skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Maybe the engineering culture is less like what was described then the marketing and executive cultures?

I'd also appreciate a female Amazon employee's perspective on gender, since they are more likely to notice issues that Nick wouldn't see, or have experiences Nick wouldn't have.
Elsewhere in the manual it seems to imply that formulas can include arbitrary Emacs Lisp functions, which would make it quite easy to implement a virus as there appears to be no sandboxing. What it probably means is that viruses written for other spreadsheet implementations won't work on it.

Edit: never mind; I read further and it does do some sandboxing based on the same whitelisting principles as directory-local variable settings. Very clever.
I feel that the NYT article may have probably cherry-picked support for their arguments due to the fact that it seemed fairly one-sided. It would have been nice to see more balance in the story. Who knows, maybe they actually are very accurate about what it's like to work there.

On the other hand I've worked for big companies in the past and there are some tells about what they described that are familiar. The concept of having stack ranking and "managing out" the X% of the bottom performers. A tacit expectation of answering emails and texts outside of normal working hours. Lots of politics and unsolicited feedback going on.

The way this rebuttal goes it's a lot of "I've never seen this so it's obviously not true" and "If it is true then shame on that manager". What I suspect that's going on here is that he's only been there for 1.5 years and that's not enough time to evaluate the culture of a big company. There are lots of times when I heard how things were run in a different part of the company and I thought "Do we work at the same place?"

I say we ask him his opinion again in 5 years. If he's around for that long.
pdf.js is disabled, too, so no more easy opening PDFs in the browser if you apply these tweaks.
Freelance at a software or marketing shop in the area. They'll often take part time work, especially if you have an expertise in a "hot" area. I would personally just pick up the phone and call some consultancies and ask to speak to the Director or VP Engineering, or even just ask for their email address.
What is your email?
So you can bail out cleanly and go around for another run if the infoleak fails, yeah? Or do bad things happen up in kernelspace?
> Remove "(site) is now fullscreen" nag message and make it faster

For a list that want to make the browser more secure, why do they want to remove the only line of defense against sites using fullscreen mode for phishing?

> Disable PDF reader

PDF.js has fewer security vulnerabilities than desktop PDF readers.

> Disable 'safe browsing' aka. Google tracking/logging

This seems like a really bad idea for most users
What if we hosted it on a ginormous floating barge? If it was that big it could possibly be stable and not be subject to the movement of the ocean. Then to solve the issue of equal average location you just float it around the world. Heck, you could road trip it around the coasts.
I don't see any discussion on that page about how this project helps house "the world" (which I assume to mean the developing world). It looks like the only places this has been used is in burning man, and there is no discussion of plans to deploy or sell them elsewhere.
It's a great book, and absolutely necessary in the technological era. One nitpick is: I wouldn't call Josef Pieper obscure.
Not a great attempt IMO.

The networking and UI things are a valiant effort. Mixing them with non-mainstream security concerns are a bad idea. You may feel that safe-browsing is tracking by the man, but advising newbies to turn it off is borderline irresponsible. Similar argument for ipv6 (wtf), error reporting (congrats: your bugs will never be fixed cause firefox doesn't know about them), and geolocation ("why doesn't google maps ever know where I am?").

If you apply these, some caveat emptor: when firefox upgrades it usually wont change these settings for you. So if firefox makes things awesome, you'll be left behind. You may want that, you may not. Personally, I'd advise against.
Again, this is conflating security patches with more general updates.

As a personal anecdote, the only serious malware that has ever hit any system I run, as far as I'm aware, was a zero day exploit. The system was fully patched when it was hit. In contrast, the amount of productive time I have spent over the past few years recovering from problems caused by non-security-related software updates that I didn't particularly want but couldn't avoid if I wanted to keep the security patches is probably measured in weeks by now.

