skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have taken the liberty of distilling the contents of the letter. I haven't substantially innovated on the content or structure, so it is still poorly organized, but hopefully it will be easier to read. Don't be too harsh on the writer: she may be ESL or have an English degree.

Dear Rockstar Management:

We wives of Rockstar employees are contacting you to address poor conditions in the San Diego office.

Working conditions have deteriorated since March 2009, to the point where employees' lives and families are affected by them. The fault lies with management, though it is probably a result of ignorance rather than malice. Immediate steps must be taken to improve the office.

Employees have suffered stress-induced illness caused by pressure from work. Several employees have been diagnosed with depression; at least one with suicidal tendencies. Rockstar has provided a full-time massuse: this will not address the causes of the stress and is insulting to employees.

We understand that the video game industry experiences periodic crunch. Traditionally, teams were offered time to decompress after milestones. This policy has been abandoned. Managers at the San Diego office have instituted a de-facto policy of permanent "temporary" crunch. Employees currently work 12 hour days, including on Saturday, regardless of the status of their projects.

This infringment of our rights is unacceptable.

Employees seeking treatment for stress-induced illnesses have been forced to use leave to do so, because most healthcare providers are not open on Sunday. Management is dismissive of complaints.

In addition to pervasive crunch, the last year has seen benefits cut. Comp time and a week of post-Christmas vacation have been eliminated. Medical benefits have also been cut, which has exacerbated the stress-induced illnesses. Non-exempt artists and designers have had overtime pay eliminated on the excuse that they are "too senior" to be non-salaried employees. One manager cusses.

Our children miss their fathers.

Rockstar customarily pays employees predictable bonuses. The bonuses have become unpredictable and, when not eliminated for specious reasons, are not actually paid in a timely fashion after being awarded. Raises have been below inflation for each of the past four years. Employees have been told that this is due to Rockstar not being profitable, however, Grand Theft Auto had over a billion dollars in sales. Rockstar should share the wealth with its employees.

If working conditions are not improved immediately, we will be forced to sue Rockstar.

Sincerely,

The Wives
I assume he was talking about the javascript engine in Safari since the webkit project downloads includes the squirrelfish js engine.
Oh boo hoo. Really. Sounds exactly like every programming job back in the 90's, except these lucky bastards somehow found the time to meet girls, date them and get married.
most likely it's a sign that their direct manager may be mistreating their underlings.
Cargo Cult Programming
I probably would have written that as a PDF, printed it out, scanned it, printed that out, faxed it to myself, then use my digital camera to take a picture of that and paste the 5MB photo into a Microsoft Word file.

But that's just me.
What's clear to me is like you're inexperienced in life, she's inexperienced in english.
Wait, where's this multi-touch? I have the Nexus One and if I hold down one key, I can't type another. In fact, if I start typing too quickly, I will often miss letters because I'm not lifting my thumbs up enough.
Who says employers will only bring a single recruiter per company? Most of the companies listed are actually bringing 3-5 company people to help recruit, so it will still be pretty efficient.

Also, I'm hoping that we have at least 50 candidates or so, it seems like the job market here in the Valley is really strong so it might be hard to find people looking to switch/find new jobs. So far we only have 30 candidates confirmed...
Looks like it'll do a great job of all the furniture-free rooms with perfect 90 degree corners I don't have!
It'll do a great job of making sure all the rooms you don't have are perfectly clean, no matter whether they have 90 degree angles or not!
Incidental copying like that has never been tested in court, and neither have EULAs for that matter (I'd bet my ass they're invalid). Everything gets buffered somewhere, even in analog processes, even in physical processes. Stop making infringing copies of my work in your brain!

