then prefer startups and leave the slower-moving and more dysfunctional larger companies as a last resort.

<comment><USER11> yes. which big company matters so much. i find it frustrating when my hacker school friends deride big companies as having no interesting work being done or not being great places to work. Having worked at startups and two different big corporations, I've learned the most at the very large company I work at now, almost nothing at the first one I did and a mixed bag at startups.

<comment><USER12> Heck, even well known boring big companies (eg IBM, Oracle) have great smaller teams that are doing interesting things. Much of it is a crapshoot. The nice benefit of the smaller company is that you have much higher likelihood of seeing your code go into production, and experiencing the feedback from it being used. At a big company you will get shielded from that. Often for good reasons - but the feedback truly helps your career.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I've made this point before, but since it's a bit relevant here, I'll make it again (sorry to repeat):

If you're primarily interested in making money, or if you love the startup but not the compensation, you should NOT work at that startup.

If you're a good developer, you can get a better deal by working at an established company and simply investing. This has been true for every startup offer I've ever seen. Ever.

I've considered lots of startup jobs because I believed strongly in the companies. Every single time, however, I was able to get a larger chunk of the company by keeping my current job and simply investing.

To give an example, my current job pays about $250k, and one year, I invested $100k of that into a startup, leaving me with ~$150k of salary. This $150k + startup equity was a better deal than the startup was offering in both salary and equity (BY FAR). Plus, equity bought as an investor is much less tax toxic than equity options received as an employee of a startup.

On the other hand, most people who work at startups aren't interested in money. If that's you, that's totally cool!

<comment><USER14> AFAIK, working at Google et. al. pays well, but for most people your career will cap out at senior engineer. At other big companies (banks, telecom, oil, etc) a good Google dev can climb the tech career ladder quickly and make more money, get more responsibility (if that's your thing).

Do you want to be a small fish at Google, or a big fish at Goldman Sachs?

<comment><USER15> You may be under-estimating how competitive and difficult becoming a big fish at Goldman Sachs is. And in many places (ex, banks), your technical chops are not appreciated as much.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I didn't do more than browse the article because I didn't need to hear the arguments to accept the conclusion. I think the only place perhaps in the world where working in a startup could be seen as any way superior to working at an established business is in Silicon Valley, where enormous amounts of VC money come together to create a modern Rome.

Certainly we need Rome, the modern world wouldn't have existed without it, but Romans themselves are myopic and self-obsessed. They need to be, otherwise it wouldn't be Rome.

I love that Silicon Valley exists, but I wouldn't want to live there. I love the people that go there and exist on the bleeding edge of innovation. I'll happily sit here behind the curve and have a normal life with a house and car and kids. I'll root for the dreamers that go there and hope that they too can one day achieve their dream life. I don't need that glory.

<comment><USER17> Actually, as an European (as in, in a completely different environment than SV), I'd recommend the opposite with a small tweak, add "small company" to the startup meaning.

Most big companies I've worked with in Europe have horrible new employee training package or no training at all. I haven't worked in a single one that took fresh out of college types and allowed them to work in different departments. The most common scenario when a new graduate gets hired into a team doing X is to throw him in, get whatever documentation the team has, even maybe someone to ask questions and the expectation is that he will do X for the next few years.

Opposed to this is the environment in a small company/startup, where you'll be forced to do a bit of everything and even lend a hand with stuff that is not your job at all. You'll have the chance to see different technologies, see the whole process end to end AND then, decide what you want to do.

BTW, is salary that important for people starting their careers? Salary advancement yes, even what salaries you might expect with 2/5/10 years of experience, of course. But for a first job? Does it matter that much?

My first salary was crap (600€/month in the year 98), but allowed me to work in multiple environments (web, databases, sysadmin, embedded system...) and when the time came to look for a new place, allowed me more freedom to choose what I wanted to do (the biggest problem I had finding a job, in the middle of the .com crisis, was convincing employers that, yes, I had indeed worked with all those technologies in 'only' 2.5 years). I multiplied by 5 my salary with that second job, which was a more than decent salary in the country at the time.

<comment><USER16> We're on the same page here.

I don't work at a big company, I work at an established one. The key factor is that they're not still trying to validate their business plan, not the size. I want one that's been around for at least ten years. Less than that and I have to ascertain for myself whether the company's going to be around long enough for me to get what I went in there for.

The goal here is mitigating existential risk to your employment situation. There's outside risk, the chances of your company going under, and internal risk, the chances of getting fired or laid off before you've accomplished your goals.

Working at an established company mitigates external risk, working at a small one helps mitigate internal risk because you can get to know your company very well and keep alive to shifts in politics. For me, the small, established company is ideal. I work at such a company now and will only jump to a similar company for a significantly higher salary. Small bumps aren't worth the switching costs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I've worked at both startups and big companies since I first came to SV in 1999. And some startups that became big companies. For me, there's much more than the practical & financial considerations laid out here. Deep down I know that I enjoy taking risks -- I like the roller coaster ride, and having a very real and visible impact on whether the company as a whole sinks or swims. Know yourself and don't ignore your intuition.

Also, while "rand(100)" might be an accurate characterization of the returns of all employees over all startups, it is not entirely a game of chance. There is skill involved in picking the right startup to join: being proactive in your search, building a personal network, finding founders with track records, considering enterprise startups. You can learn to improve your odds -- a bit like learning to count cards.

<comment><USER19> If you think you're that good at picking financially successful startups, why not invest just money rather than time AND money?

<comment><USER20> Because you're not legally able to do so unless you're an accredited investor?

<comment><USER21> Is this true? if so, how can sites like angel.co exist? I believe I can invest in most of the startups right now on there..

<comment><USER22> You must be an accredited investor to invest on angel.co. see: [https://angel.co/help/general- solicitation/accredited](https://angel.co/help/general- solicitation/accredited)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I don't want to criticize too harshly, because I do think this analysis is generally good (if slightly unoriginal).

The problem is that these analyses always focus on how you, as a prospective employee, can extract the most value from the world. Optimizing cash vs equity or arbitraging location or whatever.

You can see it seep through all over the place in the language used. Sometimes it's subtle:

> I've told that anecdote to multiple people who didn't think they could get a > job at some trendy large company, who then ended up applying and getting in.

Waiting and hoping to "get in" is pretty weak. It implies that we're all just meat-sacks working away until some of us get lucky and manage to convince a fancy company to overpay us and let us extract a lot of value from them.

If you have value to contribute to the world (and you definitely do), then go figure out someplace where you can best contribute it. Stop worrying about the best way to take things from the world and figure out the best way put stuff in. The rest will take care of itself.

<comment><USER24> aka "ask not what your world can do for you, ask what you can do for your world"!

<comment><USER23> More-or-less yeah. You'll have a much better time in life with this worldview I think.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> > A new grad at Google/FB/Amazon with a lowball offer will have a total comp > (salary + bonus + equity) of $130k/yr.

I think these companies are actually _too_ ideal to draw this conclusion from. For everyone Google/Amazon/FB, you also have a Comcast, an Oracle, an HP or Cisco.

You frequently hear about companies like Apple, Google, Facebook, etc trading employees. You don't hear about the typical big company poaching anyone besides executives.

Edit: The above doesn't seem to represent a clear thought. I'm trying to argue that the average big company doesn't pay as well as those three. Similarly, the average startup isn't going to be able to pay massive dividends in four years.

</comment><comment><USER26> Equity at a startup is a joke these days, even as valuations climb to infinity. When you're an engineer at a VC-funded startup you're competing against VCs for a piece of a pie. And guess who will walk away with the pie at the end? Will it be the Ruby expert who wrote the backend, or will it be the VC partner who drew up the terms of the funding and the exit?

If you join a startup early you'd be very lucky to get 1%, 2% maybe? Ok so then 4 more rounds of funding go by and you're diluted. Then finally after 5 years you sell to Googapplesoft for $200M. Holy shit, payday is here! Wrong.

First you're going to pay out to all of the preferred shareholders, some of whom might have special payout clauses because you guys really needed the money. Then you find out your 1% is now 0.3% and you have to wait 6 months to sell any of it. So you busted your ass for 5 years for a few hundred thousand dollars when you could have had a full-benefits, low-stress job at Googleapplesoft in the first place and not put nearly so much at risk.

Oh and there's a 90% chance that exit never even happens and all you did was work way below market salary for worthless stock. Oh and that whole time you probably had crap health insurance and minimal 401k matching so your savings aren't looking too good either.

