I've always felt the culture of hiding salaries was doing a significant disservice to employees. It creates a significant and largely artificial information disparity, giving a major market advantage to the employer. In turn, this makes the entire labor market less efficient for the employee.

This also makes the employer less accountable to the employees. The employer can easily pay somebody significantly more or less than they contribute, and the rest of the team cannot really say anything about this.

Now, there are some cultural reasons to do this--preventing jealousy, hiding inequality. But it really feels like a social band-aid, a temporary solution hiding the symptoms but not the underlying problem. Besides, everyone ends up having a reasonable guess as to who makes more and who makes less anyhow! The same dynamics develop, just with more uncertainty.

On the other hand, making salaries public takes these problems head-on. Inequality isn't bad in and of itself; some is basically necessary. But hiding that fact doesn't really help anyone. Instead, forcing people to see it head-on, deal with it and talk about it is probably a better solution.

I really applaud Buffer and the general movement towards transparency. I think it's a very healthy cultural progression and hope it catches on more widely, so that people stop having knee-jerk reactions to salary information.

EDIT: As an interesting additional note, all salaries (beyond a token minimum) at Berkeley (and the whole UC system) are publicly available at http://ucpay.globl.org/.

I've looked up various professors at the ParLab (where I did some undergraduate research). The fact that their salaries range from ~120k to ~350k did not change my perspective of anyone and did not seem to affect the lab's culture at all.

Essentially, I'd be perfectly happy to see this outside of public universities.

Let's say I'm a competitor, and I find that Niel (randomly picked) is someone I want to hire. All else being equal, I offer him $100k (website says he's making $88k). He comes to his boss to say "I like it here, can you match it?"

What does his boss do? Especially, if he's valuable to the company...

What if I have a very specialized skill that doesn't fit nicely into your matrix? Let's say market pay for my skill is $200k. Do you create a new category for me? Do I get dirty looks from all of my co-workers because I have a valuable skillset that most people don't?

I'd hate it, as an employee, as a boss or as an investor. But that could just be me.

tl;dr: moxie uses ancient, known broken crypto primitives (Dual_EC_DRBG, RSA with 896 bits, MD2 and XOR) to construct a chat protocol which is unbreakable if framed in the same way the Telegram developers did with their challenge. "If they can’t demonstrate a break in this obviously broken protocol using the same contest framework they’ve setup, then we’ll know that their contest is bullshit."

Also, a call to arms to improve the OSS TextSecure implementation.

For reference, here's a list (probably incomplete? (EDIT: and feel free to add!)) of ways this protocol is broken:

  1. There's no authentication at any point. The whole thing is trivially MITM-able.
  2. The RNG is Dual_EC_DRBG, which is backdoored.
  3. The RSA public key is small enough that an attacker of sufficient means could break it.
  4. The RSA plaintext is unpadded. Proper padding is critical for safe RSA encryption. See e.g. Bleichenbacher '98.
  5. RSA is used to encrypt semantic data. Dangerous for the same reasons as above.
  6. The hash function is broken. I'm not sure if this matters too much here, but I'm also not sure that it doesn't matter.
  7. The ciphertext seems to be restricted to messages of exactly 128 bits. It's not clear how or if the plaintext is padded if it's too short, and it's not clear how the protocol handles a longer message. These are noteworthy considerations.

And yet it's still (basically) safe against the kind of contest Telegram has outlined. Someone could win by factoring the RSA public key, but I'm not sure if that would be cheaper than the $200k prize. This vulnerability can also be mitigated trivially by using bigger RSA keys, making the protocol Telegram-secure.

When it takes a public outcry on HN for a company to do their job, I no longer deal with such a company. Simple as that. I don't care if you raised $25 million - if you can't treat your users fairly, you deserve neither.

It's awesome that Bill Gates decided to participate in the gift exchange.

This is also quite assuredly one of the best ways he could have possibly advertised for Heifer International.

So, yeah, he's a regular dude in a lot of ways. He's also still a ruthless billionaire who created a company that was known for crushing its competitors.