I'm all for keeping systems secure, but when updates start to take priority over keeping systems useful, you have a problem. Most security patches are fairly low risk and have few if any unrelated side effects anyway, but that is certainly not the case with modern software updates more generally. Just look at the frustration of browser users with Mozilla constantly rearranging the UI or Google actively removing functionality from Chrome, or of course the number of users who never moved from Windows XP to Vista or from 7 to 8 because the changes weren't considered improvements.

In the brave new world of Windows 10, the average individual user will be stuck with all the updates, security or otherwise, whether they want them or not. There's really no excuse for that, even in a consumer-focussed OS. Install updates by default, so less technical users get what they probably want? Sure. Block even knowledgeable users from choosing whether to install specific updates? The only time that makes a difference is if Microsoft want to force an update that the user does not want.
For what it's worth I believe he also has a 0day for bypassing rootless. Check his Twitter.
> but I don't think they are treated as gospel

Sorry, untrue. Literally several examples of offers turned down because of this even when apart from this 'raise the bar' person everyone were strongly in favor of hiring. This happens all the time and employed engineers are none to happy about this. BTW from the number of your posts here, would that be an unofficial job requirement ?
The only time I ever see the fullscreen message is when the screen has essentially already fullscreened itself in a case where I want it to. =/
> If you wanted extreme performance Python is a lousy choice in the first place.

Agreed; assuming the problem is "we need blazing performance here," I don't think you should choose Python.

However, that doesn't preclude looking at improving performance. E.g. I have a python process that takes 10 minutes to run. If I rewrite it into pure C, I can get it down to less than a second, but if I (minimally) rewrite it to take advantage of concurrency, I can get it down to two minutes, I see that as potentially worth it. As in, I need to run this process 7 or 8 times a days, the hypothetical concurrent Python makes a lot of sense. If I need it to run 1000 times an hour though...

I see where you're coming from but I don't think parallel python is an oxymoron, I see it more as the old range() vs. xrange() issue. It's been awhile, but as I recall, there is no reason to ever use range(), but if I see it in someone's code, I'm not going to start freaking out. Similarly, I think rewriting a Python 'subroutine' to something faster when the optimization is found to be necessary is well-covered ground, and is incidentally more essential than parallel python, but I see value here.

I guess I can summarize my position to considering better performance (parallel python) versus extreme performance...
Or a compromise of four places in rotation. Many cities who've hosted the games recently have the infrastructure already.
Ok...That's pretty cool. Thx :)
I think number theory fits perfectly: the definition of the natural numbers is dead simple and, well, eminently natural but results in an intricate structure we're nowhere near understanding.
Yes, phone makes about 20% of the requests for us. However, we have received requests all over the board from cement, steel, home appliances, industrial machinery, computer/laptop etc.

From our experience, the prices published online are not necessarily negotiated price. They come to us because we do online research as well as in person negotiation with bunch of retailers/distributor to get them the price. For example, we sold a TV worth USD 2300 for 1911, a price not available anywhere online.

In a way, this crowd sourcing platform will help discover negotiated prices that people are buying the products for.

NOTE: Negotiation is a common habit in India.
I agree with you. My comment was more of a commentary on the unintended consequences of this: http://www.wired.com/2013/01/google-says-get-a-warrant/

On HN and most places on the internet, most people support the warrant requirement for most or all digital data. I do too, in a sense, as I believe law enforcement shouldn't have unfettered access to a person digital info.

However, as a defense attorney, I've learned that a consequence of the warrant requirement is that the defense has no legal way access to digital information during a defense investigation.