The point of the above is not to say "don't work at a startup" because it's obviously a great experience and the right choice for some. And who knows, maybe it will be WhatsApp and you'll be a billionaire and you can come back here and mock me. But if you run the numbers (as the article says), you really shouldn't work at a startup if you're after money.

</comment><comment><USER27> It's worth nothing that the mean and median salaries of graduating Carnegie Mellon University CS majors, one of the top CS schools, is only $103k/105k:

[http://www.cmu.edu/career/salaries-and- destinations/2015-sur...](http://www.cmu.edu/career/salaries-and- destinations/2015-survey/pdfs-one-pagers/scs-2015-post-grad- stats-12-17-15-kc.pdf) [pdf]

Having $130k as a baseline salary for the analysis is silly. (However, a total compensation of $130k is not silly)

</comment><comment><USER28> Working in Europe I can never believe these fantasy numbers from the U.S. 250k USD after 5 years, seriously? A good Senior Developer here, with 5-10 years of relevant experience, might have a base salary of around 50-60K EUR, and perhaps another 0-2K EUR in bonuses. Then you have to pay around 30% income tax and another 20% if you hit a certain income bracket (which you do with 50K) in many Western European countries. If you want to make more you need to do contract work or roll your own business.

<comment><USER29> It's real and if you're willing to move to SV, they're always hiring.

<comment><USER30> But also get ridiculously lucky or be past the 95th percentile of coders.

<comment><USER31> Nah. Programmers at Google, Facebook, et al. are all pretty solid, but most aren't amazing ninja rockstars or whatever. I'm at one of them, been doing fine career-wise and I'm certainly not mind-blowingly good or anything.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I don't see why this is getting much attention. You can look at the financials all day long, but what really matters is your happiness. Are you going to be happy at a big company doing the same job day in and day out? If so, great!

If you're the type of person that can't stand repetition and predictability and want the emotional roller coaster of creating something new, then join a startup!

We don't have blog posts talking about the payouts between being an artist and a hedge fund manager, and yet people still become artists. Why do we do this in the startup culture? We shouldn't feel apologetic or like we're missing out on something if we decide that what makes us happy is to work at a startup.

<comment><USER33> It's basically a reply to the positive coverage that Startups get. Startups get the glory (as much as you can in this line of work anyway). They get TV shows, movies and endless blog posts. And judging from the attention, his post was needed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Getting a job at Google as an engineer is ridiculously hard. The guy that wrote Homebrew couldn't even get hired even though 90% of their engineers use his software.

[https://twitter.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768](https://twitter.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768)

If you can get a job at Google, it's very different than getting a job "at a big company" and has historically actually increased your odds of success later on (via the propensity of investors to fund Xooglers). So I would definitely agree - taking a job at Google when you haven't had one before vs. starting a startup is a very legitimate choice to make. Taking a job at Microsoft vs. starting a startup, I would argue (and the X-Microsofters in my life) a very different one.

<comment><USER35> You shouldn't confuse "getting a job there is hard" with "the interview process is random and skewed toward false negatives, with an especially bad job done with experienced candidates"

\---

"Second problem: every 'experienced' interviewer has a set of pet subjects and possibly specific questions that he or she feels is an accurate gauge of a candidate's abilities. The question sets for any two interviewers can be widely different and even entirely non-overlapping." \-- [http://steve- yegge.blogspot.com/2008/03/get-that-job-at-goog...](http://steve- yegge.blogspot.com/2008/03/get-that-job-at-google.html)

"I have 25 years of software development under my belt, I published a book, spoke at various conferences in Europe, have a Github profile (admittedly not very lively), worked for well-established enterprises and have great references. Why shall I still prove myself?" \-- [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10757186](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10757186)

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> I spent the first 15 years of my career as follows:

3 years in small companies outside the bay area 10 years in bay area startups ~2 years in bay area big corporations

I can say the following. The transition from startup to big company was really tough. Part of this was because I was used to being "the guy" for such a wide range of things. At big corporations, these roles are divvied up into 5-10-15 different roles. This is both good and bad. On the plus side, I can relate somewhat intelligently to colleagues across a very wide range of roles. On the minus side, the colleagues all (rightfully) feel their areas are their domain and don't typically recognize expertise coming from outside their team. This knowledge with lack of credibility was hard to reconcile until I fully realized what was going on.

</comment><comment><USER37> I don't think you can go into a company as large as Google and expect your salary to double in five years. HR will have set limits to how much of a raise you can get in any given year and even with promotions you would be very unlikely to see that kind of bump. I also don't think the middling programmers he mentions would hit the 250k year mark.

Orthogonal to the point of the article, but the only time you can really get a salary bump is _before_ you start, so make sure to negotiate like hell before you get in. Once you're in, you're going to be grinding to get a 3% raise (contrary to what the OP states).

<comment><USER38> The idea of starting fresh out of school at a company for $130K, doubling up to $250K seems to me ludicrous, besides for a rare few outlier roles at a rare few companies. I can say I've got close to 20 years of experience and I don't make anywhere close to that.

Not saying there are no roles like this--just saying this probably several standard deviations from the mean, and not useful as a "back of the envelope estimation of big company tech salaries in general"

<comment><USER39> I personally know someone that went from 130k to over 1 million in 7.5 years at a large 20,000+ person non valley company. Skills, luck, negotiation, and HR will get ignored.

<comment><USER38> Totally believe it, but he or she is a clear outlier, when considering the huge breadth of tech positions out there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> So I've been at this 9 years and I'm not making six figures. Fuck. I don't even understand where I went wrong. Part of me can't believe the article at all.

His comment about cost of living was kind of an outright dismissal, very odd? I don't think Google will let me work from Milwaukee.

Where is the information on travel, quality of life (owning a house?), etc?

<comment><USER41> _I don 't think Google will let me work from Milwaukee._

Depending on your skills, maybe they would, maybe they wouldn't. But you might be surprised to learn that the author worked for Google an hour-and-a-half away in Madison? [https://github.com/danluu/tex- resume/blob/master/resume.pdf](https://github.com/danluu/tex- resume/blob/master/resume.pdf)

<comment><USER40> I am surprised, and it my own mistake not to look into. Thanks for pointing me to his resume.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> sudo-i Paul Graham/Sam Altman/Michael Arrington/etc... are just spreading their messages as they are always, because in the end more startups/more smart people at startups, the more it has an impact on their wallets.

It's just a fun as arguing which is a better phone, Android or iOS... it's super old and a boring, divisive conversation.

</comment><comment><USER42> Author missed option 3:

Do contract work at $250 an hour or equivalent compensation in shares at >= series B funded startups. Choose the level of risk you're willing to accept in cash vs equity. (Nearly) completely avoid politics and other office related BS. Take vacation between gigs if you like. Get a very broad variety of experiences at different companies and get a good feeling for what companies are willing to pay for should you decide to start your own.

</comment><comment><USER43> There is valid criticism to be made, but the negativity in this thread is out of proportion.

As somebody who worked at Google for 5+ years, I'd like to emphasize a point: If you sustain good work [1] for a few years, you will be rewarded well beyond expectations [2]. Your compensation will depend on your performance, and not on your starting salary. I think this is unique to Google and maybe a few other tech giants. From this point of view, the generalization to 'big company' is flawed. But otherwise the points made by OP are true, and I wish more new grads would see it (and believe it).

[1] Your overall contribution to the project is important. Whether you work 30 or 50 hours a week to get there, it depends on you, of course.

[2] And those rewards do not depend on the stock price going up. That's just cream on top.

<comment><USER44> Since the thread is about making career decisions, can you explain why you left Google?

<comment><USER43> I didn't leave. I guess I used the wrong tense.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> When it comes to compensation I think it's pretty clear that Big Companies win. You don't even need to point to Google, Facebook, etc to make this point.

However, his argument becomes truly hand-wavey and spurious when it comes to the interesting work part. Of course some of the most interesting tech papers are coming out of Google, that doesn't mean anything for the average Google employee. Also, in his, argument, he goes from "here's what the average can expect for compensation" to, "you need leverage to work on interesting things at big companies...get some".

Of course not all start ups provide interesting work, but I think the dice roll is solidly in the camp of start ups for interesting work against the Big Cos, whose interesting work dice roll, I would guess, is similar to the start up comp dice roll. Unless rebuilding a bog standard UI framework is your thing.

At my first startup job I got to:

\- build a compiler

\- implement shared memory on high traffic services

\- play with any language I wanted

\- manage smart and interesting people

\- more stuff, but I'm tired of typing.

<comment><USER46> You did a greenfield implementation of a compiler?

Why?

<comment><USER47> it's terrifically fun?

<comment><USER48> Investors invest in fun?

