skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The comment that Arial is "a not-very-faithful imitation of a typeface that is no longer fashionable" struck me as odd too. "No longer fashionable"? Well, that may have been the case in 2001. I suppose 2001 really must have been a long time ago! All the designers I've known who've had any interest in type love Helvetica.

One even had a sample of it tattooed on their arm. I thought this a touch extreme, but Google image search says it is quite common.

(For my part, I always preferred Arial at lower point sizes. At 10pt, it's so attractive - not a pixel out of place! Its own Arial is Arial Unicode, a misshapen imitation that just doesn't sit right. I wonder what Arial Unicode's Arial is. Comic Sans, I suppose.)
Netflix is anything but cheap when it comes to employees.
FT: Unicorns face end of the ‘steroid era’
Asm.js Chess Battle
How can you say it's a non-issue when it's the exact thing that we've brought up as concerns? Especially when there's plenty of evidence that, not only does this happen, but it would happen more if the cap was removed?
I've always found it amusing when companies say they hire "the best of the best", but offer only market rates or (usually) lower.
Depends. Did you even once drive to the nursery or hardware store to pick up seeds, pots or fertilizer to grow it?

If so, you have completely negated all energy savings.
OK, I'll play the devil's advocate here. I am against free snacks in the office. First of all, it tends to be utter garbage: muffins, chips, cheese sticks, soda, sugary drinks, cookies etc. Has anyone tried to calculate lost productivity from health issues arising from eating that highly processed junk full of salt, sugar, and trans fats?

Second, snacks in the office might make more sense in the suburban offices in the places with extreme climate swings (think Schaumburg or Kanata) where getting out of office for a snack is an ordeal. In large downtown cores like Toronto or New York I would say a stroll for a snack is more refreshing for productivity than mindlessly eating chips in front of the computer after a short run to the cafeteria.

Third, there is this "useless perk" consideration. I'd rather get the share of money spent on the junk food and do whatever I want with them.
"Just establishing a cap on the number of visas per company as a percentage of the workforce"

This can be gamed too. Large employers could start operating bodyshops.

Say the H1B limit was only 5% of a company's workforce. Then Walmart could sponsor 110,000 workers. Yum!Brands could sponsor 22,000 workers.

This probably wouldn't even put Infosys or Tata out of business in the US they would provide the same recruitment and management services they do now, but other companies (in this example Walmart and Yum) would be the sponsors of record.
I don't understand why the opposite to "local" has to be "halfway around the world". Why not do it in a scalable but sensible way? You know, like being able to address a market of millions instead of thousands, but perhaps not necessarily billions.

You are of course welcome to pay extra for some sort of weird pleasure of having things made very close to where you live, but I think the taxation systems should punish you for the extra strain that makes you put onto the environment.
It's fairly easy. Business asks for something. Business gets mad when what they asked for was wrong, technology failed, bad luck, or they felt like you didn't do more than what they asked.
Been doing Go dev for over a year now, in a place where I can make the language decisions, so I clearly agree.

But it being a good tool should not be a deterrent from it becoming a better tool.

[edit] Edited to sound lest strident.
> Documentation and Code Quality are some of the most important features.

Code quality is an important attribute, sure, but those don't say anything about it.

Comprehensive documentation of the bureaucratic sort of process documentation that I think motivated that line is not a deliverable, its an artifact of process; when it becomes understood as an end to its own rather than as something that should be used to the extent it is useful to achieve value in the end product, it becomes extremely problematic (I've experienced the kind of bureaucratic software development that this reacts to, and I can assure you that it does not contribute positively to quality, it contributes to management -- and staff -- spending lots of time worrying about and measuring and optimizing metrics that are unrelated to quality.)

> Your software is not working if it doesn’t exactly match its documentation.

Your software is not working if it doesn't deliver the expected behavior. Documentation of requirements is important to provide a consistent method of communicating between people (and across time and space) what those expectations are. And to the extent that it is necessary for that purpose documentation is a good thing.

But its important to keep the purpose in mind. Otherwise, you end up with excessive effort going into polishing documentation rather than building software.

> you’d end in jail if you tried to write security critical systems like that.

Sure, bureaucratically comprehensive documentation is extremely useful (and sometimes essential) for demonstrating compliance with process mandates. Such mandates, and the incentives they create, are also very often not helpful to the actual quality of software, including the aspects of software quality which motivate the mandates.
Well said. Thanks!
Watch out for that word "they". The students who were quoted sounded childish. Plenty of students don't sound that way. But maturity is boring. It doesn't sell. So those people don't get quoted.
That's my theory too. It seems a lot of software has peaked a few years ago and gone downhill from there:

- MS Office peaked around 2000
- Gmail 3 years ago?
- GMaps 3 years ago?
- I would argue Windows peaked somewhere between 2000 and XP

The same applies to managers. When an organization works well, they have the need to change things around just because.
"no one wants to 'bookmark' tweets"

What evidence supports this claim ?