Even if it was deemed within the purview of copyright, it's squarely within the realm of fair use -- they aren't violating copyright any more than a corporate mailroom that scans and duplicates incoming correspondence. They took it in in good faith, they aren't publishing it outside their own organization, and they aren't making copies to get more 'use' out of it, so it doesn't matter.
It's a MO policy: http://mathoverflow.net/faq

"We also encourage you to use your real name as your username. In your own enlightened self-interest, realise that participating in blogs, Math Overflow, the arXiv, and mathematical publishing are all forms of advertising for your "brand", even if that’s not your principal purpose (and hopefully it’s not). Since job applications require you to write your real name, you might as well use it everywhere else, too."

The bright side is that if a Fields medalist answers your question, you know it ;-)
I love my Roomba very much. She cleans every day when I'm out of the house so dust never gets a chance to accumulate on the floor. She cleans around furniture and she fits under my bed where I'd normally break my back trying to vacuum.

I've had to rescue her from an empty box I left lying around once and I have to empty her once a week but overall it's so much better than the old-fashioned way.
I really don't understand why they don't quit. Maybe making games is their dream, but obviously it's not as good as they imagined. Switch to web dev and find work instantly.
We are very close to having consumer robots drive a burst of innovation. We need the Apple II of robotics then we're off!
Or go make their own games? If word got out a bunch of Rockstar employees broke off and started their own deal, it'd get loads of free hype and press. Maybe even enough to make it viable. Isn't that pretty much what the original Diablo team did with Torchlight?
Facebook Fellowship Program
Perhaps because that just happens to be the make up of the company? Nothing wrong with female devs, but if Rockstar happens to only have male devs, then yes the wives are going to be the ones complaining.
Too late. Education may have done the trick at one point but now the internet has stepped in to fill the void. Citizens can now get all the education they can eat in whatever half-baked ideology they crave.

The new problem is polarization. Truth is not an absolute fact to be uncovered, it's a trophy to be won by the team with the loudest and sexiest ideas, though the game never really ends.

Just look at the comments for that article. You can pigeonhole every one of them and they're all trying to pigeonhole the author.

The only thing we need to be educated in is rational, critical, dispassionate thought and I have no idea how to teach that.
I have zero interest in speculating on potential future actions by the movie studios and distributors.

Fine, but my point about the First Sale Doctrine stands - it is not the settled legal situation Wikipedia (and thus you) claim it to be, and I've shown why. You can take or leave my other opinions as you see fit.

Do you honestly believe that Apple has any choice as to how much data they provide? Do you think apple give detailed metrics because they're warm and kind business partners?

It's part of their offer, not a matter of compulsion. I'm just pointing out that distributors would love to have similar information from Netflix, so you could, you know, make more money by trading it for a small reduction in your wholesale costs.
If you use eval in your program, the program will macroexpand each time it evaluates code containing macros. As even standard operators like setf are macros in CL, it will practically macroexpand each time it uses eval.

So, macros really slow down all or practically all programs containing eval. One can avoid evals, but from my point of view that means avoiding the most powerful, the most fun code=data feature in Lisp. It doesn't look good to me. So, why should one avoid eval?

"Eval is to be avoided because most of the time there are are a lot of more structured ways to do exactly the same thing." I miss the point here.
All the free press in the world won't pony up the 7 or 8 figures in capital they'd need to make a game, though. Imputed deferred wages if nothing else. Torchlight, for example, clearly cost over a million to bring to market. (Take a look at the length of their credits.)

I think it is just a bad, bad industry to be in... and yet I feel its siren's call for my next app, too.
Because you've accumulated experience that's most usable in game development. The procedures, process and even testing is quite different from other places.

Also it's not like that you decide to quit, and go to another work.

I have a friend that moved from Heavy Iron studios to that exact same one, and he drives 100 miles back and forth (Santa Monica -> Carlsbad/OceanSide/San Diego - not exactly sure where the studio is).

He moved away from Heavy Iron studios because they were told that all salaries would be halved.

He's with kids, and has to react quickly. He can't let himself be laid off (on half salary), and then search. He needs to quit (so no compensation) and has to find job in maximum one two months.

