skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> ... many managers ...

I would've thought my presence here on HN would've taken me out of the usual class of manager.

Sometimes it's hard, but I make certain I reward open and honest communication. I use various techniques, but I make sure my programmers, and employees in general, can give me bad news without fear of personal repercussions. This includes telling me when they've screwed up. No one gets punished for that. The only things I demand are honesty and consideration/diplomacy. And even if they express themselves less than diplomatically, they still don't get punished.

Some years ago when I was senior, but not really a manager, the company was in the process of going under. I and some senior colleagues managed a semi-hostile management buyout. In the middle of all this, when none of us had been paid for four months, and it was going to be at least another two before we could take control, 90% of the staff were still coming in and working 24 hour weeks (4 days of 6 hours).

Without pay.

When we'd given a briefing of where things were we asked one or two to stay behind, and asked why they hadn't left. Their response - we don't want to work with anyone else.

We've worked hard, really hard, to maintain that kind of working relationship, and to this day any of them, when necessary, will come into my office to give me bad news, knowing that I want the truth.

That's why I object to comments like yours. I accept that it wasn't intended personally, but wanted you to be aware of how it could be construed, and how potentially destructive attitudes like that can be.
The author didn't convince me that the company was successful or that the CFO's move was political, and even provides information that suggests the opposite (the company wasn't making a profit and the CFO needed to address critical areas that had been overlooked).

Your last paragraph is particularly relevant. Startups attract engineers who want to work in areas that interest them and in workplaces that are fun. But eventually someone has to do the work they didn't want to do, and the change in the environment seems unavoidable. Anyone attracted to startups would do well to heed your advice.
How the heck are you supposed to remember what is running on "server001" vs. "server002" or "server003", etc.? Why not just stick to IP addresses if you're going to do that?
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=comparison+between+erlang+and+haskell
Everywhere I've worked that's not a startup, I've had to pay for all my stuff. The startups I worked for, as they became non-startups, started ditching perks like beer:30 Fridays, catered on-site lunches, free soda and the like. One took off and is wildly successful these days, the other became a non-startup by becoming a non-company.

It's my personal observation. Of course, it's probably different here on the prairie (Kansas City) than it is in The Valley. Maybe the Oracles, ciscos, Googles and Yahoos of the world still provide plenty of goodies for free out there.

I agree with many others in this thread that expenses are expenses. $16 per person per month is $10k at 50 employees. What about the 18-kilohuman corporation I work for right now? $16 per head per month turns into a $3.5M line item per year at that point. When does free soda become impractical?

Also, the original article posits that it's more a symptom of the culture change than anything. Having to rifle through your pockets to score that Mountain Dew that used to fall out of the machine with only a button-press is often the first tangible effect of that culture change.
I think you've misinterpreted what shrughes meant by "right". I agree with a lot of what you've written, but you'd be refuting someone who said "what makes it smart", not "what makes it right".

Keep in mind when shrughes wrote "what makes it right", he was responding to someone who called the USA "anti-immigrant" because it doesn't prefer highly educated and skilled immigrants over low skilled, low educated immigrants. I find that argument strange too - it's a basis for claiming the US is kinda dumb about immigration, but taking 1.2 million immigrants a year that most other nations don't really want is definitely not "anti-immigrant", it's immensely pro-immigrant.
When I worked at the Twitter offices, the real free perk was expensive Belgian beer. The dynamic was this - the service would go down, the devs would work to bring it back up again, and then some grateful and wealthy Twitter user in the valley would send over some fancy beer as a thank you.

I often wondered if this was creating perverse incentives, but I sure liked that fancy beer.
I would put Microsoft in the former group. It was one of the best companies when led by its original founder. Now, not so much.
I much rather prefer managing names rather than codes/numbers. One major reason is that often in a standardized system, the least significant bits are on the right, and at least in Windows often a longer name will be truncated in a display. I don't need many characters to tell one dwarf from another, but to tell names of the type XXYYYNNNNN0-12 from XXYYYNNNNN0-13 is a huge pain sometimes.