In effect, a warrant requirement for digital materials means only law enforcement and prosecutors can access them. However, an accused person's attorney cannot.
The tweaks under appearance and bloatware are good, although I'd probably leave error reporting on (I'm on the nightly channel for a reason), as well as WebGL although it would be nice if it could be changed to "click-to-run" style launching. The rest of the tweaks seems fairly reasonable privacy-wise.
Request seconded, Homebrew would be great.
Hmm, this gets a little into successors to MIDI and what's happening today with kyma, MfL, NI rounds and controllers that let you vary many parameters over the life of a note or chord. The harmonica is pretty interesting (based on watching about 5 minutes at the end
If the heap info leak fails, I bail out cleanly.
If the kASLR leak fails, it is usually because instead of hitting a vm_map_copy (the intended structure I need to corrupt), something completely unrelated is hit instead. If it happens to hit something different than expected, that's undefined behaviour usually ending up in a panic.
Made a PR: https://github.com/dfkt/firefox-tweaks/pull/1
Why Reading mode is even considered "bloatware"?
I am not a fan of Amazon, but this article is straight yellow journalism.
Also, to the extent that this article exists and people hear about working at Amazon being punishing and stressful or horrible warehouse jobs, if things have really changed, Amazon has a marketing/PR problem.
Not a convincing article. Although the writer of the post is in good standing, I doubt the motives.
The reason people leave Amazon is... after two years at Amazon, you can do any job and solve any problem in software engineering anywhere on the planet. You command the most desirable skill set on the planet.
Little unsolicited wordly advice: If holding on to a belief requires you to rationalize that everybody else is stupid and wrong may be it is time to re-evaluate your belief. If OOP were that good how come nobody made a killing with an implementation that would make these 'true Scotsman' folks happy. What I am pointing out is that other paradigms don't seem to need such pervasive apologism.
+Байкал++Клуб+Байкал+-+Концерт+на+8+марта+2015+҉Текущее+время+16+авг+2015+10:54+
If OP knows PHP then Laravel is a good choice.

I love Ansible, it's the only provisioning tool that really clicked for me.

I tried Chef a few years back to provision a single server and there were just too many moving parts - chef, chef-solo, chef-zero, knife, knife-solo, berkshelf.

I gave it a go again last week and it's gotten easier, although I still think the docs for chef-zero are not that good.
No, this is definitely suckless: http://suckless.org/philosophy
To build: install flex and ctags, and -Wno-error=unused-but-set-variable
FTP file indexing used to be how I found everything on the Internet before HTTP existed. Does anyone else remember Archie? (My coworkers thought I was a wizard.)
Coming up on 4 years at amazon here and I agree far more with the NYT article than this one, even though I agree it is a bit cherry picked. There is a saying that goes around quite a bit here: Amazon hires intelligent people, and they retain the sociopaths. You don't acquire colloquialisms like that without some sort of truth behind it.

Some people get lucky and find a reasonable team/org right away, and some people get unlucky and get the sociopaths right away. Either way, as people stay longer, they become more alienated and broken down, or they become more sociopathic themselves. I don't find it surprising that there are plenty of amazonians defending the culture...they are probably the ones that thrive in it. Everybody else will slowly find themselves under a manager that gives them stress-induced kidney stones (like I did), and will either move teams (like I did, and I quite enjoy my team) or quit altogether (like the other 90%).
Anyone bothered by how all companies are using Pride commercially?
Quoting the official text is data. Summarizing internal data sources is data. In contrast to the interpretive dance that were the quotes from third-parties, this was dripping with data.
The data that I keep coming back to is this: the median employee tenure at Amazon is one year (2013 data). This must mean something is seriously, chronically wrong. A LOT of people are leaving after just months of work.
I agree. He manages other managers and so has a vested interest in maintaining the content of his employees.

What really struck me as cool-aidy is that he tosses out statements like "Amazon is, without question, the most innovative technology company in the world. The hardest problems in technology, bar none, are solved at Amazon." That's a cool-aidy statement for any company (google, tesla, amazon) and pretty much irrelevant to the main topic.
You're bothered that Amazon employees (I'm assuming that they are not paid actors) that were celebrating pride were captured in a photo, and that photo shared?
I personally believe there's a strong pro-Sabbath argument to be made from the New Testament:

In the gospels, Jesus says he is the master of shabbat; how can a person be a master of something he is abolishing?

Again in the gospels, we read Jesus ruling it is lawful to do good on the sabbath - if he was aiming at abolishing sabbath, why talk about what's lawful to do during sabbath?