<comment><USER47> Was the question about investors? I thought it was addressed to the person who did the implementation.

<comment><USER48> He said he worked for a startup.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> Like everyone else... I couldn't get past the repeating theme:

> But the total comp for "a good hacker" is $250k+/yr, not even counting perks > like free food and having really solid insurance

Maybe that's anecdotally true for the big companies in a small high demand area of the country (really just the bay) but not so most everywhere else. Probably why Paul Graham used a figure less than 1/2 that.

With that figure exaggerated, I'm not sure I can take any other points made here seriously...

<comment><USER31> It's true for the author's experience. We have a culture of not really discussing comp openly, so people mostly base what they think as 'normal' off what they and immediate friends in the industry make.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> To set people's expectations properly, this guy is high-tier dev that focused on his niche and probably had his payoff event 10 years into work. (Presumably his 8 year stint at Centaur and the buyout had some of that.)

AFTER all those 10 years, the Sr. Engineer plays at Google and Microsoft were probably 250k+, when they needed that 10 years of specialized experience for a $10M+ project and can pay to play.

Anec-data: As an SV person who's worked at BigCorp and funded startups (from co-founder to CTO)... these numbers definitely trend high amongst my friends and acquaintances who graduated Stanford CS in the early 2000s.

</comment><comment><USER51> You had me till you non-ironically referenced mchurch. Seriously if you ever see him start talking just turn around and walk away.

Having worked at Google for 7 years and now at a startup, I have to say the big company bullshit factor is huge. Even at Google where where bullshit is gold plated and served with delicious, locally sourced, healthy and tasty side dishes.

I learned a lot there, worked with brilliant people, was able to carve out super gratifying work. But, it just got silly. I'm thrilled to be gone, and hope never to go back.

<comment><USER52> Mchurch goes to the extreme quite often, but there's still a ton of truth in his main themes. He's trying to get people in the SV/VC-funded world to open their eyes to the subtle and not-so-subtle deceptions told here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> I've done both - 3 years as an employee across two different startups, 18 months as a founder, 5.5 years at Google, and now 18 months as a founder. I guess I'm quoted in the article too. :-)

All I can say is that the market is actually a lot more efficient than most people give it credit for. I remember coming out of school and thinking "Why would anyone work for a big company when the payouts for startups are so much better?" After a bunch of experience, I've found that:

1\. Those big startup payouts are much rarer than a typical new grad conceives. They're also more widely distributed: perception is that startups are "go big or go home", but a number of companies end in talent acquisitions that are just slightly less or more than what the founders would've earned at a big company.

2\. Compensation at big companies varies wildly, and people with the effort & effectiveness levels that you'd expect from a startup often are actually making startup-level money. There is _zero_ reason for anyone doing this to publicize that fact, and oftentimes they're contractually forbidden from disclosing it.

For people trying to decide between these - forget about the financial rewards and ask yourself "What would you like your working life to be like?" I'd also forget the common wisdom about startups = no life & big companies = drudging pace; both of these are inaccurate on a micro-level, and you can find startups that prioritize work-life balance or teams within a big company where everyone's life revolves around work.

Instead, think about the problems you would like to solve. Do you want to do cutting edge research that pushes humanity's knowledge forwards? Work for a research lab or big company's research department. Do you want to bring new technologies to the masses? Then you want a startup, probably one that has spun out of a major university with a couple professors as founders. Do you want to put social hacks in motion and bring technology to ordinary lives? That's probably also a startup, probably one with young founders. Do you want to scale technologies and work with big data or machine learning? Big company; startups usually lack ownership of enough data, unless they're a consultancy. Do you want to apply technology to an industry that currently does things backwardly? Join a startup whose founders have significant domain knowledge in that industry.

If you work on problems that you believe in, you'll find that you're much more effective at solving them. The financial rewards follow after that; money is a lagging indicator for value generated, not a leading one.

<comment><USER54> "oftentimes they're contractually forbidden from disclosing it"

Is that true? That sounds illegal.

<comment><USER55> You'd be surprised how unwilling people are to risk breaking contracts even when the actual terms are not valid or enforceable. Not to mention that there are plenty of ways to get fired over something you can't legally be fired for.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> Tangential to this article, but >pay outside of the US is often much lower for reasons that don't really make sense to me).

Can someone explain why salaries in for example Europe are so much less? Out of uni salary for example seems to be around 38k in Europe, whereas in US everything under 90k seems very low. Just the difference in purchase power and costs?

<comment><USER57> There is a huge difference between companies where software is the product (Google, Microsoft, Silicon Valley startups), and companies where software supports a business that has nothing to do with software (most IT jobs).

When software is the product, you tend to consider your software developers as money makers and pay them better. When you think of your engineers as a necessary evil to sell other stuff, you tend to pay them as little as possible.

Europe is full of the second scenario. That's the problem.

<comment><USER58> The majority of the world's software is the second case. It just so happens we have a lot of software product and services companies in the US. Also, just because you're a technology vendor doesn't mean that you'll treat your software developers well. There's tons of really mediocre software companies (large ones, even) that outsource developers constantly and shower sales with massive bonuses because they've failed to make a good business being good at technology, so they become a sales-oriented culture. This tends to happen at the majority of large (10k+ employee) software companies across the Fortune 500. Technology itself is a business few are actually capable of doing well in, most just mark up crap for other businesses and deliver "value" in areas that have nothing to do with good engineers of any sort.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> As someone in The Bay Area looking for work as a sysadmin with a heavy interest in automation/devops (obligatory plug), it's not a question of Big Company vs. Startup, it's a question of who is hiring and has at least been open to interviewing; these have almost unanimously been startups. I'd like nothing more than the stability of a large company with interesting projects and decent pay but lets be honest, how many of us will really have the chance to work for Google or Facebook vs the earlier stage startup that's a bit more risky but has a product you find worth supporting and has reached out to you based on their interest in the projects you've been working on?

</comment><comment><USER60> It may have been said elsewhere, but even if it has it should be said again. There is a huge difference between a tech "Big Company" like Google, FB, Amazon, Apple, etc., a Startup Company and a traditional non-tech "Big Company" like, oh, you know, most of the Fortune 500 in virtually every other industry - retail, pharma, insurance, transport, etc.

A tech Big Company values engineers and pays accordingly.

A non-tech Big Company simply does not value engineers or tech and consider both to be cost centers instead of drivers of growth.

I would plainly say that jobs at either a Startup or a tech Big Company would both be better options than a job at a non tech Big Company.

</comment><comment><USER61> I think the endgame of SV is to become more like Hollywood. Not that that's necessarily a bad thing.

Typical startup raises a $500k seed round and is two founders + 2 senior engineers building the v1. If founders want Google-caliber people, they can't afford to pay $200k; the cash just isn't there.

So companies will have to start giving out real chunks of equity (5% or more) to early key hires. And "who you are" will matter even more than it does now (e.g. look what having Spielberg or another A-list director does to a movie's prospects, they can get the good actors, etc.)

I just don't see any other way this plays out. SV will become more like Hollywood.

</comment><comment><USER62> Although, overall, I think this article is reasonably right, there are quite a few things sketchy about it. But I'll just start with the first that comes to mind:

If Google and Facebook are your median exemplars, I _really_ want to know what your sample is. Those aren't exactly large companies. Amazon, too. Apple and Microsoft may be, at least in this industry, but I still have the feeling that the total number of the technical people that this article seems to be addressing is much larger than the total employment of the "large companies" (and small ones).

Also, another minor issue: During my years at IBM (technically, contracting for IBM, but even then you couldn't pay me enough to sign on), I did get to work on very interesting projects and learned a great deal from some very smart people. On the other hand, everything I did was shovelled into the trash can immediately after I finished it. Project cancellations, reorganizations (IBM: I've Been Moved), etc., these are fun facts. Of course, I don't expect start-ups to be any different in this regard, given their failure rate.

</comment><comment><USER63> For money:

Work at whatever job meets your financial needs, everything else is gravy. This will be hardest at the start, but as you gain seniority, you'll have increasing freedom to work where you want. All things being equal, established companies will pay better. Save money, but don't take jobs you hate to save more money - it's not worth the equity.

For work:

If you know what you want to work on and can get a job in an established company, do that. Established companies are much more likely to actually have you work on what they hired you to work on. They are also much more likely to continue the project you were hired for. There are exceptions, but generally you will have much greater resources available to you. Your work may never see the light of day, or may only be used internally, but you'll walk away with a lot of experience on a specific area.

