skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I see this argument come up a lot in these kinds of discussion, but the problem with 'vote with your wallet' are numerous, including (not all might apply to the HN crowd):

1) market competition: if there's no (better) competitor and you need the services provided for whatever you need, how can you vote with your wallet?

2) Price: I'd love to buy ethically sourced-everything, but I simply cannot afford it and will never be able to (on my current income) as long as unethically sourced remains this much cheaper and the norm. Income and market prices adapt to each other.

3) Knowledge & time: It is incredibly time and energy consuming to find out all these things. Amazon has now made the news, but how do you know which competitors are better? Look at food, even with all the labels we have these days there is still a lot of misleading information out there.

4) All of the above and more applied to everyone: As I mentioned, the above probably doesn't apply to most of the HN crowd, but any of these reasons (and probably a lot more I missed) would be enough to stop someone from voting with their wallet. In order to do so you must have the knowledge, time, energy and availability. Something not everyone has. If but a small minority can (and wants) to vote with their wallet, it will almost never be cost-effective for companies to change.

Whatever happened to good old fashioned legislation? One can make a similar argument for voting (time & knowledge limitations mostly), but they should be less severe barriers.
"BREAKING: Hugely successful big co has ex employees not fully satisfied, willing to criticize it. It also has current employees who appreciate it. Will keep you posted."
Sound-Proof Seamless second-factor authentication for the web
As mentioned elsewhere in the thread, DDG also supports use of "site:amazon.co.uk." So, you have the option to memorize the short form for what I presume to be the sites you personally search for the most.

This is interesting: it is one way to allow for a better search experience through personalized search options without using data collected about me.
That is what happens if you don't pay for their managed support plans. If you do, they provide spectacular service.
It would be nice if more managers agreed with the "what works for you" mindset, instead of "what works for the manager."
Yep. After spending 10 years in a medium-sized marketing agency, I wrote a recap post called "A beer fridge does not make a culture," which included this bit that the "nerf war" comment made me think of:

"About that beer fridge...It’s pretty cool. So is the pop-a-shot table, the happy hours, the lax dress code, the summer outings (i.e. Drunk Hook-Up Fest), and the staff lunches. But those aren’t culture. Those are nice-to-haves, things that make the good days great and the great days awesome. But they don’t make the bad days good. Please, please, please don’t rely on those kinds of things."
The kickstarter campaign where they described Soylent not just as perfectly safe, but perfectly safe for anyone; and where they say it puts you in perfect health; and where they claim rigorous testing.

This iterative approach to regulatory compliance - ignore everything until a regulator points out a problem - should be worrying when you're talking about food.
Ha! I had the urge to comment on the Nerf wars, and you beat me to it. I cringed because, in my adult mind, having "daily Nerf wars" at work means they really don't know what the word "fun" is supposed to mean. I think it kind of proves the point?
QVC owner Liberty buying Zulily in about $2.3B deal
Gartner: 93 percent of all mobile apps will be free by 2016
> At the time, and for a long time after, a lot of computer science types were arguing that everything should be implemented from the ground up in very high level OO languages and abstracted runtime environments and this was the inevitable way things would be.

I don't really see that they were wrong. After all, C and POSIX are also very high level and abstracted compared to the assembler-based OSes which existed before them.

The big problem now is that to be a successful alternate OS one needs to be bug-for-bug compatible with POSIX, and have a C compiler, in addition to one's own language and OS. Perhaps recent years' developments in virtualisation and containerisation will make it easier for a non-Linux host to run a Linux kernel and hand containers to it as needed.

Maybe one day OS and systems research will once again pay off.
The email was [redacted]. We don't know what it is.

But in a way it is a time for action. Pushing your people to the extreme and caring about them are not mutually exclusive. Depending on Mr. Bezos' actions in a few days we will understand if the amazon toxic culture is policies stripped from a lot of nuance when made into soundbites or got that way by design.

And a CEO could indeed be somewhat isolated - at that level you see reports that have already passed a couple of levels of sanitation.
If you haven't read this book, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon, and you want to know how Amazon has worked from day 1, it's a good place to go. It straight up tells you the culture at Amazon, starting from day 1.

I'll even include the Amazon link =p
http://www.amazon.com/The-Everything-Store-Bezos-Amazon/dp/0...
Read The Everything Store. It is clear the only relationship you want with Amazon is as a customer. Everything they do is to drive lower prices to the customer in order to take as much marketshare as possible.
I've been working 6+ years remote, and agree: dedicated work space, GTD and pomodoros. Without a dedicated work space you'll burn out in a few months because you live where you work. Pomodoros keep you honest about how much real work you do. GTD makes sure you don't lose track of anything.
Almost 97% of the Good Jobs Created Since 2010 Have Gone to College Grads
To top it off, written by a company that has clear conflict of interest in context of eCommerce (NYTimes is an eCommerce player) and publishing (Washington Post) with Mr. Bezos.