Then, in the epistles, the author of Hebrews writes, "There remains a Sabbath rest for the people of God."

Combined with the historical reality that the early Christians were almost all Jews who saw themselves within Judaism, it is probable the early Christians were sabbath keepers.

As others in this thread have noted, spiritual significance aside, the physical rest and ceasing of ahabbat is healthy. Its importance is amplified in our work-obssessed culture; more so in the startup culture.
Hacker Manages to Side-Load Google Play Store on Windows 10 Mobile
We Have Petitioned US/UK To Stop Issuing Visas To Indians, The Most Racist People On Earth;

https://petitions.whitehouse.gov//petition/stop-issuing-visa...

https://www.change.org/p/president-of-usa-and-prime-minister...
Makes you wonder what will happen to the Fontainebleau in Las Vegas
It says "suck less", not more secure. And this isn't something that most users would use.
Globalization is Zero-sum
A critique and a follow-up. Better than almost everyone.
It's not journalism. This guy is writing a personal account. He is not a paid writer, and this work was unsanctioned.
it's a major piece of a multi-step own, no doubt. Get write and execute from browser, email client or office doc vulns, and shit's on. Rootkit installed and bot ready to install more payload components.
Disabling IPv6?!

This is an... opinionated list. Wish there was more annotation around what those opinions were.
Here's mine: https://gist.github.com/dad0731fc0373a9db858
Well, I was more looking for an explanation of what "no shared CR3" means. What is CR3, how do I know to go to that option as a way to disable this exploit.

And, coming from a Grub/ubuntu perspective, when you say "boot args", I think of the boot loader, which for Grub is configured with config files (text files) or else at boot-time, via the Grub menu. I know OSX has a single-user mode, but don't know of a way to edit boot args prior to completing the boot sequence.

Please don't take this wrong. I'm glad to see the original fix you gave, so much so that I want to know more about it. What provides the capability, how to know the specific options that mitigate such a vulnerability.
Is it still that bad?
> you ended up on the wrong end of their fraud analysis algorithm.

I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that.
Condorcet is better?

http://ScoreVoting.net/AppCW.html
This looks interesting, but what I would like to see is good integration with org, org tables, and org babel.
Show HN: I self-published a book
Hey folks,

I wanted to share my latest project, which is a book that I wrote and self-published. The book is called Behind the Ivy Curtain: A Data Driven Guide to Elite College Admissions, and the link is http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B013YFIQ30.

Let me give you some backstory. I went to a fun high school but it was really easy and fun and I was a pretty big slacker. Around sophomore spring I decided I wanted to leave Florida, and the best way to do that was to get a scholarship to a good school. I had no idea how to do that so I spent a bunch of time reading online forums like College Confidential (http://talk.collegeconfidential.com) to figure out what works. I then acted on the advice, became the first kid from my school to go to an Ivy, and gave presentations/tutoring sessions at school to help other kids - I'm still close with my principal and try to be involved in the community there.

Anyways, I really wanted to consolidate my knowledge in book form, but there are other books on college admissions. So what I did was programmatically scrape the forums to gather admission results for nearly 5,000 kids over several years to figure out what works and what doesn't.

Most of you have graduated college already, but I really want to use the book to share this info broadly. Specifically, college admissions consulting is a multi-million dollar industry for no reason - it's all built on information asymmetry. I want to get this stuff into the hands of every interested kid, and I wanted to use real data/outcomes instead of "oh well this one kid a few years ago did X", so I put in the effort and wrote this book.

The book is pretty cheap ($4.99) so buy it if you want, but I think what's more interesting to the HN community is the process I took. I have hit the character limit so the process is in a comment on the post.
So this is how I did it:

1. Read a bunch about self-publishing. Traditional publishers give 10-15% royalty, and this book really isn't built for paper-back, so I decided to go digital. Amazon gives you 35% or 70% royalty depending on what you price it at. Write Publish Repeat (http://www.amazon.com/Publish-Repeat-No-Luck-Required-Self-P...) is an excellent book on what it takes to be an independent author, and I highly recommend it if you want more info there.

