skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I work with doctors, in and around hospitals and clinics. This problem has reached epidemic proportions, especially in the US. Bean counters know that no matter how many perks are removed or how intolerable working conditions get, doctors simply won't walk away from patients. I'm sorry to say that this is being taken advantage of in the worst of ways.

Be careful working at a job you "believe in", it puts you at a fearful disadvantage.
I'm posting this under a new account, but I've been around HN for a couple years now...

I just wanted to get a feel for how developers are approaching the choice between native iPhone apps and mobile web apps.

If you could help out, the survey shouldn't take more than just a couple of minutes max.

Thanks!
Single Points of Failure
some background i found on a quick search:

http://www.maa.org/mathland/mathtrek_6_28_99.html (short summary)

http://www.maths.bris.ac.uk/~majm/bib/GAFoS.pdf (two page magazine article)

http://www.maths.bris.ac.uk/~majpk/papers/67.pdf (heavier)
I was introduced to programming in 5th grade (around 1990) where we made our own adventure games in computer class using World Builder (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Builder) on 9-inch compact Macs. Everyone in the 5th grade took that class. The programming section was a small part of the whole curriculum and was presented in a way that everyone had a pretty good time with it.
The thing that more often than not that list of 'random' names isn't random.

Exactly. For instance, my firewall is called "charon". Personification is a good thing and should be encouraged. It's easier to visualize things that way. From an inside-out perspective (people such as accountants who see everything but, for the most part, do not understand it), naming servers like $function_$row_$rack_$slot or whatever else makes sense...it will simplify things.

The problem is that it simplifies things from an inventory perspective, not from a "I'm trying to visualize this so that it all works" perspective.

Think about it like this: you have things in your kitchen, right? Say you have a toaster, a refrigerator, a mixer, and a microwave. You would NEVER call them things like "appliance_counter1_left", "appliance_floor_right" etc. This would be confusing. It is for this reason that humans give things names; toaster, refrigerator, and mixer are all names, they're just very common ones.
get a life homo
Writing a Hacker News Android Client?

I think I will start without an API anyway. Most of the things I need to do should be possible with the RSS "API".
That is a false dichotomy - kids should learn languages and get some exposure to a decent programming languages. As far as I am concerned, I'd like to read Proust (and Schiller) in the original languages but I'm not aware of anything in Ruby that I'm so keen to read.
Oh I see, my apologies, I thought that the first sentence was the summary, and the second two were your thoughts on it.
At the last company that I worked for, they didn't remove the free coffee but they took away the free napkins, sugar, creamer, coffee cups, etc. I was laid off two months later.

The coffee also got better right before the layoffs. In an effort to save money, they looked for a cheaper coffee source than the crappy business supply company they had been using. They managed to stumble upon a deal at a local coffee roaster to get cheaper coffee.

It was pretty good when made correctly. One of the worst things than can happen at a company is for someone who doesn't like "strong coffee" to be the first one into the office in the morning. Not putting enough coffee grounds in the filter basket makes coffee taste bitter and horrible. If you want weak coffee, add water to a strong cup. Someone eventually had to put up signs giving this same advice.
Is anyone else bothered by the subtle social underclass undertones made in the article? Like:

"Most live in this city’s poorer districts and begin their academic life well behind the curve."

"..two other students ambled by, one wearing a pair of clown pants as a headscarf."

"..a 4-year-old boy in a FUBU jersey and long dreadlocks..."

It's almost like the point being made is that, even dummies like these can benefit from our program.
We gotta do a deal together
I can't believe how happy about getting virtually splashed in the face I am.

Great perspective reset questions to help us keep our eyes on the prize and ingrain solid startup habits.
Why VCs don’t invest in early-stage consumer companies
I worked at a very large company, which post-merger started rolling out various changes which negatively impacted our development group. $0.25 sodas, redbull, and snacks went to normal prices, release night dinners were cut, flex time became less flexible, etc...

While no one quit due to any one of those changes, it did change the place from somewhere fun to work to somewhere that wasn't fun. As a result about three months later a large number of the architecture group and other key people quit within a 1-2 week span. So while no one may quit the day the water coolers are removed, that type of change will lead to higher turn over later on, especially among the top folks, who can find a new job pretty easily.
British Court: Stormtroopers Don't Belong To Lucas / Not copyrightable
I just want to say I really love this analogy.
Climate change skeptics/deniers pay better
The fake blog is probably from a Markov generator. I've always liked that much more expensive to generate real content like it isn't that as a blackhat SEO strategy. However, it seems like the recent post about eHow and bingo cards like it seems like it seems like the recent post about eHow and bingo cards so there isn't that risk The fake blog is probably from a Markov generator. I've always liked that risk The fake blog is probably from a blackhat SEO strategy. However, it isn't that as a Markov generator.
In the harmonic D Minor, the C is raised to C#.
For purely physical reasons, the Project Orion study disagrees with you. According to their models, a robust surface to orbit launch schedule would result in a couple of extra deaths a year worldwide from cancer. Compared to the extra cancer deaths from burning coal, this is nothing! Compared to worldwide deaths from automobile traffic? Compared against the potential economic benefit?