I am not in any way associated with the wunderkind of Seattle and/or his company. Just noting an interesting fact.
Facebook is testing blogging function like Medium.com
I was working on instrumentation for testing an IR suppression system for the Phrog's exhaust. Here [0] is the exact aircraft (BuNo 152578) sitting at the Pax River NAS museum, with the IR suppression attached (and a nice big bundle of our thermocouple wiring, too). From what I could find in the records, this was either the 4th or 5th time the Navy had tried something like this, and the results were less than promising.

[0]: http://cdn-www.airliners.net/aviation-photos/photos/3/0/8/16...
Yes, but you can cite fair use. The problem isn't with stolen music, it's with things like mashups being taken down.
WordPress base configuration files on GitHub
The best way to deal with shared passwords is to not have them. If you find yourself needing to share a single account with multiple users, then you're doing something wrong.
Very nice introduction tutorial with many examples. I am sure it will be a reference guide for many people —me included. Thanks!

A minor issue, on your second snippet (open devices for live capture), you miss the "github.com/google/gopacket" import.
Really interesting to see everyone's opinions - thank you all for taking the time to contribute.

The Independent has just published a story detailing the most trusted professions in the UK - the police rank 6th to last. http://i100.independent.co.uk/article/these-are-the-12-most-...

I'd like to pad out my opening comment on my experience with the police - Luckily I live in a society where corruption within the force is a lot less noticeable than some others listed, however one can easily identify when certain groups are intentionally targeted as a way to increase the statistics for policing in my country.

My experience as a young white male, living in a large city is that most police officers whom I have contact with come with an undeserved air of superiority about them. This has always led me to the assumption that this is potentially a character trait not caused by the police but one that's unusually high amongst the police - perhaps shedding some light on the kind of person that grows up wanting to police/control his neighbor.

The fairy tale job of being a policeman you're told as a kid has long since disintegrated amongst my circles, a police officer is no longer a hero figure with the same stature as a Paramedic/Firefighter but somebody to be avoided/approached with caution.
Of course you are right! But as I understood the article, the treatment difference occured during the first phase, association between character and meaning. They observed that those character-meaning pairs that got repeated more often during the first phase have been remembered more often in the second phase (as part of two-character combinations).
If every one had a wireless node on their house you might get an open web.. Just leaving the problem of connecting to the backbone
I like the idea of getting employees to 'dream big' but pushing their families and personal time to the side or outright eliminating it is a huge problem with companies like Amazon (imo they're not an isolated company as I've heard similar stories from friends who have worked in SV). It just doesn't seem to me that productivity for its own sake is a dangerous precedent since it doesn't pay back to the employees what's lost (time with one's children, spouse, and friends).

Programming is not anything like working on a factory line. On a factory line you fill one tiny task of assembly and/or inspection within an allotted time frame and production quota. Programming it's a matter of analysis even on the most mundane task of bug fixing. Analysis takes a variable amount of time which sometimes over shoots estimates since a problem or a desired feature per business requirements can be found to be novel to the existing codebase. Or sometimes we're lucky as programmers and it's as easy as expanding on a tiny sliver of existing business logic but that isn't a guarantee by any stretch of the imagination.
Firefox does something like that. If you start typing the name of the site you want, it will find the tab you already have open and give you a "switch to this tab" option.

It's how I survived with 600+ tabs in Firefox ;-)
Creating Powerpoint Presentations with Python – Practical Business Python
When a language dies an entire knowledge base is lost. I hope this won't be perl's fate.
Amazon's success at being a grinding place but reaping major business results align with what I've seen of my previous employer (a transportation icon) that tightened the screws, re-engineered processes, encouraged thousands to leave. Revenue, profit, stock price, and bonuses soared.

All of what we've been told about the war for talent, desire for caring work places, etc. seems to be exaggerated. Companies can literally have a policy of "be happy you have a job, punk" for professionals for YEARS, and people will suck it up. Morale does have an impact but not as much as you'd think once your company is large enough AND it is successful. One commonality in both companies is that they are very data driven. Eliminating a costly perk? Do it and see what the data says. Make a change to a major process that people are resisting? Do it, fire any insubordinates, and see what the data says. Basically don't take management policy or process for granted unless you have data to back it up.