If you don't know what you want to work on or you like working a little bit on a lot of things, work for a startup. Especially for junior roles, there is enormous flex in terms of what you'll actually work on from day to day. This is not limited to programming, but includes all branches of tech work: architecting, service monitoring and setup, marketing, etc. The downside is that it can be hard for you to explain, in a substantive way, the amount of work you did during this time. The upside is that you learn a lot and get a feel for many things.

As for future options - startups will give you many shallow options, working at a big company will give you lucrative & focused options. If you work only in one area, understand that you are betting on that 'kind' of work to continue into the future. The more experience you have, the more value you have _in that market_. The value in that is entirely dependent on the value the market puts on your skills. You can often pivot, but it can be difficult. Keep that in mind when looking at future work.

</comment><comment><USER64> I prefer to work for smaller companies because of the way work and responsibility are divided. At large companies I've worked for, work gets divided into much smaller chunks so each developer is working on a very small sliver of the total product. At a smaller company, your typically solving a smaller, more focused problem as a group, but also, you get a much bigger chunk of the work as a developer. It's easier to have ownership over a whole project. It's why the term "full-stack developer" is so common in the startup world and basically unused in the enterprise/corporate world. Of course all of this lies on a gradient of headcount vs. total workload so I'm sure there are great counter examples out there.

</comment><comment><USER33> I work at Big Company and although I grumble, I know it's probably better than going to a Startup. I think the Startup route is like trying to win in Vegas. Some win, most don't. Although it could be fun depending on what you're looking for.

At Big Company if I get bored I can move to a different group fairly easily. And I know my work will be used by millions of people a day. I think that's the part people forget; A lot of people will use your product. At a Startup good luck with that.

And another thing, if you start to have conflicts with someone at a Startup and it's not resolved, it will be a pain to work there. At Big Company, at least you can move to another group or hope they will.

</comment><comment><USER65> I dont think these high salaries will last because we are in the midst of a startup bubble with too much VC money chasing too few good ideas. Echo 1990s.

However even if return to the 2004 scenario of 80K/100K that is still comparable to other professional careers and better than most college majors. So I'd recommend staying in CS if you like it.

<comment><USER66> The counter argument is that now that the entire world is on the internet (unlike the 1990s), the addressable market for tech is significantly greater than it once was. Maybe there isn't a bubble at all, or maybe even if their is a bubble in VC the value of a single good engineer is still really freaking high.

</comment></comment><comment><USER67> You could apply this same model to IBM very easily if you started from college any time from 1993 (April to be precise) and 2013. If you just worked your way up the promotion ladder you would have done super well financially (better than the SP500 by 4-5x).

The problem with any comparison is hindsight. Many other large cap tech stocks do not behave that way. Certainly you could have joined Microsoft at a certain time and "given up" at the "wrong time". Your cash comp might have been quite good (or not).

The thing to ask yourself (and I definitely am not judging or implying one way or another) is where does your code go and what does it do? A lot of that IBM code, well... And of course many startups don't make it as well.

If all you want is money with low risk the choice is clear. If all you want is a chance at a huge payoff with high risk then the choice is clear.

If you're happy with the end result of your code then in a Fountainhead sort of way that's what matters. Then whichever risk path you take for your compensation is secondary. And your views on this might change at different life stages.

Finally the ability and skills to navigate and succeed in either a startup or a big company are different. Depending on when you choose and how you grow and evolve you may or may not be at the right place at the right time.

That's my shortest comment to a very long topic :)

<comment><USER68> >> If all you want is money with low risk the choice is clear.

It's not quite clear to me: care to explain?

<comment><USER67> Assume starting salary and velocity and ability to perform are all equal. Then that's one interpretation of the original article.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER69> At my BigCorp employer, Senior Engineer starts at like, maybe $140k total compensation, on the low end. I don't know where the author is drawing these $250-350k minimum figures from, but it feels like "thin air."

That being said, a startup in my area would pay 50-70% as much.

<comment><USER31> Depends on the tech hub and employer. He's mostly discussing top tier companies like Google, Facebook, etc. where they're very successful and software is their product, more or less.

</comment></comment><comment><USER70> Article makes some good points. The cash-out value of "equity" one gets in a startup can, if you are lucky, result in some nice lump sum at some point down the line. However, many often miss the point that this big lump sum is quite often still much less that the cash given up in the meantime by agreeing to accept lower cash comp in exchange for said equity.

No different than when people talk about how they bought a house for X and then sold it for Y at some point down the line, giving the impression that they made a nice return on investment. Off course such casual math forgets that it costs a ton of money in interest, taxes and maintenance costs to hold such an asset for this length of time and these need to be subtracted from what appears to be a nice lump sum payment down the line. In reality, net net many people never make a $1 owning their nice fancy house even though when they sell it results in a nice lump sum.

With jobs and houses there are lots of other factors at play, but when it comes to $ it's important to understand the difference between perceived "windfalls" and actual net return. The true results are often not what people expected.

</comment><comment><USER71> I was nodding along throughout this and pretty much agreeing that overall a big company makes sense for most people.

Then I got to the final footnote. That kind of Kafka-esque bullshit is what keeps me working in startups. I could not stand working in a culture where policies which are widely seen as unhelpful and ridiculous are still routinely inflicted upon employees.

Yes, startup "bullshit" also exists, but the difference is that it's totally possible to avoid that bullshit by picking a good startup to work at. I've never had anything like the experiences described in [1], despite working at 3 different startups. On the other hand, big company problems seem to be universal: it's not possible to find a big company without at least some arcane and employee-hostile policies. (For example, Google's blind hiring keeps me from ever considering working there.)

[1] [http://totalgarb.tumblr.com/tagged/startupbullshit](http://totalgarb.tumblr.com/tagged/startupbullshit)

<comment><USER72>
        Then I got to the final footnote. That kind of Kafka-esque bullshit is what
        keeps me working in startups.

While I agree that big companies can have weird Kafka-esque bureaucracy, they're still generally a lot better at record-keeping than startups. I've never had a big company ask me if I could go without pay for a couple of weeks while they waited to "sort out my payroll paperwork". I did eventually get the back pay, but it was pretty tense for a couple of weeks, as I waited and wondered if I'd made a terrible mistake in quitting my work for a large corporation to go work for this startup.

</comment></comment><comment><USER73> I've worked at sv companies of all sizes, and I think that for a fresh grad especially, the most important thing as some have stated is to find a team (manager, coworkers) and project that are right for you. You want a place where you will be supported, where you will have interesting work, and where you'll be able to develop in all the aspects (not just technical ones) that you'll need as a more senior developer. You'll want to avoid toxic cultures and places where no real work gets done. In companies of all sizes and stripes there is a huge amount of variation internally. Unfortunately it's often difficult to know what a particular team is like unless you know an insider. This advice may seem like common sense, but in my own experience and through talking to junior colleagues, many people don't have much of a clue for what to look for in a job (beyond - they pay a bit better / I've heard of them and its a prestigious name / I have some idea about what they want me to do and it sounds vaguely intetesting).

For fresh grads there is almost no negotiating room on compensation. Additionally, what one learns and experiences is critical to career growth. At one sv bigco I got paid intern level wages to manually label machines in a server room for a month (hired as a developer). I'm sure this is not represent tative of that company. At another bigco I have seen fresh grads and interns get plum work assignments (and pretty good compensation, according to surveys), and I know that's not the case for many other parts of that company. Neither of these companies is appamagoogsoftbookflix, but I know both these scenarios can be found pretty much anywhere.

Even midcareer professionals should care a great deal about the people and projects they will be working with, but there the ability and need to optimize compensation can be more acute. So, avoiding optimizing for compensation and company prestige early in ones career is something to be cognizant of.

</comment><comment><USER74> > Moreover, the pitch that you'll only need to work for four years is usually > untrue.

Definitely, and not just for the reasons stated in the article. I believe it's pretty common for employees to get escalating stock options as they progress in the company. When I first joined my startup as the second engineer hire, I got something like 0.2%, under a four year vesting schedule. After a year I got a bit more, like 0.3%. After another year and a half or so, I was given enough to bring me up to what is currently 1% -- but again, under a four year vesting schedule. Most of my options vest under a four year schedule that started 2 1/2 years into working there.

Is it pretty common for regular engineers to get 1% options right off the bat? I thought it wasn't.

</comment><comment><USER75> How do you even argue with someone who thinks that the average "big corporation" pays and looks like Google or Facebook? The vast majority of them aren't. That's my experience from working at them, interviewing at them, and seeing my colleagues work at them. The best thing about big cos? Generally I had good comradery and in-office perks, as well as good hours. When it comes to pay, raises, innovation, passion, speed, benefits, on all of those terms I've always had a better experience at smaller companies.

