nicolethenerd

Yup - credit cards offer incentives (for example, 2% cash back) - I can't think of any good reason not to get one and have it set up so that it automatically deducts the balance from your bank account once a month - this makes it effectively a debit card where everything you purchase is 2% cheaper.

Startups fail all the time. Just say it didn't work out - you don't need to give all the details.

There is a distinction between the pressure that comes from growing up in a "tiger family" and the consequences of growing up with the "smart" label, and I feel like the author is conflating the two. Personally, growing up with the label (but not the parental pressure) was one of the best things that could have happened for me and my education - the fact that others believed (whether true or not) that I was lightyears ahead of the class afforded me numerous opportunities - special classes, programs, etc. And more importantly, the fact that I believed it meant that I was able to operate free of insecurities or imposter syndrome that so many of my peers faced. Did it inflate my ego a bit as a kid? Sure - but I had good role models to look up to who helped me tamp that down a bit, and I had plenty of time to figure out that I wasn't the smartest kid in the world once I got to MIT (which I might not have gotten into had I not so fervently believed I would!).

I can't comment on what it's like to grow up with the extreme parental pressure the author describes - I didn't experience that, and I'm sorry she had to go through that. But I think that's an entirely separate issue from growing up with the "gifted" label.

With my HSA, auto payment is apparently a setting you can turn on or off. I highly recommend having this turned off if your HSA allows.

I keep hearing this "negotiate" thing, but I tried it when I was billed $254 for a strep test (after being quoted $25 at the walk-in clinic), and the provider refused to negotiate. I appealed with my insurance, the appeal sort of disappeared (I received a letter saying it had failed the first round of review, and they were sending it elsewhere, and then I never heard back again) - and after fighting it for four months, I gave up and paid. Should I not have?

I think the trend these days is to use People-first language: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People-first_language (that is, saying "person with autism" - because it puts the person first)

"Affordable housing" is a very specific term - it means city-subsidized housing that is restricted to tenants within a certain income bracket (and usually applicants are selected by lottery). There are sometimes requirements that new developments must set aside a certain % of units as affordable housing.

Real academy, fake COBOL bootcamp. It's just that one page that's the joke - the rest of the site is about their real JavaScript bootcamp.

In case people are confused - the Grace Hopper Program at Fullstack Academy is a real bootcamp. They do not teach COBOL - that's the April Fool's joke.

Thanks! Or a turtle being drawn by a turtle being drawn by a turtle... turtles all the way down! ^_^

Seriously, though - I appreciate the suggestion - I was thinking of triangles drawing triangles, and turtles drawing turtles - but it didn't occur to me to mix the two. Great idea!

This is a bit of a tangent, but you guys seem like the right crowd. Logo has been on my mind the past few days, as I'm rapidly approaching my 20th "codeversary" (ie. 20 years since my very first programming lesson, in what I believe was Berkeley Logo). To mark the occasion, I've been trying to figure out what a Logo tribute tattoo might look like - the "turtle" is the obvious thing that comes to mind, but in the version of Logo I learned on, the "turtle" was just a triangle. I'm trying to come up with an image that's aesthetically pleasing, doesn't actually include any code, and is recognizable as Logo. So maybe the "turtle" drawing something, but what? (No idea whether I'll actually muster the courage to get this inked on my body, but it's a fun thought exercise either way.) Any ideas?

Clicked through to her site, and the tagline is "True && False of two Female Developers"... True && False evaluates to False... so, lies by two female developers?

Not a criticism - I get what she meant, but it's amusing.

Or just have people mail you a self-addressed stamped envelope (SASE)? Then you can just put the stickers in it and drop them in the mail (plus, you don't have to buy or address envelopes)

This is great, thanks!

Interesting analysis, but would have also loved to see a breakdown of salary by years of experience. "Average salary" doesn't tell me much about how much I can reasonably expect to be making in those cities - how many of those data points were senior vs junior people?

MIT Mystery Hunt - http://www.mit.edu/~puzzle/ happens every year in January. Afaik you don't need to be an MIT student to participate

Nice to see this again - I've told this story to many of my web dev students. :-)

Not to knock the work that they're doing at all, but that website has the first use of the <marquee> tag I've spotted in the wild in a long long time! I had no idea Chrome still supported it!

Hooli XYZ is a reference to the HBO show Silicon Valley. It has no relation to Google (other than that Hooli is basically a fictional parody of Google). Looks like some developer added that to this press release as an easter egg.

>> Susan is doing a great job as CEO, running a strong brand and driving incredible growth.

Is this supposed to say Sundar? Kind of an awkward mistake to make.

Joined the registry in 2012, but your post prompted me to make sure they had my latest address info. Good luck w/ everything! I hope you find your match!

One more note - I'm guessing that 2.1 is 2:1, as in "second-class honours, upper division", right? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_undergraduate_degree_cl...) But to an American reader, it looks like a GPA (grade point average), which are out of 4 - a 2.1 GPA would not be something you want to advertise. Might want to clarify that, if you're going to be looking for remote work.

Funny coincidence - I was just reading about DragonBox this morning in The Game Believes in You (a new book by Greg Toppo about educational games) and here it is on HN! The book is a good read (so far) if you're interested in this sort of stuff.

> A computer will never live as long as The Trial. … What if Amerika was only written for 32-bit Power PC?

This line kind of got me, and made me think about the transience of my own work. I build educational software, and I entered this field because I was inspired by the educational games I played as a kid. Most of those games, developed for a specific operating system, can still be run today on a VM or an emulator of an older Windows machine. But the apps I work on are web applications - we're constantly racing to update and maintain them in a sea of ever-changing devices and standards. The odds of somebody being able to run my work, even a just few years from now, and have it work without issue is unfortunately kind of small (the introduction of iOS 8 already wreaked havoc on some of our layouts). And that makes me kind of sad.

There's codebuddies.org, which hosts free study sessions on Google Hangouts for a variety of programming topics.

How about "Your software skills were great, but so-and-so's were better"? Of course, not knowing you and not working at Fog Creek, there's no way to know if that was the actual reason or not - but I would think it would be an acceptable reason.

Something I've realized since ending up on the hiring side of things is that there's a bit of a mismatch between how candidates and companies see the hiring process. As a candidate applying for jobs, I used to think I was applying to "the company" as an entity, and I was either good enough or I wasn't. The company, however, sees its candidates as applying for a specific position - like college admissions, there may be more qualified applicants than spots the budget allows for - especially at a place like Fog Creek.

(And, anecdotally, I am female and many years ago applied to Fog Creek for an internship. I didn't get it, but I enjoyed the interview process - it was one of the more interesting and challenging technical interviews I've done.)

On the contrary, the evolutionary argument here is that a few generations under these conditions would allow more biologically "stupider" humans to survive (since intelligence isn't being selected for) and pass on their genes, creating future generations of dumber humans.

Jared Diamond makes a similar argument in Guns, Germs, and Steel for why the people of New Guinea are smarter than their western counterparts.

Why offers from startups specifically? I think most of the companies I applied to were safely out of the 'startup' category.

Also, are you looking specifically for data from new grad job searches? If so, you should clarify that on the survey.

That's exactly the same link.