There's a line between tough and abusive, however, and this seems to be where Amazon's (and other tough cultures) walk the line.
None of this most recent discussion has included any mention of conditions at fulfillment centers (something that has been criticized in the past):

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/02/mac-mcclelland-f...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7902887

It is helpful to be aware of how all different types of workers are treated when evaluating whether or not to work for a company.
I've also been working from home for 3 years and love it.

My 3 year old understands perfectly well that "daddy's at work... we can't disturb him."

Oddly enough, it was the teenagers at home during the summer that had a hard time grasping that.
I don't know Ruby or Lisp, but Python, at least, doesn't like it if you call methods on nil. Smalltalk and Objective C both let you do that (they do nothing and return nil).
Would be nice to see the source code for this.
Amazon’s Jeff Bezos Defends Workplace in Response to Article
i don't know. i think ellison and ballmer are at least extremely honest with themselves and others about their true personalities. they don't have a face they show to the public and a face they show in private.

i.e., when you go to work for microsoft or oracle you pretty much know what you're dealing with. interestingly, i haven't heard nearly as many stories about shitty work environments at those companies.
A MongoDB Aggregation Pipeline Debugger for Node.js
And then you're left with advertorials which are harder to detect.
Doesnt Vivaldi allow groupimg of tabs under one group? I guess they also give you shortcuts to navigate more easily in that subset.
That was the statement that caught my attention too. If the environment really is how the NYT article, and many HN posters say it is, then Bezos' offer sounds a lot like US whistle blower protections. Sounds good on paper, not so much in practice.
I thought soundcloud is based in Berlin?
If you think his beliefs are illogical, just wait until you see his code!

I'm not very knowledgable about his religion, but I think he also shares some of his beliefs with fundamentalist Christianity. He was quite upset about the supreme court ruling on gay marriage and yelled to me "God hates gays!". I simply nodded my head as I wasn't sure how else to respond without offending his beliefs.

As one of the only non-believers in the office, I have to tread lightly. When a different coworker, who is strongly Christian, expressed his doubts about what happens when we die, his faith was restored by others because heaven "sounded good" (because we should totally choose our beliefs based on what sounds good). I personally wanted to advise him to convert to Islam because to me personally having 27 virgins in heaven "sounds better" to me! But I simply keep my mouth shut as anything I say will surely offend someone.
Not an egyptologist, but I did just get back from Egypt recently, so here's some anecdotal evidence. Even during the hottest summer months, there was still activity happening at dig sites. This is usually when all the digs shut down, so I would assume that there would be even more activity during the winter months. There were still occasional restoration projects (even got to spend a few minutes helping one), but they were few and far between. Many had completely halted, probably as a result of Zahi Hawass's ousting and the evaporation of tourist funds. On the other hand, a lot of the expeditions are funded by outside universities, and they bring several jobs to local Egyptians. Because of the perceived security issues, many tourists are staying away from Egypt, which is crippling many people's ability to make a living, and the government's ability to focus on cultural work. Several people I spoke with were once making a good living in the tourism industry, but have since turned to trying to find work with expeditions when they can. Unfortunately, there are a lot more people out of work than there are jobs.

The security situation is interesting. My wife and I were alone for two weeks, and felt perfectly safe. The government knows that tourism and archeology/egyptology bring jobs and dollars, so they focus their police presence on protecting those areas. Sure enough, there are police and military everywhere. However, if you watch them closely, you will see that they are not operating in top condition. I'm not sure if fatigue or inexperience contributes to this, but you can see it. Guards waving people through checkpoints without searching them at all, weapons being left far out of reach, soldiers sleeping on guard, etc. There was one attack on a checkpoint near us while we were there, resulting in the death of two police officers. That didn't seem to have an affect on the rest of the security force. A few days after we left, there was an attack in Luxor directed at tourists. I'm not sure, but my guess is this was a wakeup call for them. Thankfully the attack largely failed, but I'm sure it's caused massive harm to an already hurting economy.
They're not supposed to turn a profit while complying with their rates. It's a way to make sure they stay in control of who is selling the music.
We have an AS/400 (excuse me, iSeries) and the damn thing is rock solid. It also alerts us and IBM when it needs maintenance. Its basically a tank with a logistics chain.
I think the clear and interesting thing I have taken from this debacle is that all the horror stories come from non management with a large portion of the criticism targeted at people who work around the level of the people who are coming out to talk about how wonderful it is.

It's easy for management to say how peachy things are when they are the people who very well might be (unknowingly) creating this culture.