So here you go. He went over there, and although he's driving much - does he has much choice? Or should he start his vacation days back from a two weeks, until it accumulates to a full month and more? And at some point one would have to settle at one place - buy a house, etc.
I'm guessing cause they have wives, kids and mortgages.

Now, why they don't line up another job is a good question. But 70+ hour weeks can get in the way of job hunting.
Please read this:

http://www.indievision.org/?p=1504
If I understood well:

1/ it works offline (think git vs svn) - so you can work in a train for instance

2/ if you test your app with real data (ie: many different emails), you're sure no email will go out by mistake

3/ you can use as many recipients as you want (with any kind of address) and see the emails right away

I could be wrong though - my understanding!
It wasn't only the Apple II we first need something like an Altair 8800 an oh, a Homebrew Computer (robotics?) club so we can have those 37 companies opened by its members.
Hah. Perl-esque - awful language, but huge library. Not the same - ahem awful language might or might not mean intellectual lightweight - it could be intellectual drunkard - but HUGE LIBRARY (cpan that is)...
The homebrew robotics club meets the last Wednesday of every month at NASA Ames in Mountain View. It's pretty interesting to drop in on.

http://www.hbrobotics.org/
Wasn't it settled, rather than setting a precedent? Might be wrong... But there was an action after it happened. But it stayed in EA:

- Hourly employees

- No bonuses

- No royalties

Off course take that with grain of salt - I doubt it applies to all EA studios.
Here you go, although it has the dreaded [citation needed] tag too - best I can do on short notice. I don't know what the exact terms of Netflix's distribution agreements are - my comment about the rental fee was meant as a general one, to give a capsule explanation of how the industry works, so I'm sorry if it seemed like an overly specific statement about that one company.

Generalities about the film business are awkward; it's opaque insofar as much pricing is contract- rather than market-based.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockbuster_Inc.#Business_model
Not all automated trading or quantitative finance is high-frequency. A bank trading exotic derivatives OTC could use C# to generate quotes without a problem. There are at least a couple reputable prop groups I know of that use C# in real-time trading systems, but both are running more quantitative long-term strategies in options.
Great idea! Also, mount the dishwashers a few feet above the floor to avoid all that leaning over.
Having your wife contact your boss does not a strong negotiating position make.
Swedish startup selling North Korean jeans
Good observation. But I would say that the key takeaway from a good educational system isn't so much facts as it's the ability to discuss matters in a civil manner. Good discussion helps against polarisation.

The Internet hasn't exactly helped in teaching the public civil discourse. As you point out - just look at the comments in the article. Or on youtube, Digg, etc. A proper educational system will teach people to disagree based on facts and evidence, learn from their mistakes, and help them discern fact from anecdotal evidence, bad science, and good old-fashioned yelling.
Neanderthals correspond to Trolls, just like Dragons correspond to Dinosaurs.
English second language speakers (like myself) often use words out of place or the wrong words. The reasons for that is simple - often you think of something but there is no direct translation (there aren't a one to one mapping between words in languages). Another reason is that you have to keep on using new words - otherwise you will end up with the vocabulary of a five year old.
Here's the URL for Mint: http://www.mintcleaner.com/
Because if you use a real smtp server:
- Sometimes setup are not easy (like using gmail in a rails app)
- It's not instant
- You need a internet connection.
This phenomenon is actually responsible for practically all of Vancouver's game industry presence - nearly every shop in town is formed by pissed off ex-EA employees. It is now almost expected for a junior dev to cut their teeth at EA, and graduate to one of these studios where they will be treated like human beings.
According to the Wikipedia article on the library of Alexandria, Carl Sagan was basically full of shit. (I'm assuming you're talking about the last episode of Cosmos.)
"Now, why they don't line up another job is a good question."

Probably because most other studios in the area are just like this also - this is a persistent problem in any industry where there is a lineup a mile long of suckers who want the glamour of making video games.

Just look at Hollywood.
(Shrug) When I need to do something outside my core competency, such as publishing a letter in Farsi, I ask for help from someone qualified to do so.