The big win, though, for a more clinical naming is that shared context/training can be easier, and in a larger org the standardization of course makes things a lot easier to deal with. But of course, standardization can be done with the more whimsical names. And a lot of the time the naming scheme that is drawn up by committee takes just as long to learn as the more fun ones (mostly because they need to be abbreviated a bunch).

I suppose the one thing you can say for formal naming systems that is fairly inarguable is that once you understand the rules, you can look at an unfamiliar machine name and know instantly what it does. For machines named after fictional characters that's only true if you read/watch the same books/shows as the people doing the naming.
I know the problem of such a large share of IE6 in China is basically due to millions of pirated WinXP ...
Fewer high school students taking computer science classes
I know at my high school, it wasn't even an option. The "web design" course I took basically was a study hall for me.

I also think this is a symptom of our poor math curriculum. I took every math class available to me and I still didn't touch discrete math or formal logic until college.
We've just quit the sodas perk, replaced them with fruit
and we took time to explain why. While we didn't get high fives for the changing policy, now two three months later we're hearing, "gee, thanks, this is a great idea".
An excellent point.

What I find strange is the insistence on cheaping out on the food I see a lot of places. Once you've commited on food, the incremental cost of healthy vs. cheap and crappy isn't all that bad, and keeps the premiums down if you're an employer subsidizing insurance. In any case, keeping employees healthy is in fact a good thing...
@notauser Yeah, but I have to write my thesis until January 7 and I need to focus on that for now.
Replacement engineers as well :)
Also, you only say what percentage of revenue comes from likely "deniers" (based on origin.) If you think you're measuring "gullibility," wouldn't it be more informative to know the two percentages of likely vs. unknown/random who visit your site and generate ad revenue, right?
Heh: when MIT first started doing this in the late '80s, they started cleaning most restrooms only every other day.

They called this "Frequent Cleaning"....
It all depends on your 'soup' you start with. Online advertising is a perfect example of punctuated equilibrium: big ideas that get gradually refined, until the highest return on investment comes from creating another big idea.
"[E]nergy to get a spacecraft to orbit? It's comparable to sending a 747 over the Atlantic."

[citation needed] I have not done the math, but I find this quite improbable.

The space shuttle has two SRBs with one million pounds of solid propellant each plus more than 500,000 gallons of super-cold liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen.
http://www.nasa.gov/centers/kennedy/about/information/shuttl...

The 747-8I has 64,225 U.S. gallons of jet fuel.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_747#Specifications

According to http://www.convertunits.com/from/gallon+%5BU.S.%5D+of+naphth..., one gallon of jet fuel contains 133.92e6J, so a full fuel load on the biggest 747 is 8.6e12J.

According to somebody google found, the energy to get the shuttle into orbit is 1.17E11J, but that is just the potential and kinetic energy, neglecting the losses due to air resistance, etc.
http://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=229835

http://xkcd.com/669/
As someone who bites the heads off of chickens for a living, I find this article offensive.
Tell HN: Cinch, W7-like window management for OSX
Honestly, the muppets/elements/planets works really well...until there's some turnover. Then the new sysadmin thinks the three stooges should be the db servers and capital cities should be the web servers. Then you end up having conversations like: "Hey, can you move some data up to larry, moe, and saturn? We're building on hydrogen, oxygen, and sacramento."

The confusion this causes for new hires and non-natives is real, albeit somewhat comical.

edit: ServerXX is no better-the names should give a clue to what function they perform (i.e. IRV-FNP01 = located in irvine, file and print server, 01 [oldest server])
Will do - but please share results!
... and this is why I absolutely oppose letting non-engineering-background people run a company. You really have to have been in the trenches yourself to be qualified to manage those who are.
Unfortunately, Firefox 3.5 is blocked by the company proxy. 3.0 wasn't, but I guess they're getting wise to those wily engineers trying to use a (arguably) more secure browser.

