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While we're throwing out book recommendations, I'll mention one by William Poundstone, who's quoted in the article.

Fortune's Formula: The Untold Story of the Scientific Betting System That Beat the Casinos and Wall Street (2006)

If you want more background on Thorpe, or Shannon, or a layman's view of gambling and information theory, it's a fun read.


> favoring foreigners over locals on the basis of being able to pay foreigners less only

Hypothetically, if you were a Machiavellian hiring manager:

You would also prefer a foreigner on a visa because they would have less freedom to leave the company than an equally paid employee who wasn't worried that quitting a job would risk being forced out of the country.

Also this would make the foreigner more worried about the consequences of being terminated for unsatisfactory performance.


Quite unfortunately, your Machiavellian hiring manager is simply the hiring manager, from what I heard about companies like Infosys.

It's hard to imagine this not being abused. Even in academia, where the H1B - green card process is pretty much a railroad. I've seen a department drag out the green card process over the span of years - out of fears that the professor in question might just jump ship and ditch the rat nest as soon as they get the green card (that was my best understanding of the situation).

Good point, and too nuanced for the article, alas.


> Even in academia, where the H1B - green card process is pretty much a railroad.

Academic H1Bs are not transferable to commercial employers, so you're even more trapped than you'd otherwise be. The department I worked for at Stanford had a blanket policy not to sponsor green cards for staff. Ironically this policy made me leave earlier than I would have otherwise as I did not want to be left in limbo as I approached the 5 year H1B limit.


Not just Infosys. Here is one Indian h1b talking about his experience in Intel: https://youtu.be/ge9LQQfckUY?t=117

His words after joining Intel: "That was the first time I found out all these managers in US blatantly use h1b situation to make people work more than others".


Foreign workers complain less about working unpaid overtime every night and every weekend.


> perfectly legal

Well, not necessarily.

If your reflexes are good enough, and your brakes are good enough, and your tires are good enough, that you can safely stop a bike going 20mph on a wet downhill section, then yes; you are still in control of your vehicle and operating at a safe speed. No legal problems there.

But maybe your reflexes aren't that good because you haven't had coffee yet. Or maybe your brakes are worn down. Or maybe you're on crazy thin road tires that have effectively no traction going downhill in the rain. Or some combination of all three.

The point being, if it's not physically possible for you to stop that bike in whatever time interval is required, are you really operating that vehicle safely? Probably not.

And to the extent that you're legally required to operate at a safe speed and maintain control of your vehicle, your behavior would no longer be "perfectly legal."

So 20 mph + downhill + wet roads may very well be illegal for some combinations of cyclist and bicycle but not others. It seems premature to declare that perfectly legal in all cases.


No, because the fact that I'm neither Chinese nor likely to read Chinese Daily News doesn't actually prevent me from seeing your ad.

If you posted "Help Wanted" flyers in the middle of a college campus for a part-time cashier job, some 52 year old could--in theory--be walking by the quad on his way to a Frisbee golf game.

It's when you explicitly add in logic to filter out a protected class that you may be in trouble.


But the ad is targeting. Ads always target.

So if this is indeed true then FB should simply splash enough protected classes to chalk off the requirement. That should not be hard.

We have this really great machine to reach people. FB is just one way to attract talent. Why ruin it

Remember, FB is voluntary


I don't think it works that way. If you add logic that says:

"here's group A, who we really want to target, and here's group B, the protected class we want to exclude. throw 10% of all impressions at group B so we're not violating federal law."

Then I think you may still be breaking the law. Because you're explicitly favoring one group over another. Whether the ratio is 100%/0% or 90%/10% probably doesn't affect the underlying legal problem.

> Why ruin it

At some point many years ago society latched on to the idea that "equal opportunity employment" was a civil right worth protecting with federal law. One of the major draws of facebook, if you happen to be an employer not wholly committed to this idea, seems to be that you kind of have a way to effectively bypass it. There are people who would equate "ruining facebook" in this scenario with "protecting fundamental civil rights," which is more important than creating a favorable environment for recruiters.

That's more or less the argument I think.


My favorite resources are now all slightly dated; I haven't really kept up with the cutting edge as I've moved away from design and towards development.