2. Started looking at the College Confidential forums and writing my scrapers. It wasn't too much coding, about 1.5k lines in python to do all the scraping, clean up, and storage (flat files + SQLAlchemy). It took some time to figure out what fields to use and what would be relevant, and the other hard part was actually parsing data. For example, some people report "SAT: 2370", while others do "SAT: 800/770/800", while others do "800 CR, 800 M, 800 W". All three represent the same score (2370), but they all have different info, so it just took some regex fanciness + manual verification to get good parsers in place.

3. Started writing the text. I've been dreaming of writing this since I was in 10th grade so it wasn't hard to get the outline ready. I finished up the text on what the application process is like (after you submit), and then I started generating tables from my data and analyzing it.

I used Google Docs, but that was a mistake for two reasons. For one, once you hit 40-50 pages on Docs, the whole thing becomes slow. It was annoying to scroll through to different pages, and after a while I just exported to ODT and edited in LibreOffice.

The other reason that was a bad call was because it is really difficult to export it to something that Amazon will like. You see, tables are kinda hard to do in Kindle, and a lot of the formatting gets messed up because you have to go Docs -> ODT -> HTML, when Amazon then turns into MOBI or AZW. Eventually I had to download Office 365 and export as .docx, then edit in word, export that to HTML, and upload that. Some guess and check got the tables to print mostly ok, but the lists were all messed up because Microsoft uses some random HTML stuff. So I went through all the pages and then just used <ul> and <ol> to do what I needed to with lists.

And that worked well. A few more tweaks and dealing with Amazon's system (once you send something to 'Publish', you can't cancel it. They approve it quickly but it takes ~6 hours to actually publish, at which point I would republish a final version and wait 6 more hours =\)

Overall, a really fun process. I do want to write more books and experiment with different tools like Scrivener. Happy to discuss college admissions or publishing or anything else. Thanks for your support, and eager for your feedback!!

P.S.: My last few Show HNs (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8821393, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8006940), are all around admission/college application tips. Didn't realize the theme haha.
That thing is incredible. For those who are unfamiliar, it is an empty, uncompleted, unoccupied multi-billion dollar resort-hotel on the Las Vegas strip that was left unfinished after the big real estate market bust of the late 2000s. The outer shell of the building was completed all the way up to the highest floor, but the interior was never finished and according to Wikipedia it would require an estimated $1.5 billion more to finish to the point where it could open. It's been sitting unfinished in the middle of Las Vegas for years now, much like the famous Ryugyong Hotel in North Korea.

The building itself is a sight to behold. Even in the outsized scale of Las Vegas, it's considerably taller than most hotels on the strip. I took a walk towards its end of the strip one night without knowing what it was, and after initially seeing it in the distance and thinking it was fairly small, it just kept getting bigger and bigger without seeming to get any closer. Finally I got up next to it and counted the floors in amazement. It's very surreal to see this giant unfinished monolith sitting completely dark in the middle of all the lights and activity of Vegas. Amazingly, it's still the #2 tallest building in the city (surpassed only by The Stratosphere):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tallest_buildings_in_L...
Unsanctioned by Amazon? You'd get in serious trouble for that.
How hackers get paid
Employement in the US is usually on "at-will" basis. That is usually sold to employees as "hey you can quit anytime, isn't that great". In reality the employer usually just means "hey, I can let you go anytime".

Of course they can't fire for discriminatory stuff. They can't say "well this person is too old or not white enough or a woman". But they can say stuff like "for performance reasons", "restructuring", etc. even if they really mean the former reasons (race, color, gender, age...) as long as there is an official cover the law is on the employer's side.

So I still don't see enormous lawsuit potential here. One was fired for "performance" reasons (wink-wink) and another for "culture fit" (wink-wink again). There is some potential but only with a recording/email/some kind of evidence.