Reminds me of the sites they have blocked under the category "productivity", no joke.
Competent, sure. However you can learn a spoken language much faster then people imagine. You could have conversations in french by christmas next year with some basic courses, a good software, some tenacity and a 2 week vacation.
SEOmoz Basics for Local Small Biz SEO
I have no affiliation with this guy whatsoever but I just found this app and it's so amazing that I had to share it. It lets you 'cinch' windows side-by-side like in Windows 7, as well as easily maximize a window. I figured I couldn't be the only one looking for an OSX app like this..
Is there some reason Microsoft would not want to accept a Google signed certificate?
Why should any word be banned? Banning language is just a way for one party to silence another because they disagree.

When does it stop?

Words shouldn't be banned. People like this professor just need to get a thicker skin.
Do you mind saying which company this was?
how sad that firefox reaches its adoption peak while hitting an all-time low for stability. it took me 7 years to jump ship from ie to firefox. it took me 1 to go from firefox to chrome.
You can control it with a thin wire.
http://www.space.com/businesstechnology/technology/rocket_li...

To weaponize it, I guess you could parachute down your wire-bearing rockets to the target, wait for a storm, and have the rockets auto-launch when they've detected enough atmospheric electric charge that a discharge would be likely. Of course, in the meantime, the enemy will just go find the rocket, as it sits for hours or days on the roof, waiting for a storm, and disable it.

Anyway, from the original article, I think what they are after is more of a manipulation of the storm cloud itself, to get it to form where they want it to form. Form a large, mean enough storm cloud over a city, and at the very least, you've caused your enemy to operate at less than peak efficiency as he deals with it, even if the actual damage is minimal. Shock and Awe.
One company I worked for named every machine for its service tag for that very reason. gag

They're no longer in business.
To throw in some personal experience to the discussion, I went to an elementary school where we were taught BASIC (in addition to a lot of 'practical' classes that aren't included in most American public schools). I can definitely see how some of the problems people are talking about would arise, but as a direct result of that and similar classes, I and several of my friends picked our careers very early on, taught ourselves what we needed to know, and landed our dream jobs before we were even close to college. We had a practical hobby, excelled at math, and have done quite well for ourselves.

I really wish the public schools where I live now would step up to the plate and teach some more practical stuff. I really feel a lot of the kids are wasting their time with stuff they don't really enjoy, and don't need to be taught over and over again.
Lower one fits your site better. Top one looks religious/Christian. (I don't mean it as a criticism, that was just my initial impression).
Conversion Marketing Blog
Life patterns are changed at most at 'the speed of light' because the influence of a cell only reaches only to the next cell.

What amazes me most about this is the enormous speed increase over other implementations, which usually center around nifty bit packing routines.

Algorithms that give you billions of times speedup over others are a rare find, the 'fresh approach' paid off in a big way here. It's also interesting that he uses functional programming techniques to achieve this, even if initially it seems like you're actually losing performance.
Didn't they stop offering free food to the non-engineers a little while ago?
Okay, so why not have something that submits "better link and headline" and that can be voted up? Pass a threshold and the original headline and link get swapped out.
Having workers move on always has a cost, generally called retention costs/turnover costs. The employer has to go through the hiring process again. The position may remain unfilled until that's done, meaning your team is short on personnel. You have to train the new person, even a skilled hire needs to learn the particulars of your business. (That's one reason why employers look at how long you were at previous jobs, to avoid that turnover.) Depending on the position, the company could lose 1x to 1.5x the employee's yearly salary, sometimes more.

And if you're trying to "hire them back if you offered them enough", that rather negates the point of trying to save money by eliminating soda, doesn't it?
Great find!