How hard can it be to find someone willing to look over an English letter and offer suggestions?
Single page: http://spectrum.ieee.org/semiconductors/devices/how-europe-m...
This is not the goal of mocksmtp. It's for first level testing. Checking html and correcting rendering with webkit. Then of course you need to test other mail/weblmail reader or with litmus as mention before.

It's like make HTML/CSS for a webpage. First level, you create you HTML/CSS code and test it with Firefox usually. Then when you are happy with, you check safari/chrome and debug IE :).
The only company that took the EA wives scandal to heart was EA - from what I hear from people inside it's now a much better place to work than before.

Well, much better than slave work is still kind of shitty, but...
French President Pushes For 'Google Tax'
Well no. You might as well tell your boss: "I'm no longer a team player. I am a family player right now". I've told that to my boss, because I knew my boss would understand me.

But not everyone is like that.

It's not manager problem. It's an industry problem. No silver bullet...
Now how practical is that? I'm bulgarian, my english is bad, my accent is even worse. I take it that there is no right language, no right accent.
A Measure of Web Page Relatedness
You should have added "Ask HN" at the beginning. Maybe someone would have replied.
Game studios in California typically have nasty reputations, in my experience. The rest of the industry isn't renown for good working conditions, but I can't think of many studios in CA with a good reputation. Could be that the huge programming and artistic talent pool in the state makes it easy for the studios to abuse employees.
I don't know since I'm not in the industry - but I can hazard a guess. Like Hollywood, California is essentially the birthplace of video games - and in many ways is still considered its Mecca. Like the other HN post about the aspiring web dev who moved to CA to "make it", I'm sure others do the same to break into the games industry.

Low supply of jobs + huge influx of desperate glamour seekers = massive drop in pay and benefits, and more incentive to abuse (there's a guy who's spent years honing his experience right outside the door ready for you to burn out and quit).
U Make Money Online - Work From Home
You’re about to discover the simple secrets that most people will never know about how to create easy monthly internet income, without ever leaving your house. Work from home and earn big.
Interesting that for debugging purpose only, the author considers that one should use the software stack in English only. I am sorry, but the wonder of humanity is coming from our differences. I speak French, German, English and Danish, each language allows me to think/reflect on different themes differently. I can express some concepts in German with one word for example "Schadenfreude" which would require a complete sentence in French.

Now imagine, you are deep into doing some work in German and you need to switch all the time between your "German" work and your "English" tools because your computer may crash and you may need to copy/paste an error message in a search engine. This is a usability disaster. I am really surprised that lot of HN readers are supporting such idea when at the same time the majority of people here have high praise for good design and usability.
Also, I spell potatoe with an ‘e’, as God intended, so you know I’m right about this.

Wait, Dan Quayle writes iPhone Apps?
Cooliris
Code Stew
I agree, but it seems ironic since your chances of breaking in are probably a lot better outside CA these days. It's become common for studios to clamp down on hiring in high-cost locations, while ramping up in cheaper cities. If I was trying to break into games today, I'd go to Montreal - thanks to gov't subsidies, they're the cheapest place on earth to make games, and the studios have noticed.
I rather think about the little understanding of game theory I have.

"Factors outside my control will make me look for other employment in a short time, unless you give me a better deal."

Think of it as the other "player" seeing you throw the steering wheel out of the car window, when playing Chicken. He knows you can't turn...
I suspect he intended to reply to this one:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1040114
When the next civilization finds the flag on the moon, perhaps they will say the same thing.
AddThis - Get Your Button Code
The Danger of Distracted Driving
In an earlier age people were skeptical that you could ever get good policy from a mob, well-educated or not. Popular opinion will always be subject to the influence of demagogues.
Java libraries aren't as simple as the Python counterparts, agreed and I too just built a sudoku solver http://sudokusolver.info seems like everyone has built one of those... I wonder why?
Bad Credit Repair - the Helpful Way to Clear Your Bad Credit.
Around the world,so many people are not having much knowledge regarding bad credit repair help.Now a days,this type of help is available in the market.
Tip Top Care for hands and nails & Glitter Night Nail Color
Google Apps + Google AppEngine. Total cost: $0 (since you already have a domain).
The practising mathematicians I know don't program. I'm not sure if there are any ways in which programming can help with things like Functional Analysis or Geometric Topology. Not even sure about low-dimensional topology.