Unfortunately, it would be politically infeasible.
Well, sober or not, I felt it pretty thoroughly laid out the argument for the sceptic position.

> For example the self-limiting effects of CO2. Seems plausible enough to someone reading about it for the first time, but I'm guessing this is a theory produced by climate researchers. Why does this get a free pass when other theories get demolished for using computers, creating models, assumptions and other basic tools of science?

I didn't understand that? I don't recall theories being demolished for doing those thing?

> Also, out of the 4 basic points, point 3 (the earth hasn't warmed since 2001) seems incredibly weak even at first glance.

There is some satellite data going back around 30 years that doesn't register any statistically significant warming. Obviously, there are some other that does, and "Climategate" and "hide the decline" seems to be about this. I'm not qualified to evaluate the arguments about which datasets can be processed how or left out or given different weights, but there's a lot of language in those e-mail that you wouldn't expect to hear from someone confident in the completeness and soundness of their own argument.

Actually, I'm mostly interested in the politics, more than the science. IPCC is a political body disguised as objective science, and quite frankly, that should piss of all scientists, whether or not they agree with the conclusion. The politics-disguised-as-science is then being used to push a very expensive and very ineffective agenda, and that should piss off the rest of us.
For at least a year now I have been hearing tech pundits say, 'Nobody uses RSS anymore. I just get all my news from twitter.' I have never seen this behavior replicated in anybody I know.

I think that it's because heavy twitter usage has other points of appeal to the tech blogger crowd, most of which are, let's be honest, webcocks. The average internet user, or the average hacker, has no interest whatsoever in following 1-5k twitter users, and no real interest in trying to amass that many users themselves. But the 'social media expert' devotes a large amount of his time and energy to gathering followers, subscribers, commenters, etc., so he has some reason to spend an absurd amount of his time in twitter.
This reminds me being told the column names in a table of the admin panel that customers would never see would have to be changed.

Furious but didn't contest it.
Pocket Therapy iPhone App
Hmmm. It's a lot easier to automatically manage boxes named "server001" than a list of random names that constantly has to be maintained.

I bet you could save $10,000 a year by eliminating the arbitrary names and calling them ServerXXX.

Sorry for the attempt at a witty reply. Let's start again. Agreed, there are efficiencies. The point of the article is that when you institute changes like this, you may create unintended consequences like a mass exodus of people who liked working for a company where the servers were named after Muppet characters and associate "Server042" with a company where professional managers demand cover sheets for their TPS reports.

Before making such a change, ask yourself this question: Is what I'm doing good for the company?
You're right. I don't know about doctors, but I work in an IT department. You can tell that pretty much no one here "believes in" the job. It's just a paycheck. I think people don't leave for a variety of reasons, but passion for the work or the good that the work is supposed to provide is definitely not one of them.
Awesome that he's working on a shorter version. I poked around his site after finishing the book to suggest just such a thing. Thanks for the heads up.
link to the source: http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601109&sid=a1jw...
My employment contract lists free sodas as one of the benefits, right next to health and dental. Probably one of the main reasons we still have them.
You may be confusing risk with recklessness. NASA is very careful in how it runs missions (since there are so many opportunities for irrecoverable operational errors), but the actual designs in unmanned missions have routinely pushed past the state of the art.

Using aerobraking shells, landing on Mars with bouncy pillows, catching a returning solar wind probe with a helicopter, shielding a probe within 10 solar radii of the sun... NASA projects are daring in their design even if they are (quite properly) conservative in execution.
“Nerd” and “Geek” Should Be Banned, Professor Says
That optimizes for ordering replacement parts :-)
The article's a bit thin, but the comments are fun.
Yeah, it doesn’t really. Python was already at version 1.2 before, Guido says, “... in April 1995. CNRI’s director, Bob Kahn, was the first to point out to me how much Python has in common with Lisp, despite being completely different at a superficial (syntactic) level.”
Given all the speculation about "spending lavishly" on C-level executives and other such stuff, I wonder how much longer Twitter engineers can expect the soda to be free for? ;)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1007750
Some care required. Four years ago we coined some names for internal use that we knew no one would ever see. Now they've leaked out into places where some customers can see them and the entire code-base really ought to be cleaned for consistency. Currently we have visible names and hidden names, and remembering the dichotomy is proving difficult. We're cleaning as we go, but we are all wishing we'd been a bit less whimsical.
The parent's point remains completely valid. Rapid iteration only works if you are allowed to fail. In the case of manned space flight, failure means you lose the crew.
Unfortunately, shows are just that. Pure signaling. If you cut $10k for snacks but the executive keeps his $30k company car lease, what have you just told the engineers who made the company possible in the first place? To them its about respect. Its worth more than money to most of these types, and when it dries up, they're gone.

