Hacker News Reader

groaneron Google will protest SOPA using home page

Doctors use Google, too.

http://losangeles.cbslocal.com/2011/11/10/study-nearly-half-...

groaneron Dear Internet: It's no Longer OK Not to Know How Congress Works

If even programmers write crappy commit messages, there's not much to be optimistic about legislators' commit messages.

groaneron Mark Cuban Invest in Yourself

Heh, I don't mind. Anything I say on the internet can and will be used against me.

I appreciate your advice and it's definitely something I plan to follow.

groaneron Mark Cuban Invest in Yourself

Ha! If only it were that easy. I've spent most of my life being a goody two shoes, only doing what other people told me to do and never really exercising any individual free will. Passion? What passion?

I'm aware of the irony of reading what more people, this time strangers on the internet, are telling me to do. I doubt I'll see the answer in a web browser.

For the time being I'm simply trying to do something I've never done before every week. It doesn't have to be drastic, maybe something like trying out a new recipe or taking a photo of a different neighborhood or going for a moonlight run at 3am. Sort of a "throw lots of things at the wall and see what sticks" approach.

groaneron Mark Cuban Invest in Yourself

OK... so as one of those people with a fair amount of spare cash lying around and no debt, I still can't quite grok this "invest in yourself" idea. Clearly I'm not about to start swallowing Ben Franklins.

I'm just a jaded programmer who is frankly terrified of the brutal startup culture, with no intention of being a founder (can't handle the high pressure and emotional roller coasters) or employee (not a fan of grueling schedules for minuscule hope of a payout). I'm also a couple of years out of grad school and have no interest in going further down that rabbit hole, so don't try selling "education" as an investment vehicle to me either.

The only area where I have a good idea of how to invest in myself is to improve my physical fitness. Still, that's mostly an investment of time and effort, not money.

What am I to do? Maybe it's time I just check out of the working world and wander for a while.

groaneron Please Donate to the Internet Archive

Wow. Haven't felt so blind in a while! Good catch.

groaneron Please Donate to the Internet Archive

I had to dig through their site to find this, as it wasn't immediately noted on their donation page, but they are a 501(c)(3) non-profit and donations should be tax-deductible for US taxpayers.

http://www.archive.org/about/about.php

groaneron Ask HN: How many hours do you spend coding per day?

Three or four years ago, maybe 10-12 hours spent on thinking about programming, probably no more than half that spent actually writing code.

Today, I'm burnt out and have written only a single line of code in the last month, for recreational purposes. Took about two hours of work. Ugh.

groaneron Making It In Silicon Valley When You Have Zero Connections

Plan B section 2, whining about how exploitable deficiencies opens up people to being defrauded by vendors, consultants and recruiters who can talk the talk but not walk the walk, is still legitimate (though not constructive). There's getting social proof, and then there's not being a douche. Sometimes the line isn't clear either.

groaneron Ask HN: Hacker Finances? / How much do you save each month?

I'm Asian. What social stigma?

I could probably pay less by living elsewhere, but $1000 that stays within the family > $500 to some landlord with whom I have no connection. Also, I'd miss out on Mom & Dad's awesome cooking.

groaneron Traveling, Writing and Programming

> 5 weeks corp leave, 2 weeks public holidays and weekends

Thanks for rubbing it in :(

/american

groaneron Ask HN: Hacker Finances? / How much do you save each month?

It's not that surprising when the house is valued at roughly $1 million. This is in southern California, where that kind of money doesn't get you a mansion either.

groaneron Ask HN: Hacker Finances? / How much do you save each month?

My monthly breakdown:

- $1000 renting a room in my parents' house (utilities and wi-fi included!)

- $50-100 my contribution to groceries and household purchases

- $50-100 transportation

- $10 cell phone (it's prepaid and I'm a recluse who prefers to communicate online)

- $100-200 miscellaneous discretionary stuff that I don't really track (e.g. restaurant meal, a new pair of shoes, a sale on Steam, yet another USB stick, etc.)

At this rate I socked away about $30k annually into my "I have no idea what to do with this but maybe someday I'll figure it out" fund. Another half that amount in pre-tax retirement savings. So far I've only watched the balance slowly shrink in my brokerage accounts.

I assure you that I do NOT have my shit together, though. You can probably imagine the quality of life I have when discretionary spending is less than 5% of budget.

Considering that you have kids and a house to take care of, I can't even begin to imagine how much of a difference that 45% "other expenses" would make. But you're really going to have to offer more details before anyone here can make suggestions on how to possibly trim some fat there.

groaneron Adding a picture of me to your site will improve conversions by 788%

What if I'm ugly?

groaneron The "overlearning the game" problem

The cynic inside me would extend this problem to the entire economy or even human society itself. Any economic transaction is supposed to benefit both parties: the buyer offers an amount he is willing to pay for what he wants, the seller provides his goods or services at a price he is willing to accept. As PG might say, wealth is created in tandem with creating stuff that people want.