Sure, that may not be true across the board, but the author's assumptions are far reaching. I mean, 250k? Really? I'm not questioning his honesty, I just envy the bubble he lives in.

</comment><comment><USER76> As a European constantly reading about total compensations in the 200k+ seems like FUCKING crazy to me, holy shit. What the hell.

<comment><USER77> Same here. Threads like these completely alienate me, feels like a completely different world. I can't image a software developer getting more than a 100K per year (non-freelance), it's not rocket science or anything.

</comment></comment><comment><USER78> The section on options doesn't mention early excercising and 83(b)s. I thought it was commonplace to allow options to be exercised before vesting, at a nominal valuation. File your 83(b), and then any increase in value of your options are not considered capital gains; you just pay tax on the final amount that you sell the shares for.

Is this an omission in the post, or is the early exercise option less common than I thought?

</comment><comment><USER79> The median income for full time workers in the US is about 40k, not 30k. Also I don't personally know anyone who makes $250k cash comp, and I know people at google and facebook and a handful of other "big corps". I have a friend who's close tho, around $230k at google after 6 years. You can't count the appreciation of the stock on the RSUs

</comment><comment><USER80> The grass is always greener on the other side. Unless you live in the Bay Area where you lose either way due to the cost of housing.

</comment><comment><USER81> Why not add consulting (i.e. helping startups out as someone "external") into the mix?

I make ~$110k/yr after taxes (!) and insurance and I work 10 hours per week, tops. I literally watch Netflix more than I work on an average workday. I know it's not great money (don't have a Tesla), but it's quite cozy.

Thoughts?

<comment><USER82> What sort of consulting?

</comment></comment><comment><USER83> The last couple rounds on this have talked about experience at startups but they neglected to go into the value of that experience. From the startup side, people will say the experience is valuable and what they mean is the experience of getting to make more technical choices and experiencing what it is like to have to make compromises to get something shipped in an early stage company.

So the startup people talk about experience in the context of assuming you will also want to do a startup.

The author of this piece kind of ignores the value of having to make those difficult choices in the face of shipping something. But that value is only towards actually starting a company. It's not nearly as valuable at a large company.

So that bias shows through in the writing although I agree with the rest of it. It's just a tiny argument towards the value of startup experience that in context for some people does have immense value while for others it is negligible.

</comment><comment><USER84> > Perceptive readers will note that 100 does not actually show up on a d100 or > rand(100).

I was _just_ perceptive enough to notice, that, copy the entire table into a comment and pontificate on it, then notice that I missed the sentence in question _immediately_ after commenting, and delete it _3 seconds_ after posting it. :/

<comment><USER41> But is the "perceptive reader" actually correct?

There are many pictures online of d100 dice clearly showing a '100': [http://www.amazon.com/Role-Playing-Dice-Spherical- ZOCCHIHEDR...](http://www.amazon.com/Role-Playing-Dice-Spherical- ZOCCHIHEDRON/dp/B0026NDDEE)

And while the argument for rand() starting at 0 is true for Perl, even this is language dependent. More frequently, rand() doesn't even take an argument: [http://linux.die.net/man/3/rand](http://linux.die.net/man/3/rand)

<comment><USER84> Yes, my comment (prior to deletion) said _and rand(n), depending on implementation, may explicitly exclude n_. I looked it up for C/C++ first, but it was slightly confusing, and there are articles that go into quite a bit of depth about how rand() can be misleading. perldoc was my next stop, as I was almost positive that perl's rand explicitly excluded the upper bound (and it does).

My recollection of 100-sided dice was that it was often printed as "00", so you could take it as either 0 or 100, depending on your need.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER85> 2 things: (1) this may change soon but for the past 2 years I've seen a decent % of startups pay around the Google scale ($130-$160), with raises not too far from the scale set-out in the article. However, the big difference of course is that many of these startups will never make it to year 5... (2) this should be qualified as "...for Engineers" (maybe implied by the venue ha). The math is pretty different when you talk about (a) finance/consultant types deciding between big institutions and startups [pay is MUCH worse unless you win big, but hours and work satisfactions are higher..or supposed to be] and (b) sales/ops types [pay is comparable, hours are worse, but potential impact is higher..or supposed to be].

</comment><comment><USER86> Meanwhile in Berlin...

[http://www.payscale.com/research/DE/Job=Senior_Software_Engi...](http://www.payscale.com/research/DE/Job=Senior_Software_Engineer/Salary)

</comment><comment><USER87> So for me this begs the question, how do you get to this point? I've never cared too much about compensation, since though I went to a good school, I did the computer science major pretty quickly and after graduation am working at a start-up I think is great.

Should the goal be to spend time studying for interviews, or is this some other strategy? This article assumes you're at some level to command this level of compensation, but how do you get to that level to begin with? I know the classic advice: do good work, write excellent code, etc, but is there more specific advice?

</comment><comment><USER88> I wonder what people do with all that money. If you're capable of earning $250k working 5 days a week, why not earn $100k working only 2 days a week?

<comment><USER69> It doesn't scale down like that.

<comment><USER89> Wouldn't that be nice, though? I'd do it in a heartbeat.

One of the guys tried to arrange that where I work, and he ended up retiring.

<comment><USER88> As a contractor that's basically what I do; the drawback is you have zero job security, and you're not really "part" of the company (which, depending of the client can be a good or a bad thing).

I think if enough people asked for it, it could become more mainstream; we spend way to much time at work IMHO.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER90> I appreciate some of the writer's points, but he's so eager to prove his point that he makes some obvious mistakes. The 38% of founders who failed took on average a few months to do so. Quality of research papers is produced is not a measure of how interesting work at a company will be - was Steve Wozniak churning out papers while he worked on the Apple II?

</comment><comment><USER91> I make less than the year 0 at year 3.

</comment><comment><USER92> TLDR: Article about lifetime earnings that fails to mention cyclicality. Good luck with that.

<comment><USER66> Though it probably reinforces his point more. Would you rather be working for Google or a random startup when the next recession comes?

</comment></comment><comment><USER93> Don't forget that there are other options. I work for a small consulting company. Our size allows us to have the agility of a start-up, but without the long hours and the stress of your product failing.

<comment><USER94> Consulting without long hours? Does that exist?

<comment><USER95> For my case, in a consulting company headquartered in a relatively 3rd world country, it is not allowed to work after 6pm. Because of family issues that employers value.

<comment><USER96> Yep, this is the case at large consultancy firms such as Capgemini or Accenture, not for small company where you tougher scale your resources.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER97> Have to say i'm really jealous. You don't get nearly that much in google/microsoft London office, not sure about FB but I doubt it's much better.

</comment><comment><USER98> At my big company in Australia, I made 85k after 4 years, with high income tax and rent of $1800. I have quit to create a startup. I don't really know what will happen now.

</comment><comment><USER99> The last line is pretty important -

"You should figure out what the relevant tradeoffs are for you."

The author is just summing up his experience. Individual mileage definitely varies!

</comment><comment><USER100> The point of joining a start-up is to take risk and make more $. I'm not sure there is anyone who doesn't get that. Obviously joining a large stable company with consistent growth will net you high stable pay, the point is if you want to make an above average amount of money that moves the needle and makes your life feel different, a start-up is the way to go.

</comment><comment><USER101> Can anyone give some figures for big companies in the UK?

</comment><comment><USER102> Or you simply work in finance in tech.</comment>


Announcing Apache Spark 1.4 - <AUTHOR> http://databricks.com/blog/2015/06/11/announcing-apache-spark-1-4.html <comment><USER2> Anyone who wants to pick up Spark basics - Berkeley (Spark was developed at Berkeley's AMPLab) in collaboration with DataBricks (Commercial company started by Spark creators) just started a free MOOC on edx: [https://www.edx.org/course/introduction-big-data-apache- spar...](https://www.edx.org/course/introduction-big-data-apache-spark-uc- berkeleyx-cs100-1x)

(If you wonder what is Spark, in a very unofficial nutshell - it is a computation / big data / analytics / machine learning / graph processing engine on top of Hadoop that usually performs much better and has arguably a much easier API in Python, Scala, Java and now R)

It has more than 5000 students so far, and the Professor seems to answer every single Piazza question (a popular student / teacher message board).

So far it looks really good (It started a week ago, so you can still catch up, 2nd lab is due only Friday 6/12 EOD, but you have 3 days "grace" period... and there is not too much to catch up)

I use Spark for work (Scala API) and still learned one or two new things.

It uses the PySpark API so no need to learn Scala. All homework labs are done in a iPython notebook. Very high quality so far IMHO.