Most "I will work harder" types at startups just kind of know when the pigs are trading them to the glue factory for a case of whiskey.
Ignoring Asia, IE6 is at about 5% right now. It is small enough to start ignoring.
That's pretty amusing. You get health and dental benefits, along with one of the leading causes of health and dental problems... I know soda is considered holy water among many HNers, but for those of us who are highly health-conscious, that sounds a bit like the Detroit assembly lines with the cigarette vending machines.
Accurately summarizing other sources is how you develop a well-referenced argument. If a quotation can work as a summary then all the better. It is not a format we are used to, but it is how you build a case based on evidence.

For GCBC, I think it is important to differentiate between demolishing the bad fat/cholesterol/salt, good fiber hypothesis, and proposing the new carbohydrate hypothesis. GCBC debunks these weak hypothesis. However, all it can do is propose a new hypothesis given (as admitted by the author) the small amount of research available that directly supports that hypothesis.

It is pretty apparent that he is not cherry-picking. First of all, the book wouldn't need to be as long! Seriously, this represents an absolutely enormous investment in time that as you point out just ends up turning off readers.

Normally a cherry-picker will stoop to low quality sources of information. When demolishing conventional wisdom, Taubes sticks to all (yes all, there aren't that many) of the high quality large-scale studies that actually matter (but goes through the history of lower quality information that lead to the available hypothesis). Again, he admits that the evidence is weaker for his carbohydrate hypothesis.
I work in this area, and the market risk you allude to here is not the one that scares me. The scary one is what I like to call algorithm or system risk. The 2003 Corinthian Colleges incident mentioned on page 3 of the article is a good example, but I've seen much worse. I once saw a major bank take literally a billion dollars of risk on in approximately 10 seconds due a bug in their algorithm (most likely a new release of a modified program) that interacted with a poorly implemented exchange interface. Some of their counterparties let them out of the trades and some didn't. Releasing new software can be a hair raising experience due to the poor quality of testing systems provided by the exchanges, the speed at which money losing trades can happen, and the vast complexity of the environment faced by the software.
I think it's dependent on the situation. I enjoy the charm of machines named "frodo" and whatnot, but when I first arrived at my current company, the totally arbitrary naming conventions was highly confusing because we had three environments (dev/stage/prod) and several databases and other classes of server per environment. Now we have a standardized naming convention with names like "dev-foo01", "stage-bar02", "prod-baz01" etc.. (were foo/bar/baz denote the purpose of the machine) and it's much easier to deal with.
Chrome Extensions and webOS Applications look quite similar
Tool of the Day: Spaaze, a virtual corkboard
Free fruit works well as a similar perk, though not very many are caffeinated.
7 More Useful Tips To Help Your Site Convert
10k pays for half the janitor's salary.

We don't get free anything where I work, and I'm fine with that. My company's job is to make more money, not baby me with things that I'm perfectly capable of paying for on my salary.
I think he admitted himself to cherry picking somewhere - everybody would be cherry picking... In principle I have nothing against "more" references, however, in that book it is so much that it becomes once more impossible to check up on it. You can only give in to the sheer number and size of references. Personally I find that a bit unsatisfying and unnecessary. I would have preferred concentration on a few core points.
To answer you:

1) No. This was just a hacking solution that I got. ECMA already has a solution but browsers haven't implemented yet.
When JS engines start implementing ECMA class system, JSC will became obsolete.

2) I looked to ES4 and 5 spec, but they were too extense. I wanted something more simple, that could be similar in syntax to Java-like language with some flavours of SmallTalk. My main problem was with code from the same class being scattered on several files. This led me to creating the same classes and packages concepts that exist on other languages. More so, if you never code in JS before, this syntax seems more friendly than some weird new object system.
I went through this transition once. Initially, sodas were to be .50$, but that caused an uproar and price was quickly reduced to .25$, where it remains today. It's one thing for sodas to not be free; it's another for them to be a profit center.

Aw well, at least coffee is still free.
I would agree completely with you, if the next sentence was "In a similar situation at a different company, no one on the board..." But without such a line, I read that as commentary based on previous experiences, followed by a continuation of the main story.