The problem is that some elements in society have become extremely effective at creating a perversion of "stuff people want" for their own benefit. They exploit loopholes in the system, whether by preying upon the poorly-informed, shifting costs onto externalities that we can't price properly, engaging in corruption, or producing items of questionable actual value but very attractive perceived value. They take advantage of our desire for easy answers to our problems with minimal effort expended.

Case in point: Ponzi schemes, coal power plants, Halliburton, the tobacco industry, Zynga, and even to an extent, religion

We've tried to control this with laws, education, and social norms, but ultimately it seems the invisible hand reigns supreme.

groaneron Why you should never ask permission to clean up code.

I've mentally checked out of this place for quite a while already.

groaneron Why you should never ask permission to clean up code.

Why is this the typical reaction? Because bosses don’t have to read, edit and support the code.

I dunno about that -- mine actually watches SCM check-ins and flips out if there's some unauthorized code cleanup happening (it "adds risk", supposedly).

And yes, I've also been asked to remove unit tests because they were "making things break" (really just causing builds to fail if a regression was introduced).

groaneron See how many times a URL has been shared on Facebook

Clearly their censorship efforts have failed:

http://graph.facebook.com/http://lamebook.com

groaneron Is employer-based health insurance a barrier to entrepreneurship?

This grumbling keeps coming up here, so I just have to ask: how feasible is it for a young American like me to just pick up and leave for a place that does have a sane health care system, and work on whatever I want?

As far as I can tell, these places tend to have fairly steep immigration/visa hurdles to overcome, usually involving some kind of employer sponsorship (presumably to deter freeloaders?).

If anyone here has done this, I'd love to hear your stories.

groaneron Cracking the Scratch Lottery Code

This story sounded familiar -- it turns out that some of our own HN'ers have done this too:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1823191

groaneron "What society overwhelmingly asks for is snake oil" (1994)

I certainly agree with you, though the truth seems to be that the so-called "academic enterprise" seems to be succumbing to the pressures of industry. My university's CS department has begun offering grad-level courses in silly things like "Personal Software Process" and "Topics in Software Management" which, from first impressions of the students, are filled with utter BS.

groaneron Should You Really Be A Startup Entrepreneur?

I've worked 80+ hour weeks on an emotional roller-coaster knowing I would certainly fail. I definitely hated it.

The difference is that this was at BigCo. Does this mean that I'm not cut out for a startup?

(EDIT: Am I a fool for believing that I can escape from 80-hour work weeks and emotional roller coasters by working at a startup?)

groaneron The Social Disease

There is a solution - wait.

Artificial popularity without the engineered quality to back it won't stand up to the test of time. People are fickle and will tend to jump to the next thing that catches their attention, but the sort of thing that remains strong after the promotion machine has shut off probably has something real going for it.

FWIW, Google pointed me to a "top 40" chart from 1911: http://tsort.info/music/yr1911.htm. I'm probably outing myself as a cultural ignoramus here, but the only name I recognize on that list is Enrico Caruso.

groaneron Ask HN: Finally have loose change and spare time, but no sense of purpose. Help.

Thanks for the Candide recommendation. I've had it on my reading list for a while but I'm picking it up on my next library trip.

groaneron Ask HN: Finally have loose change and spare time, but no sense of purpose. Help.

For the record, I never said I didn't want to work for myself, just that I wasn't ready to start my own company. And I don't think corporate culture is unique to the US, despite my phrasing as "corporate America."

groaneron Ask HN: Finally have loose change and spare time, but no sense of purpose. Help.

Wow, I never thought of it that way. I really really want to believe this is true... but time will tell.

groaneron Ask HN: Finally have loose change and spare time, but no sense of purpose. Help.

Thanks. I'll take your suggestion to experience something different, although I find it curious that you chose to frame this as relationship advice.

groaneron Ask HN: Finally have loose change and spare time, but no sense of purpose. Help.

Let it be known that your investment has paid off in, at minimum, a grateful reader and an upvote.

The really scary thing is that I've noticed I'm having an easier time acknowledging that I'm boring than taking action to change that. I'm still trying to fight the idea that I might be fundamentally lazy.

But thank you for your support! It will be a difficult journey for me as well.

groaneron Ask HN: Questions to ask candidates in a job interview?

You might have seen this posted here before, but Reg offered an interesting one that certainly opens the door to other questions that may help or give you ideas:

http://weblog.raganwald.com/2006/06/my-favourite-interview-q...

groaneron Ask HN: Finally have loose change and spare time, but no sense of purpose. Help.

I've thought long and hard about this. I really do want to do this, but I don't know if I can pull it off.

I'm afraid that I'll wind up like Antoine Roquentin from Sartre's Nausea -- a long world tour followed by disappointment and existential crisis.