---

Web:

A List Apart, especially the articles section - https://alistapart.com/articles

CSS Zen Garden - http://www.csszengarden.com/

Magic Ink - Information Software and the Graphical Interface, by Bret Victor - http://worrydream.com/#!2/MagicInk

---

Print:

Flexible Web Design: Creating Liquid and Elastic Layouts with CSS, by Zoe Mickley Gillenwater

The Zen of CSS Design: Visual Enlightenment for the Web, by Dave Shea and Molly E. Holzschlag

Transcending CSS: The Fine Art of Web Design, by Andy Clarke


I'll throw in Brian Lonsdorf's "Professor Frisby's Mostly Adequate Guide to Functional Programming"

https://drboolean.gitbooks.io/mostly-adequate-guide/content/

And the related video series on Egghead (which I think requires a subscription)

https://egghead.io/courses/professor-frisby-introduces-compo...

Which reminds me, if you can get an employer to pay for an Egghead subscription and/or a Frontend Masters subscription as part of a training budget, both are great. Also probably worth buying on your own if work won't cover it.


Same situation for me. I disable notifications for everything but direct messages.

Sometimes I'll exit it entirely for an hour or two, but I don't want to look like I'm unavailable to help teammates.


I successfully convinced my coworkers to run Slack like old IRC where you just dumped to one channel and there is no urgency to immediately reply, instead whenever we have the time can go through the history and respond. Cut down on meme spam and other interruptions. It also relaxes junior team members since they don't worry about interrupting somebody to ask questions. If it's something catastrophic we can just call each other.


I'm going to guess that you don't spend many hours 9-5 Monday through Friday at a beach or on a golf course.

If you're in the right places, you'll definitely see people who value free time over money and prestige.


I spent three years making the other choice and working remotely from various beaches.

I had to stop because of how lonely and isolating it was and how I couldn't maintain any relationships with my girlfriends and the 99% of my peers that were back home working 60h a week.


The fact that his response rate when from < 5% for "applying the right way" to 22% for "maybe you upset a hiring manager" suggests his new approach, in spite of your reservations, is better for cases where you don't know anyone who can give you a warm introduction to a given company.

If anything, assuming most companies have an 'employee referral' program, emailing a random non-recruiter may have the additional advantage that, for no cost to you, someone at that company becomes incentivized for several thousand dollars to lobby for you.


It's very much a tragedy of the commons scenario, though: if one person emails a random within the company, they're going to stand out, maybe even get put in as a blind referral. If everybody starts doing this, then it's just spam, and the emails are more likely to get dropped on the floor.


This is actually a very good point. Having an incentivized advocate really skews things in your favor and many companies have such programs in place to bring in new hires...


Alternately, it suggests that people getting emails like this should be sure to send them to Recruiting with a "Could not follow instructions, do not hire" note.


Sarah Federman - http://sarah.codes/

Sarah Drasner - http://sarahdrasnerdesign.com/

Assume whoever looks at your portfolio is going to scroll from top to bottom first, get a first impression, then _maybe_ click through things later.

So build for the question "What do I want people to see if they scroll through my site without clicking on anything?"


> So build for the question "What do I want people to see if they scroll through my site without clicking on anything?"

The home page of the first site could literally fit all of its quickly parseable informational content with no scrolling required and without being too dense (on a desktop - minimal scrolling would be needed on mobile).

Does anyone really enjoy looking at seemingly-random large background images while trying to pick out the isolated islands of text as they scroll - complete with shifting brightness/contrast? I used to think not, but it's becoming so prevalent I begin to think I'm in the minority.

Pictures convey a lot of information, but (IMO) people don't want a lot of information when first visiting a place - they want an overview that they can digest quickly, and they want to be able to drill deeper for more details. Images.

Pictures also take a lot more time to process - it was three passes through the site you linked before I realized that the pictures were actually showing (through pictures of devices...) examples of her work - I was there for information, but didn't realize some of that information was png-encoded.

Some of her work looks quite good - but if I weren't paying extra attention for purposes of writing this, I would have never seen it.


Hey, you guys found my old website! It's in sore need of some upkeep, I haven't touched it since the week I built it when I was in school :(

I understand what you're getting at re:scan-nability and info denseness, but I believe that is what a resume for. I'm not trying to use my website as a resume, I'm trying to establish a digital presence and show off my work. If I weren't a designer and front end person, having an online resume might be the goal, but this is a portfolio.

It has many problems that I hope to fix, but using visual aides are not one of them :) Anyways, thanks for taking the time to look at it. I adore Sarah Drasner's work too, she's one of my favorite people!


Thanks for the reply and the additional context. I hadn't considered that from the perspective of why you're showing what you're showing. Naturally design is visual, and difficult to show effectively using small chunks of text.

(But my feelings on scroll allthethings remain unchanged :D )


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