Here's a keyboard driven alternative that folks might be interested in as well: http://www.irradiatedsoftware.com/sizeup/
Professional Networking Website for Technology, Research and Development
Dup: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1008102
[Offtopic]

In reference to point 5 - That line made me respect Jay-Z as an artist. He isn't in my top 5, but that was honest of him to admit. In that song, he says something along the lines of "Lyrically, I'd rather be Talib Kweli". Now, Talib Kweli is in my top 5. He writes on some deeper topics then most mainstream artists, and as a result, is rarely heard of. Kweli, in a song he wrote after Moment of Clarity came out, would say:

> If lyrics sold then truth be told, I'll probably be just as rich and famous as jay-z

Anyways... A lot of rappers are ex-drug dealers. As a result, many of them are business-savy. I feel Jay-Z is the best example of this.
Sure, but in this case, the testing failed to detect an error which more rigorous testing would have detected. Like I said- automated testing, trying every possible combination, would have detected the failure discussed in the article.
It reminds me of boring Computer Science assignments like BoxBug and JumpingBugs for the mere purpose of learning polymorphism, classes and objects.

It was way too formal to boot, too! If I want to create a specification, I write them in code, either as unit test or as a prototype.
I see parallels in California's ill-conceived desire to "protect" porn stars through mandatory condom use:

http://www.forbes.com/2009/12/07/entertainment-pornography-c...

One of the arguments against Sarbane-Oxley is that it created incentives for smaller public companies to privatize and thus reduced the overall level of economic transparency -- just like forced condom use could cause the self-regulated adult industry to go underground.

W.r.t. Sarbanes, it seems that the US government would better serve the "greater good" by creating a few standardized sets of accounting/audit/disclosure requirements from which public companies could pick. Presuming that investors actually valued disclosure laws, companies could pick a set of rules which they think would maximize their valuation.

Let's say you are a small cap whose profitability would be significantly affected by the cost off complying with onerous SEC requirements. You could opt into a looser set of rules, but the market could punish you with a lower valuation as a result. Perhaps this lower valuation for less transparency/trust would be better than the reduced valuation from spending an extra $2.3M to comply with Sarbanes regulations.

As a libertarian, I'm not keen on government involvement in markets, but the above proposal is a compromise of sorts.
That's probably true for manufacturing, but not for knowledge work like software. The Mythical Man-Month covers this fairly well.
Yeah, the irony was not lost on me. I actually requested some sparkling water be added to the mix, but apparently that costs more from the distributor.
I can smell if someone is taking antibotics. Maybe I can't smell if anybody is, but I can definitely tell when some are.
Photosounder.com - Image-sound editor & synthesizer
And then someone started http://www.forceclose.com/ for Android questions using StackExchange
This was a failure on the part of the executives in doing their jobs. It doesn't take an engineer to recognize that they needn't be concerned with machine names (unless the names were so bad that public disclosure would result in a PR nightmare).
I guess it depends on the location, but here in Switzerland, both Nerd and Geek used to be used as a derogatory term, but me personally, I carried that title with some pride and others seem to have done so too.

By now, Nerd isn't used and Geek changed its meaning to be more of a positive thing - at least in my age-group.

I guess if more people stood for their Geekdom, this could happen in other places of the world too.
http://www.businessinsider.com/high-frequency-trading-hits-t...

The Daily Show does an amazing job with this subject.
The Soul of a Portable Machine
I'm always skeptical when Congress legislates process. They are almost always better off sticking to outcomes. In this case, hold the execs responsible for company fraud, but let them figure out how to make sure their company stays legal.
By that logic, we shouldn't teach chemistry or physics in schools either.