It is followed by a more advanced spark course (Scalable Machine Learning) also by Berkeley & Databricks.

[https://www.edx.org/course/scalable-machine-learning-uc- berk...](https://www.edx.org/course/scalable-machine-learning-uc-berkeleyx- cs190-1x)

(not affiliated with edx, Berkeley or databricks, just thought it's a good place for a PSA to those interested)

The Spark originating academic paper by Matei Zaharia (Creator of Spark) got him a PHd dissertation award in 2014 by the ACM ([http://www.acm.org/press- room/news-releases/2015/dissertatio...](http://www.acm.org/press-room/news- releases/2015/dissertation-award-14/))

Spark also set a new record in large scale sorting (Beating Hadoop by far): [https://databricks.com/blog/2014/11/05/spark-officially- sets...](https://databricks.com/blog/2014/11/05/spark-officially-sets-a-new- record-in-large-scale-sorting.html)

* EDIT: typo in "Berkeley", thanks gboss for noticing :)

<comment><USER3> I would love to learn about spark,but as some one who li e in third world country I hate edx,instead I am in love with udacity and coursera.the place I am living ,we don't have much traffic monthly ,instead we can download everything we want between 1am-6am,so there is no way to download course from edx ,simply and using it later.I wish it was on udacitg or coursera,is there any torrent for course material?

<comment><USER4> I'm doing the spark course. Edx has a download button on the videos, and can download PDF files for the lectures. The rest like quizes that are embeded, i just screenshot or save as pdf for posterity.

Are you sure you can't download, or maybe they've changed recently.

<comment><USER3> Yes I am aware of download button , but consider every course is ~50 distict video and also consider our downloading time you are going to agree with me about downloading is extermely painful ,why they just doesn't put whole material (at least just videos) like the way udacidy does.

<comment><USER5> You can download the lectures using the edx-downloader: [https://github.com/shk3/edx-downloader](https://github.com/shk3/edx- downloader)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> As someone who doesn't know what Apache Spark is, this article reads like it could have been randomly generated.

<comment><USER7> Apache Spark is a general purpose distributed data processing and caching engine. It is an evolution of MapReduce concepts into more general "directed acylic graph" processing, which is very flexible for defining and executing data processing work on a distributed cluster. It's got some similarities to PrestoDb, Apache Drill and or Apache Storm (although not quite the same).

It also has some nice data mining libraries, a library for handling streaming data, some connectivity to external data sources and a library for accessing data stored in its generic "data frames" via SQL. "Data frames" are just an abstraction for a dataset, but they are distributed, and in-memory and/or persistent.

Personally, I like to think of as an engine for data analysis/processing and queries, but different in that it is not really a "database" like you would traditionally consider. It's almost like if you took the SQL data processing engine out of your database and made it really flexible.

Edit: Also, all the functionality of Apache Spark is programmatically accessible in Java, Scala and Python, or through SQL with their Hive/thrift interface.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> The release notes: [https://spark.apache.org/releases/spark- release-1-4-0.html](https://spark.apache.org/releases/spark- release-1-4-0.html)

Another major change is that it supports Python 3 now. [https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/SPARK-4897](https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/SPARK-4897)

<comment><USER9> They've integrated Tungsten / native sorting into shuffle and observed some decent speedups:

* [https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/SPARK-7081](https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/SPARK-7081)

* [https://github.com/apache/spark/pull/5868#issuecomment-10183...](https://github.com/apache/spark/pull/5868#issuecomment-101837095)

However, I guess reduceByKey (and friends) don't benefit yet.

Their SGD implementation still uses TreeAggregate ( [https://github.com/apache/spark/blob/e3e9c70384028cc0c322cce...](https://github.com/apache/spark/blob/e3e9c70384028cc0c322ccea14f19d3b6d6b39eb/mllib/src/main/scala/org/apache/spark/mllib/optimization/GradientDescent.scala#L189) ) so I wonder when they're planning to add some of the "Parameter Server" stuff (e.g. perhaps butterfly mixing or Kylix [http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~jfc/papers/14/Kylix.pdf](http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~jfc/papers/14/Kylix.pdf) )

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm excited about SparkR, even though R is shunned in the field of big data. Between that and dplyr (which inspired the SparkR syntax) for data manipulation and sanitation, it should be much easier to write sane, reproducible code and visualizations for big data analysis. (the Python/Scala tutorials for Spark gave me a headache)

SparkR appears to have strong integration into Rstudio, which is big news: [http://blog.rstudio.org/2015/05/28/sparkr-preview-by- vincent...](http://blog.rstudio.org/2015/05/28/sparkr-preview-by-vincent- warmerdam/)

<comment><USER2> R on Spark is great, but the biggest issue in my view is R's runtime licensing, isn't it GPL? Am I worried for nothing?

<comment><USER11> I too have been mystified by R's licensing. I actually don't see how anyone can ship a commercial product using R in its current form. At very least you're in a legal gray area, at worst you are involuntarily open sourcing your product. Not that there's anything wrong with open sourcing a product, but I think there's an enormous potential issue that could foul up a lot of people down the track. The best discussion I have seen about this pretty much ends up with uninformed speculation. For now, I take the policy of "explore and prototype in R, build the real system in something else". Fortunately the flaws and limitations of R as a language make this a sensible choice for a host of other reasons as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Does anyone know if there's a guide to integrating Spark between a realtime write only database and a historical database?

I've looked into using Spark Streaming, but I can't work out how you could seamlessly transition data from a streaming batch to the historical db in a reasonably tight time period.

I'd be willing to pay for training if it came to it, but I don't think I'm using the right search terms.

<comment><USER13> Do this: [http://blog.cloudera.com/blog/2014/11/how-to-do-near-real- ti...](http://blog.cloudera.com/blog/2014/11/how-to-do-near-real-time- sessionization-with-spark-streaming-and-apache-hadoop/)

Then at the end instead of writing to HBase you can write JDBC to do the insert.

<comment><USER14> JDBC works great if you have a large RDD that you want to persist in one go.

But if you are writing row by row you will need to implement your own batching algorithm and connection pooling to get any decent performance.

<comment><USER15> You could always use mapPartition to open one connection per partition.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I, somehow, always keep getting confused between Spark and Storm! Can someone explain the difference between the two (usecases etc.) as if explaining to a five year-old? Thanks!

<comment><USER13> Storm = Streaming data processing, written in Clojure and previously used at Twitter until they replaced it with Heron.

Spark = Streaming (technically micro-batch) and batch data processing, written in Scala and used _very_ widely.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Is support for User Defined Aggregation Functions (regarding DataFrames) slated for 1.5?

</comment><comment><USER18> Too bad the website is so hard to read.

Time for that site to join contrastrebellion.com</comment>


Show HN: I made a service to easily manage feedback from customers - <AUTHOR> https://www.feedbear.com <comment><AUTHOR> Hello everybody :)

For the past month I've been working on a service to easily manage feedback from your customers.

One thing that I found missing in other tools was painless process of leaving feedback. Some took it too far with on-site widgets that interfere with more important things like Intercom. With FeedBear your customers can leave feedback right from the Intercom widget, with no extra account needed. If the choose to stay in the loop, they can leave their email to receive an invitation.

With an account created, your customers can vote and receive updates about your progress. You get to see who voted for what, who are the most active customers and the most important: what to build next.

If you have any questions, I'm ready to answer them. Enjoy!</comment>


Major screwups in mathematics (why are there none) - <AUTHOR> http://blog.plover.com/math/major-screwups.html

<comment><USER2> I had an incorrect proof in a paper I wrote in Mathematics of Computation; it wasn't noticed until three years later, at which point I wrote another paper in the same journal with a (correct) proof of the result -- with the slight difference that the correct proof was five pages long where the incorrect proof was five lines long.

The reason the result I claimed was not significantly wrong (the correct theorem required the additional assumption that nobody does floating-point arithmetic with less than five bits of precision) was because I discovered the result experimentally: When I was writing the first paper, I needed an error bound and wasn't sure what it should be, so I had my computer do millions of trials on random inputs and tell me the worst rounding error which it encountered. Only after experimentally convincing myself that I had the right result did I try to come up with a proof.

EDIT: I should add that the result in question concerned the maximum rounding error which could result from multiplying complex floating-point values -- so it's not exactly an esoteric problem which nobody would care about.