(I assumed that "the board" in the next sentence referred to the board in the first part, which lead to the continuation. This is re-enforced by using "This company" and "the company" which would imply that the author was referring to the only company introduced)
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How To Hire A Great iPhone Developer
That's true. It's also bad PR for the company. Disgruntled former employees will not recommend anyone they know to work at such companies for these reasons.

That might not seem to be such a big deal (as compared to an external, traditional PR problem), but if your best employees are the ones leaving on bad terms, then most likely the people they know are above average too. Now the company will have a harder time recruiting great people.
>Some had already been irritated when “professional” managers had been hired over their teams with reportedly more stock than the early engineers had.

I'd say this was the main reason. The original employees had already proven they could manage and grow the organization from 0->even, and hadn't slowed down expecting to move the company from even->profit.

Now they have "supervisors" who don't know anything about the business or technology, shoved in on top of them, who's only role is to act as liaison between them and the corporate officers.

Bristling at the lack of corporate loyalty shown to the people that made the company happen, those people leave. The calculus is really very simple.

I've seen this pattern happen a number of times, and the usual result is that these new managers show up, make poor decisions (because they don't understand the business) cycle out (taking their stock with them), repeat 4-5 times until a manager shows up who is so inoffensive that the remaining engineers simply end up running the show in the end anyways and the manager just shows up to weekly meetings so she/he can liaise with corporate.

In the meantime, the company stock has diluted as it fled out the door to the past managers, the company lost most of its senior engineering staff, forcing them to promote lower level, less capable staff to senior positions or to hire externally (again people who don't understand the business further exacerbating the vicious cycle).
Or, failing that (and fearsome moral dilemmas aside) you could just have a lottery open to the public where the "winners" only had a 1 in 10 chance of coming back alive, but if they did, they would be millionaires and heroes. You would need a separate agency just to handle all of the applicants.

Don't even get me started on the nightmare element "reality TV" would bring to it.
So what specific problem in NASA's development methodology do you think would be fixed by your favorite VCS? From the few references I've bothered to google the existing development process is heavily regimented - if expensive - and their record is pretty good.
2009: The Birth of a New Platform
Strange the number of posts I see with this logic:

1) I fund my site via ads
2) User group X clicks on those ads more often than others
3) They're suckers!

In other words, "I have contempt for the people who pay my bills."

If you think so poorly of advertising (which is understandable), maybe you shouldn't fund your site with it?
Or perhaps they're paying tribute to me!
2009: The Year in Haskell
dev servers: gnomes

staging: dwarves

prod: elves
The elimination of free soda has nothing to do with frugality in the face of financial distress. Quite the opposite, the article begins telling the story of how well they were doing (considering current economic downturn).

The whole point of the article is that this cost reduction measure is really a political declaration of the new CFO. The engineers probably heard this message as... "You filthy lazy monkeys, leave the soda and go back to your TV-typewriters". The article position is that this bold declaration is bad business practice and that the new CFO should have shut up and implement more subtle and relevant changes, leaving the engineers to slowly realize for themselves that "things aint what used to be no more".

Said that, I agree that startup culture is riden with excesses. It is a whole live hard, die hard philosofy of compressing a decade of work into 2 or 3 years in exchange for big exit, screw life balance and all that. My opinion is that this is not a healthy way to live, but if you are into it you better get sure you are getting extraordinary compensation for your extraordinary effort. Working 80+ hrs per week for an average salary makes no sense at all.
From my personal experience, twitter is not a good medium for keeping track of news. Unless you follow less than 100 people who tweet moderately, the volume of tweets is overwhelming.

Often it takes more time to scan through tweets rather than articles because, first the URLs have to opened by the browser which is an additional step from RSS reader. Also in the case of RSS you know pretty much the kind of stories that a site is going to post but when you follow someone you will most likely get a wide variety of tweets, lot of which you will not be interested in.

When an important story breaks, twitter becomes an even bigger echo chamber than RSS because some 10s of people will be linking to techcrunch, another bunch will be linking to the nytimes coverage and weeding out these dupes is painful
No, the UK cannot enforce such a law without violating membership in the EU.
أختراق الإيميل ...بشكل أحترافي وشرح وافي . hacker
There's a vast overlap. We have free soda, I know how horrible soda is for my body, my teeth, etc and so I quit drinking it. The problem is I quit long enough to prove to myself that I could (about three months) and since then I've quit once a week or so.
This sounds like a good candidate for a The Daily WTF story. ;)
Thanks. I'm never quite sure how much extra material to provide.
I doubt it. Few people are going to mention the sodas during exit interviews. In fact, I think very few people are even aware that the sodas might be a trigger for their decision, since it's not about the sodas, but the show of loyalty.
It would be cool for them to create a genetic algorithm that trawled through a primordial soup of pitches and talking points, mixing various appeals, quotes, images, and quantities to see what would make the most money.