I would have loved to have been exposed to some CS in school. For some reason, my otherwise rather privileged schooling didn't feature any computing, and nobody in my direct environment did any. Only after starting a Physics undergrad did I meet some proper hackers, and years onwards I still feel like I'm years behind on them.
Exactly. Why not rate a company's financial transparency like bonds are rated? The market can factor that rating into the valuation.
Fair enough, you're right. I was just blown away that yelp would pass up half a billion dollars.
In case you are looking for alternative free certificate authority then there is also http://CAcert.org

PS. I'm a happy CAcert certificate user ;)
Twitter may be profitable (in some distant future or in some far-away universe)
Sarbox has driven up audit costs for startups as well. A decade ago, all kinds of small practitioners would be willing to do routine audits for $10K or less for early-stage companies. Now that cost easily runs into the high five figures, if not more.

Of course, startups usually do not do formal audits until they bring on investors who will insist upon them, i.e., typically VCs. Thus, this is just one more reason for a startup to try to bypass such funding sources and pursue less restrictive sources if possible (why add yet another $100K to the annual burn rate when you want above all to preserve cash and use it wisely?).

Combine this (and other factors) with the crimp that Sarbox has put on companies going public, and you have an environment where the value of VC funding (which typically is key to launching a startup on the road to going public) has depreciated.

A founder might look at this and think that this has little or no impact on his bootstrap or angel-funded startup that he plans to sell to Big Company X. But the effect on valuations is real. As with any negotiation, if you have fewer levers to use in the negotiating process, you will be at a relative disadvantage. If your company has no alternative but to be acquired in order to achieve a liquidity event, the buyers on the other side (i.e., potential acquirers) will factor this into their pricing to your detriment.

These sorts of changes may have hurt VCs but they have hurt entrepreneurs as well in limiting or eliminating funding options that were readily available to such parties in the pre-Sarbox era, leaving all parties poorer in the process.

These are real costs (as are the ones that fall on public companies directly, as noted in this piece), while the benefits of Sarbox to date have been dubious at best. Of course, the accountants, lawyers, regulators, etc. who benefit from the regulatory complexity through increased business and/or power will beg to differ, but this doesn't mean they are right.

On a final note, the Supreme Court case noted in this piece does raise the prospect that Sarbox will be declared unconstitutional and, should that happen, there may indeed be some real prospects for reform. The justices seemed skeptical about the constitutional argument during oral argument, however, and this may therefore go nowhere as a potential solution to the problems raised.
I second nymag. Also, while not a replacement for yelp, Per Se, keeping up with ny.eater.com will ensure you know of all the interesting/amazing places to eat/go out.
I think the important learning for the child's development is how to think algorithmically or within the confines of a determined system. That application of systemic thinking to solve problems is so valuable in many ways throughout life, from determining how other systems work to just making smarter guesses about how to use new objects you've never seen before. Regardless if it's taught as theory, applied projects, or whatever, that's the really valuable skill IMO.

Algorithmic/systemic thinking, combined with the basic principles of physics do wonders to get you through problems that life throws at you.
Reminds me of Teracent, recently acquired by Google: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/11/displaying-best-displ...

Evolving ads are very cool. And a little unsettling.
Cinch is great. I've been using it for a couple days now and it's made managing windows easier on large screens.

If you're just looking for a proper maximize in OS X, wrongzoom[1] is a great free alternative. After installing, most apps will maximize and restore instead of zooming when you click the green button in the titlebar.

[1] http://github.com/spicyj/wrongzoom. For Snow Leopard 64-bit support, build from http://github.com/nesty/wrongzoom instead.
How did they do an amazing job at all? The linked video (picture #7 is a video) was far more productive.
Great, I'm finding it readable, and pretty well-selected. I look forward to seeing the next issue.
Are Startups Getting Crazy, Or Just IPO Crazy?
"... pay only for what you use pricing model ..."

https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/services/pricing
How blogging is changing Public Relations in Japan
Great!

A little difficulty with multiple monitors, but workable.
I hope they don't splash out on "C-Level executives" frankly. Dick Costolo is pretty strong as COO material and I don't think Ev needs to go anywhere. This is like saying Google needed to add C-Level execs in 2002.
My once-a-month small candy bar habit.