The most amazing part about all of this is that not a single person who has come out saying this is false has said they will either look into it themselves or put their money where their mouths are and do something about it. It's easy to be the general when the guns aren't pointed at you.
So then falling on your face from one of these would be a segfault?
+1 to your advice. I've only been remote for a year and a half. The company is only partly remote, but very distributed between a few offices, and they make it work well. My system: before stopping work for the day, I make a small list of tasks too start first thing. I check for critical emails, then just hit the ground running. Hard.
I've heard it claimed a number of times that Ruby/Python are SmallTalk-esque.

Can anyone speak to that? In what ways is that so?

I've also read Peter Norvig claim that Python is a LISP with C-Syntax, so I'm not sure what to think.
No, the notice, takedown, etc. provisions that apply to third-party hosts do not, those are part of a adage harbor provisions for third-part hosts of user-supplied content against copyright liability that exists without the DMCA.
What about voluntary naps? Where do I sign up for that?
Enforce max hours per week / max on call time / minimum mandatory vacation of 4 to 6 weeks / 1 year maternity and paternity leave...

Stuff that's actually, you know, real.
Is it just me, or is there something extra creepy about Bezos having AMZN employees read the NYT article and then email him personally if they recognized any of the practices?

That's sort of like being the National Security Adviser and telling all NSA agents, "if you notice anything illicit, please email me personally [whereafter you will receive a personal drone visit]".
Dev Sprint – PyCon India 2015
Try NetSurf, if you haven't already. It's not perfect but it's a bit faster than Dillo is. (The build process feels a little wobbly to get used to but it honestly takes 3-5 minutes to build.)

I used Dillo between 209 and 2012 on an old 800MHz AMD box. It was really nice... being able to resume from hibernation, have 800 tabs open, and have a hyper-responsive machine. :D
Mostly security, privacy and usability related stuff. Here's a quite long list:

* Browser written in a way that prevents most exploits.

* Built-in Javascript and cross-domain request blocking.

* Single-process sandboxed browser where only the active tab is allowed to run.

* Tab content written to disk so it can be restored in the event of a crash or running out of battery.

* Ability to "swap out" tabs to disk so they consume no memory.

* Ability to freeze all javascript code on a tab temporarily.

* Deep searching of history (i.e. page content).

* Created by a privacy-friendly organization/people who aren't trying to spy on you.

* Avoid doing things automatically (download files to a folder, search for misspelled URLs, send URL to Google when typing it in, etc). Don't have keyboard shortcuts that are hard to undo (also, don't have single-key letter/number shortcuts at all).

* Don't have an over-engineered build process. The browser should be possible to build (not necessarily fast) on an old or low-end computer.
And what can be done if there's no easy way to separate "work" and "home" environments?

Pretty soon (in less than a month) I'm going to have the following working conditions: I'm gonna have a room to myself and a powerful tower pc. I need it both to work and to do non-work related stuff like videogames.
Of course I can drag it to kitchen every day to work and move it back to my room afterwards but that seems absurd to me.
> Why don't we start at the IPCC?

Here are some analyses:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/05/hansen...
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2013/02/2012-u...
http://www.skepticalscience.com/lindzen-illusion-2-lindzen-v...

Current climate models are pretty accurate in their predictions.

> Which isn't surprising at all, given no one has been able to show a working model of Earth.

I am not sure, at this point, if you are just trolling. Every model has a certain limits, but it doesn't mean it is "not working". If you actually knew history (I always recommend https://www.aip.org/history/climate/index.htm) it is a remarkable achievement that we can model climate at all.

> There's no way you can know that. CO2 may be completely dominated by other factors.

Sorry, this is just trolling. Of course, in the same sense, we cannot predict the path of the Earth around the Sun because what if an unknown dominating factor comes to its path?

When creating a model, we simply try to account for every important factor we know of. And given that the predictions are quite accurate (look at Lindzen comparison!), we probably know of all the important ones.
Show HN: Pay to win tic-tac-toe for Android
Google:

http://www.businessinsider.com/reasons-working-at-google-suc...

http://techcrunch.com/2009/01/18/why-google-employees-quit/

http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/fea...

Facebook:

http://www.businessinsider.com/the-22-worst-things-about-wor...

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2410298/Forget-free-...

Microsoft:

http://www.businessinsider.com/why-microsoft-is-so-messed-up...

http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2013/08/micr...

If your company has >1,000 employees, there will be disgruntled and dissatisfied employees. Full stop.
What Makes a “Good Failure”