News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

oh-moses

Ask HN: What are the benefits of requiring devs to be onsite?

I get the feeling that most jobs advertised here on HN are onsite, overwhelmingly often in the Bay Area.I've only had experience with remote work in my programming career so far (and no experience actually _running_ a business), so I was wondering if someone more experienced could shed some light on this.I imagine that requiring your developers not only to live in the Bay Area (and pay rent...

( Read More... | 1 comment | 2 points | on HN )
Re:Ask HN: Are you ok? on Thursday September 12, 2019 @01:38PM (#20954149)
> Management is the difference between your work seeming like its a valuable contribution to a bigger picture, or that it's a pointless sisyphean exercise in futility cynically driven by profit or ignorance.

Wait, this one is an objective property of the product you're working on, right?

As a kid I really enjoyed the Winnetou stories by Karl May
I second That Which Is Seen by Bastiat, nice and short intro to economic way of thinking
Re:Primitive Technology: Adobe wall (dry stacked) [video] on Saturday September 07, 2019 @03:13AM (#20902294)
But without mortar, you'd just knock it over with one clumsy stumble, right?
Who claims that "humans are the most evolved of 'all' animals"? And what do they mean by "most" evolved?

Without this information it's hard to answer the question why they're saying that.

Sounds weird, but someone actually did exactly that

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x594yMPSFqk

I understand that fashion is a pure coordination game, so you would expect every website to look the same, but man, this style of illustration that is absolutely everywhere gets annoying very quickly. (Or is it just me?)
Re:Stop Bad Employers by Zeroing Out Subsidies (BEZOS) Act on Wednesday September 05, 2018 @12:48PM (#17919686)
> Additionally, the bill makes it unlawful for a large employer to ask employees whether or not they qualify for federal benefits.

…But then how would the employer's tax department know how much to pay in the proposed tax?

On the contrary, I think most other industries do this (i.e. hire people based on mostly insane criteria).

I think programmers are more reflective and analytical than people from other industries, so programming as an industry gets a lot of flak from the inside, but I really believe it's no better anywhere else.

"Half of programmers can't program! What's wrong with this industry?" Half of everyone is completely and utterly incompetent at whatever they're paid to do, why do you think we're special? Programmers just happen to notice these things.

"The interview process is broken!" Yeah, so it is everywhere else, programming is just the only industry where someone would possibly even care about whether something is insane or not.

'Tis my two cents.

Re:Show HN: Didyougogo – An Altavista slayer on Sunday August 12, 2018 @11:00AM (#17744622)
Awesome, but man, that name really needs some work. It sounds like I'm asking a two-year-old whether he's been on the potty.
Re:Ask HN: What is your comfort book? on Monday June 18, 2018 @07:51AM (#17337501)
I'm also in the Harry Potter generation; I was 8 years old when the first book came out. I remember my grandma recommending it to me at the time. It sounded like "kid stuff", so I didn't pay much attention to it and went back to reading Asimov.

I finally read this "kid stuff" years later, in my mid-twenties, and I liked it very much!

Re:Ask HN: What is your comfort book? on Monday June 18, 2018 @07:42AM (#17337443)
I don't read fiction much anymore, but when I was a teenager, I reread both The Hitchhiker's Guide and Youth In Revolt a few times
If you read one thing and one thing only, it should be this. It's overwhelmingly long, but it's really, really, really worth it.
Everything has been written about multiple times, don't worry about it.

If your blog is the first place where a reader runs into a particular information or insight, they will find it valuable, even if chronologically, someone else wrote about it first.

There are like three people in the world who have original ideas (the only example I can think of right now is Robin Hanson), but the number of people with successful blogs is much higher.