People are complicated, and just because he can be nice doesn't mean that he's not other things too.

Upside: renders quickly and identically in all browsers.

We're looking for a lawyer to help finish up our merger. The previous guy did 90% of the work and then stopped responding to our emails!!! This shouldn't take an experienced lawyer more than a few hours.

Pay: $10

I was deeply touched while reading this piece - I felt that Powell was speaking almost directly to me. I was one of those children who suffered from a learning challenge. I had a very strong case of ADHD, and I'll tell you what I stuck out like a sore thumb. I was ostracized by both teachers and peers. In my isolation I found a sense of control in software development.

During my adolescence I found the anarchist cookbook. I used to read through it, fascinated with its ideology, and sometimes building various explosives and weapons. In high school I experimented with drugs and got very close to flunking out. I got in trouble with the law more times than I'd like to admit. I was very angry and paranoid, and the idiotic policies put in place during the Bush years had a lot to do with that.

Nowadays I'm a completely different person. I'm deeply religious, I try and go out of my way to say kind words and help others, and I'm a much happier person. I'm about to graduate with a degree in biochemistry from a great college. I believe the world would be a much better place if people would try harder to understand and love each other and show mercy. Reading this piece by one of my childhood mentors very much evoked a feeling of vindication.

Just COMPLETELY ignore it.

I truly believe after spending so much time on Reddit I became a worse person by being exposed to the same regurgitated/top voted opinions on things nobody should be talking about unless qualified (which you can't verify). I realized after a few years after taking an objective look at my life how much I had changed. If you dwell in a medium, you tend to absorb it, and that's the only medium I dwelled in. It's taken me quite awhile to get back to being a normal, nice, human being, sometimes I still slip up in real life. Every topic I've been exposed to ad nauseam on Reddit that I experience in real life, I have to consciously drop all my preconceptions on the topic that I developed online and look at it with a fresh mind, it's slowly helping.

It's a podium for anyone who has an unqualified opinion to suddenly voice it for no real reason. That, combined with the broken upvote system promoting terrible content is a recipe for disaster.

"Reddit: the front page of an on going Dunning-Kruger effect study".

You don't stand to gain anything from Reddit. The comments are largely terrible unless you visit very niche subreddits that are moderated and/or have verified users. You can argue that some smaller subreddits have really good content, but do they REALLY? Maybe you'll find a few cool links, some good comments, and an odd article or two.

The reality is, nobody who has a credible opinion on something is going to bother wasting time having in depth conversations on an anonymous message board, so how good can the content quality possibly get?

I realized how bad Reddit was when I started following comment threads and analysis on other websites on he same articles as Reddit. What was upvoted as total truth (top comment) on certain articles was just scraping the bottom of the barrel. It's basically: hunt for topic -> scrape some shit off the internet (be it wikipedia or whatever site) -> loosely compose it into some shit essay everyone will upvote with a strong ideal behind it -> top comment. This goes for every Reddit thread.

I'm mad and disappointed in myself for wasting so many years on it.

It's a shit flinging contest determined by fake points called "karma" that people, for some odd reason, REALLY REALLY care about, mitigating any hope for a quality discussion.

Great response OP.

edit: toned down the vulgarity of the original post

edit2: My comment is towards the default subreddits, not small niche subreddits that you have to hunt for yourself to find.

"The comments are always terrible. You can argue that some smaller subreddits have really good content, but do they really?"

Yes, they really do. And no, the comments aren't always terrible. You can't simply make absurdly absolute statements and contrived caricatures and expect them to fly.

You seem to have a deep emotional investment in Reddit, as if you put unrealistic expectations in it and now you strike out like a bitter ex-lover (alternately that you go karma bombed, turning you into a one-man anti-Reddit squad).

Reddit is a large site with a lot of diverse people. Many subs are not my cup of tea (/r/wtf is the domain of teenagers), but many others make for an entertaining and often information diversion.

I enjoy it. So do a lot of other people.