<comment><USER3> Would you mind sharing a link to your papers? From scholar.google I'm guessing this is the corrected version but it didn't list anything older. (<http://www.daemonology.net/papers/fft.pdf>)

<comment><USER2> _Would you mind sharing a link to your papers?_

You almost got there: <http://www.daemonology.net/papers/>

The paper you linked to contained the original (incorrect) proof at the start of the proof to Theorem 5.1; the correct proof is given in <http://www.daemonology.net/papers/complexmultiply.pdf> (Theorem 1).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'd say it's because it's the field with (a) the strictest formal definition of what "correct" means, and (b) no dependence on experiment, and hence no data and no statistics.

Everything you need to determine whether or not a given proof is correct is either in the paper in front of you, in the literature, or implied by the literature. If you can't follow the implications, you ask the author of the proof to clarify it.

Compare this to research in, say, medicine, where there are always millions of variables and progress requires careful controls, a statistician, an enormous budget that supports many trials of the same thing, and hope.

My hypothesis is that this is also why so many mathematicians do great work when they're young: It's one of the few fields where you don't have to do everything N times, because the error does _not_ depend inversely on the square root of N. Once you've figured something out in math, it _stays_ figured out. So all you need to become a mathematician -- besides your own mind -- is a library, the ability to read, and patience. (Although, in practice, nobody becomes a great mathematician without a teacher or two to guide them through the library. Even Ramanujan only found a couple of the books on his own.)

<comment><USER5> No, no, it's because Mathematicians are so smart!

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Well, in general it's hard to find errors unless you have something to look for.

I don't know if these should count as "screwups" since the resolution of the flaws in each led the way to better systems, but I'd offer the following:

\- Infinitesimals

\- Hilbert's program

<comment><USER7> Hilbert's program doesn't count, it wasn't a proof that was found to be false.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Read: "Proofs and Refutations" by Imre Lakatos</comment>


Canada's new Governor-General has binary sequence on official coat of arms - <AUTHOR> http://www.cbc.ca/politics/insidepolitics/2010/10/the-new-ggs-binary-banner-whats-it-mean.html

<comment><USER2> Okay, somebody here must have some ideas... this has got to mean something...he is connected to Waterloo/RIM.</comment>


How a team of 2 kids and adult rookies won a Robot Sumo competition - <AUTHOR> http://blog.crisp.se/2015/10/06/henrikkniberg/how-2-kids-and-adult-rookies-won-a-robot-sumo-competition <comment><USER2> I love everything about this story: the kids, the systematic training approach (TDD for robots!), the simple strategy, and the open-sourcing at the end as motivation to not rest on their laurels! Really fantastic stuff.</comment>


It's now Illegal to sell adult ebooks before 10 PM in Germany - <AUTHOR> http://the-digital-reader.com/2015/06/19/its-now-illegal-to-sell-adult-ebooks-before-10-pm-in-germany/

<comment><USER2> Are adult ebooks that one pays for reliably better than the the stuff on literotica.com?

It's hardly necessary to pay people to write, it's nearly impossible to stop them. Of course someone with real talent should be paid because then they will be able to concentrate on it without worrying about paying the rent.

But the best selling 'adult' book of recent time was Fifty Shades which is hardly a book of great literary quality so I suspect that the simplest way around the ban is to just read free stories.

</comment><comment><USER3> It may be impossible to enforce this ban completely, but that doesn't mean that major sellers won't follow it and the others, those who are based in Germany, will get fined. Could be quite lucrative actually...

My personal thinking though is that this was a legislatory mistake. Not selling erotica on Television before 10pm was a good thing, back then. And it didn't matter until now.

</comment><comment><USER4> I wonder if this will end up getting amended before it gets meaningfully enforced.

Otherwise, is there anything stopping erotic ebook sellers from just putting their servers in a different country?

<comment><USER3> That may be harder to achieve than you might think. Big sellers would have lots of employees inside Germany and smaller sellers may be reluctant to setup a multi-national business...

<comment><USER5> Assuming we're talking about German language content, it's likely small sellers would exist in Austria and Switzerland servicing that market. Furthermore, it wouldn't be terribly difficult for someone small to medium sized who doesn't specialize in German language content to include such content in a larger library.

All of this is absurd in an age where anyone can just type "hardcore porn" or any of myriad more specific requests in to google.</comment></comment></comment>


Virginia Shooting Gone Viral, in a Well-Planned Rollout on Social Media - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/27/technology/personaltech/violence-gone-viral-in-a-well-planned-rollout-on-social-media.html <comment><USER2> I am a critic of a lot Steven Pinker says, but I still think this quote is dead on:

"...Amok is a Malay word for the homicidal sprees occasionally undertaken by lonely, Indochinese men who have suffered a loss of love, a loss of money, or a loss of face. The syndrome has been described in a culture even more remote from the West: the stone-age foragers of Papua New Guinea.

The amok man is patently out of his mind, an automaton oblivious to his surroundings and unreachable by appeals or threats. But his rampage is preceded by lengthy brooding over failure, and is carefully planned as a means of deliverance from an unbearable situation. The amok state is chillingly cognitive. It is triggered not by a stimulus, not by a tumor, not by a random spurt of brain chemicals, but by an idea. The idea is so standard that the following summary of the amok mind-set, composed in 1968 by a psychiatrist who had interviewed seven hospitalized amoks in Papua New Guinea, is an apt description of the the thoughts of mass murderers continents and decades away:

"I am not an important man... I possess only my personal sense of dignity. My life has been reduced to nothing by an intolerable insult. Therefore, I have nothing to lose except my life, which is nothing, so I trade my life for yours, as your life is favoured. The exchange is in my favour, so I shall not only kill you, but I shall kill many of you, and at the same time rehabilitate myself in the eyes of the group of which I am a member, even though I might be killed in the process."

The amok syndrome is an extreme instance of the puzzle of human emotions. Exotic at first glance, upon scrutiny they turn out to be universal; quintessentially irrational, they are tightly interwoven with abstract thought and have a cold logic of their own..."

The USA is increasingly productive at churning out people who feel this way. It's time for some soul searching. Guns are a problem, but they like drugs are also "solutions" to far deeper problems, and ... let's say there is in many situations, a broader coalition to be built around dealing with effects, rather than causes.

<comment><USER3> And from John Brunner's Stand on Zanzibar:

"Background: 'mucker' is an Anglicisation of 'amok'. Don't believe anyone who says it's a shifted pronunication of 'mugger'. You can survive a mugger, but if you want to survive a mucker the best way is not to be there when it happens. "Prior to the twentieth century the densest concentration of human beings was almost certainly found in Asian cities. (Except Rome and I'm coming to Rome later.) When too many people got in your way you armed yourself with a panga or a kris and went out to cut some throats. It didn't matter if you were educated in their use or not - the people you came up against were in their normal frame of reference and died. You were in the. berserk frame of reference. Background: the berserkers developed from communities who for a large part of the year sat on their asses in Norwegian fjordal valleys with an unclimbable mountain range on each side, a lid of horrible grey cloud on top, and you couldn't get away by sea either because of the winter storms.

"There's a saying among the Nguni of South Africa that you didn't only have to kill a Zulu warrior - you had to push him over to make him lie down. Background: Chaka Zulu made it a policy to take his assegai-fodder from their parents in early childhood and raise them in barrack-like conditions owning no possessions bar a spear, a shield and a sheath to hide the penis, with absolutely no privacy. He made independently the same discovery the Spartans made. "Also it was when Rome had already become the world's first million-city that the Eastern mystery religions with their concomitant self-privation and self-mutilation took hold. You fell in behind the procession honouring Cybele, you seized a knife from one of the priests, you cut your balls off and ran through the streets waving them till you came to a house with the door open when you threw them over the threshold. They gave you an outfit of women's clothing and you joined the priesthood. Reflect on the pressure that drove you to think that that was the easy way out!"

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Why do social networks take these things down when it drives so much traffic? Is there a law against it or something?

He should have tweeted a link to liveleak or bestgore instead and made everyone's lives easier.

<comment><USER5> I would imagine that in most cases it would violate the service's ToS/rules. Content like this is clearly abhorrent to most people, and would quite easily fall foul of the boundaries set around "offensive" content on most platform. There could also potentially be legal issues in this specific case, like you say.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Here come the copy cats.</comment>


Eight men own same as poorest half of world: Oxfam - <AUTHOR> https://www.yahoo.com/news/eight-men-own-half-worlds-wealth-oxfam-001214017.html <comment><USER2> I hear these kinds of statistics all the time and they are appalling, but I need to understand how they are measured in order to think about the best ways to fix the problem.