I'll ask Tim Gowers next time I see him.

The ex-mathematicians I know who now use mathematics to do things in the real-world use a full range, including all those mentioned elsewhere.

For my PhD I used Fortran, BCPL, zed (not the one you might think - it was essentially "ed"), and Phoenix scripting.

For my day job I use Python/Sage/NumPy, C, C++, ARM assembler, bash, BASIC and OpenOffice Calc. Infrequently and irregularly I use Lua and Scheme. On the other hand, I'm not really doing math anymore. I no longer prove theorems.
He who controls the electricity...
No, this all happened without organization. For any moderately popular song, this is likely to happen.
Saying that yourself is one thing - having someone say it for you merely makes you look like a weak negotiator. Joe Programmer is a ball being tossed back and forth between his boss and his wife - he has set himself up to just go wherever the stronger player sends him.
Anything made in North Korea, as long as it is not overly expensive, would be worth buying just for the sake of owning something made in North Korea. (At least in my humble opinion.)

If North Korea wanted to they could probably make a whole lot of money, and improve the living standards of their citizens, by hiring a few good foriegn designers and created a whole line of specialty products "100% made in North Korea." Just imagine the premium they could charge!

The only difficulty that I can think of is how they would rehabilitate their image.
My parents have this solved. They always put the dishes back on the bottom of the stack. It takes a bit of juggling but it ensures completely even wear.

But then, I grew up in a large household and it wasn't uncommon to go through nearly the whole stack in a day.
My Roomba seems to pick up an order of magnitude more dust than any Swiffer mop ever has. Brushes and a vacuum will do a better job cleaning than pushing around a wet rag in a very nice pattern any day.
Again, it's a matter of you telling your boss. Not letting your wife (or mother) do it for you.
Well...a lot of people share those sentiments. :)
Same. But when I don't use all the plates, I put them on the top. Who cares if my $1 IKEA plate set doesn't wear evenly?
Congrats to Dropbox! You guys truly are an inspiration.
It was a language that I had come close to mastering in a matter of minutes, having never used it before!

And I thought mastering something took years?
So when the mobs came to burn the place down no one was there to stop them.

Hmm.. there were no mobs involved, the first destruction is attributed to Caesar at around 48BC.

I appears that the library was then rebuild and destroyed again in 648AD

... Burning and destruction of the Library of Alexandria was reported to be the first act of sacking after Amr ibn al 'Aas forces entered the city. It was also said that the Library's collection was still substantial enough at this late date to provide six months' worth of fuel for the baths. From (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_of_Alexandria)
The average intelligence of computer users
Nicely written article. A pleasure to read.
Actually, I wonder if more entrepreneurs like those Swedish geeks started to invest in North Korea would initiate a "Chinafication" process of the country.
Broadband play? Perhaps
You would because you are Greek and understand it. But what if it was Cyrillic or Chinese instead?
i don't understand. why would people want to own an artifact of human misery?
Should we expect anything better from an industry that exists merely to make us stupid, and further increase add and reduce ability to focus?
competition breeds improvement.
Weren't some rich Russians willing to pay for the privilege of a pirate-hunting vacation off the coast of Somalia? You're assuming everyone has a conscience, which is an unrealistic assumption.
Maybe we should figure out what it is that makes other human beings want to kill planes full of Americans, and work on that problem, instead of investing so much time, money, and ill-will on draconian and ineffective security measures that only achieve a lowered sense of happiness in this world?