There are a lot of people in the US that have plenty of income, but little to no wealth. In other words, their expenses match up with their income. They rent a nice house, have a large loan on their car, some credit card debt, etc. There are a lot of reasonably well off people that have a negative net worth. Would anyone living paycheck to paycheck be considered as having zero wealth? That's half of America [0]. With only 20K in my 401k, I have more wealth than half of the country by that metric.

Also, since we don't have a wealth tax, nobody has to report their personal assets, so how are these numbers calculated?

On the flip side, if you try to measure inequality of income, instead of wealth, some of the wealthiest people on earth can have years of enormous losses that hardly affect their quality of life but would put them on the bottom of the income scale.

[0][http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/05/my- secre...](http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/05/my-secret- shame/476415/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Globalization means there's a race to the bottom to see what country can make things the cheapest. It means labor laws and expecting good treatment of employees makes a country uncompetitive, and makes local income equality nearly impossible.

Granted, it is also the world's most powerful method of wealth creation, but that doesn't mean much when the people without capital don't see the rewards.

To those who disagree with me( because I'm sure there will be many), why am I wrong?

<comment><USER4> I just watched a documentary on the shipbreaking "industry" in Bangladesh: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qhIaEEW63Sc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qhIaEEW63Sc)

It's horrifying, but I don't know that I can come up with a remedy. Clearly, these men don't have other job options, and with no job, they'll just starve. And if they don't take the job, they're easily replaced with another human who will. Zero turnover expense for the employer.

The profits are not really "trickling down." Five families control this industry, and they make enormous profits ($5 million per ship, which is a 100% return). The government is easily captured / bribed to prevent much pressure about working conditions. There's no tradition of a labor movement from which these people can draw from, they're uneducated and really when you're that poor you're only able to think about today, much less where your rights are in a few years.

And let's say Bangladesh did somehow make it too expensive / burdensome to shipbreak there. I hear Somalia has no laws, and lots of young men standing around who will join in.

You try to instead convince Germany to stop sending their ships to Bangladesh to be broken in these conditions. But now, German shipping becomes a more expensive business due to the disposal costs, and German shipping companies become uncompetitive against Chinese shipping companies which will happily shipbreak in Bangladesh. Germany loses its shipping industry either by relocation of the firms to a friendly jurisdiction or they just go insolvent after losing all their business to Chinese competitors.

It really is all a race to the bottom and I don't know of a solution.

</comment></comment><comment> m-p-3 Which makes me think of an article I've read some time ago.

[http://www.futurity.org/inequality- violence-1343072-2/](http://www.futurity.org/inequality-violence-1343072-2/)</comment>


Show HN: DateNight.Media – Combine two movies to get great recommendations - <AUTHOR> https://datenight.media <comment><AUTHOR> I helped build this with our team at MediaHound to solve a really simple problem - finding a movie to watch that my wife and I will both like.

We would love for you to check it out and give us some feedback - try a few combinations of movies and filter by your favorite sources.

We are using our new API - The Entertainment Graph [[https://developer.mediahound.com](https://developer.mediahound.com)] to power the site. Looking forward to your feedback and answering any questions!

</comment><comment><USER2> Is it strange I find 2 new accounts created and praising just this platform? Never mind, just my suspicious mind at work I suppose.. :)

<comment><USER3> Two new accounts created within the same hour, with a single comment each, on a post that isn't on the first few pages of HN, both of whose comments contain two exclamation marks as their only punctuation? I think you might be right to be suspicious..

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> What a terrific idea! Now my girlfriend and I don't have to quibble about what movie to watch!

</comment><comment><USER5> This is sweet! Going to save lots of time fighting over Lord of the Rings vs. Step Up III!

</comment><comment><USER6> Don't create sockpuppets to comment/upvote.</comment>


Convert JPG, PNG, GIF Files to PDF, SVG, EPS Vectors - <AUTHOR> https://vectormagic.com <comment><USER2> A terrible user experience. Yes, it is very easy to upload a photo and see a vectorized version online. I understand they don't want to give away their services/product for free, and it would be reasonable for them to limit the size of the image, or the quality, or to add a watermark.

Instead they show it to you, but to access it to really see what comes out means subscribing.

The worst part is they don't even tell you how bit the resulting file is.

They expect me to pay $200 or whatever to buy the product or sign up at $10/month before I can even find out what the resulting file size is?

<comment><USER3> I agree, also if they don't want to download your files why not at least have some sample images so we can see the file sizes in general

<comment><USER4> It all depends how complex (eg. How many vectors) the image your use is. I'm sure it can range by 100x.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I like the idea of this and have to say, I wasn't expecting _that_ much detail for some of the photos.

But, something else that I wasn't expecting was the price... For this price, I could just hire someone from Fiverr to print out all the illustrations I need for the next year or two.

Meaning, I cannot justify paying $300 for a full license, only to see myself using the product once or twice a week.

As other said, this might just be an ad that managed to slip by.

</comment><comment><USER6> This just seems like a sneaky ad. How did this get this high up on HN. Seems fishy.

</comment><comment><USER7> Been an occasional long time user of clippingmagic, another tool made by this company. Great stuff

</comment><comment><USER8> This looks really cool. I remember in the early 2000s I wanted a tool to take the low quality real video versions of Family Guy cartoon that we all watched, and convert them to shiny vector-based flash. Glad to see tools exist to extract shapes from pixelation now.

<comment><USER8> And here's a sample. I took a 256x256 image ([https://c-sf.smule.com/sf/s78/arr/65/98/f10d1e00-e955-4e4b-a...](https://c-sf.smule.com/sf/s78/arr/65/98/f10d1e00-e955-4e4b-afd5-c382ca0df268_256.jpg)) where you can see the jpg artifacts, and ran it through.

Outcome: [https://imgur.com/a/dpysixt](https://imgur.com/a/dpysixt)

Pretty good, imo!</comment></comment>


S&P 500 to exclude Snap after voting rights debate - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/01/sp-500-to-exclude-snap-after-voting-rights-debate.html <comment><USER2> This is huge. There are a huge amount of capital inflows from indexers from being part of the SP500. This will be a strong disencentive to future IPO candidates for issuing shares with reduced voting rights.</comment>


Great example of a how-to-use-this-site screencast... by a band? - <AUTHOR> http://teamyacht.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> This is my favorite active band at the moment.

And they just launched their new site with a very funny video. Lots of great ideas in this screencast for app tours.

Especially the idea that: there are no rules for screencasts.</comment>


Mosh - Remote terminal application that supports intermittent connectivity - <AUTHOR> http://mosh.mit.edu/

<comment><USER2> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3819382></comment>


Some new climate models are projecting extreme warming. Are they correct? - <AUTHOR> https://www.yaleclimateconnections.org/2020/07/some-new-climate-models-are-projecting-extreme-warming-are-they-correct/ <comment><USER2> Basically the article says, "probably not", while pointing out the uncertainty of variables, particularly cloud cover.</comment>


Massive National Prison Strike! Maybe. We Don't Know. That's a Problem - <AUTHOR> http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/2016/09/10/massive-national-prison-strike-maybe-we-dont-know-thats-a-problem/ <comment><AUTHOR> See also: [http://www.maskmagazine.com/the-prisoner- issue/struggle/live...](http://www.maskmagazine.com/the-prisoner- issue/struggle/live-updates-prisoner-strike)</comment>


Google to restore federated instant messaging next week - <AUTHOR> http://mail.jabber.org/pipermail/operators/2013-March/001635.html

<comment><AUTHOR> This is an update for the previous discussion we had here on HN: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5382366></comment>


What would your bill of rights look like today? - <AUTHOR>

What amendments would you put in a bill of rights to prevent the abuses of government power we have seen recently?  The 1st and 4th amendment are obviously good ideas, but they don't have enough teeth.<p>What would you add or remove? <comment><AUTHOR> I would add a read the bills provision, which would require the full text of any law proposed before congress to be read in it's entirety on the floor before it is passed. Any modifications to the law would require re-reading from the start.

I would craft an amendment for the default expectation of privacy. The US Postal mail is given many privacy expectations that other forms of communication aren't.

I would love an amendment stating that you own your body and the government shall pass no law regulating it (drug use, who I hire as a doctor, who I chose to lease my body or body parts too). I don't think this would be met with wide support and I can't figure out a way to succinctly word it.</comment>


Show HN: Extreme makeover for Doxygen - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/vovkos/doxyrest <comment><USER2> This looks neat, and the example project I looked at (the libusb API) certainly did so too.

Still, I think the title is misleading, I expected a remake of Doxygen itself, not a new tool that works on Doxygen's output.

</comment><comment><USER3> Beautiful visualizations in the documentation!

</comment><comment><USER4> This is what I need! thank you!</comment>