I disagree on a personal level. I used "favorites" almost exclusively to bookmark tweets and I have "unliked" all of my previous favorites because the meaning has drastically changed.
Interesting Twitter cheat related to this- if you go to ads.twitter.com and sign up with a credit card, you'll get a lot of new metrics exposed to you without ever actully having to spend any money. I have an abysmal "engagement" rate, but I know at least 50 people see every tweet I make.

http://imgur.com/0vlXbmW.png
Care to elaborate?

Cap (or no cap) doesn't influence a select group of employers from breaking the H1B visa rules and being disqualified.
I've always liked the explanation given by __--__ [0] in a HN thread long ago on a Steve Blank post "The Elves Leave Middle Earth – Sodas Are No Longer Free"[1] about the same subject :

> "I'm not management, but I've had it described to me like this: cutting soda, while it may be insignificant and certainly isn't going to change a damned thing money-wise for the company, makes the management feel better about the situation. It makes them feel like they're doing something and something is better than nothing. It's also a CYA tactic. If the CEO wants to hold somebody personally accountable, the CFO can say "look, we did everything, we even cut back the soda!"

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5757467

[1] http://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-eart...
Your point can be rephrased as, "What if everyone ignored the realities of the job market?" There's no danger that everyone will do that, so there's no need to use ethical or other philosophical arguments to discourage it.

On the other hand, spamming or otherwise misusing email to deliver your unsolicited "message" at everyone else's expense is a classic instance of the Tragedy of the Commons. There is no incentive for any individual actor to do the right thing. Kant's categorical imperative is one of several reasonable ways to think about it.
How is your factory farmed tomato that depends on buried costs of fossil fuel, and inorganic fertilizers, and unsustainable resources not a luxury good? The luxury is the cheap price, which is not sustainable.

Truly organic local food has been produced sustainably for millennia, so to call that a luxury while wallowing in cheap oil subsidized corn food is totally backwards.
Once you insist that you have to be able to distinguish all of: one, capital-L, lower-case-L, capital-i, and lower-case-i (and maybe letter-O from zero) there are not that many fonts to choose between.
Yep, we can air-freight tomatoes on individual foam pillows. Then we'll talk about transportation and packaging costs. ;)
Aussie inventor flies 'world's only jetpack' around Statue of Liberty
I appreciate that's the definition, but the problem that agile tries to deal with is that this almost never happens as you describe in practice.

In reality:

1. You research the actual requirements
2. You design the concept of your system, design APIs and interfaces.
3. You implement it.
4. You discover that the requirements are unimplementable because of some unforeseen design issue
5. You make changes to your implementation, documentation and requirements to deal with this
6. You discover that documentation regarding a third-party system is inaccurate and requires design changes
7. You make changes to your implementation, documentation and requirements to deal with this
8. You verify it matches the design
9. You discover previously unknown acceptance requirements
10. You make changes to your implementation… and so on.
??. You release it and maintain it

Even with skilled, competent developers and architects, no system ever turns out exactly as expected. The goal of agile development is to accept that and try to incorporate the concept of continuous delivery and adaptation into the core of the process – since it's required anyway!
Well, sure.

But that’s the issue: What if you are writing the third party API, what if you are writing the firmware of a Washing Machine which is sold with lifetime guarantee*? (up to 99 years or death of buyer, whichever happens first), what if you write feature where every change has to be reviewed and costs millions?

People expect from quality software what they expect from a quality washing machine, meaning that they buy it once, never have to touch it again, and it will always work and never change. Except for some minor features added at some point.

But removing or changing features? Never.

This is true for users (remember how many people complained about Windows 8 unusual interface?) and for other developers (How many people go all crazy every time Google kills yet another service, or removes another API, or changes their API syntax?).

Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. But, effectively, I’m asking for perfect backwards compatibility. And that is rarely possible in systems where the software defines the documentation, instead of the other way round.
How quaint.

You grew up in the city, right?
Probably negligible even if you have a higher-than-average methane output. :p

But I believe the parent comment was discussing the cost in fuel emissions for local farmers producing for ~50 families in his area vs. a mega-farm outputting tons of food for cities across state lines.
If this type of subject is interesting to you then you should some of Rachel Laudan's work. She's a food historian but is very in tune with this topic. Here's a brief interview with her: http://www.washingtonian.com/blogs/bestbites/todd-kliman-oth...
I imagine Netflix has sweetheart deals with AWS that net them significantly cheaper costs and dedicated teams of support staffers, given their size.
Shingled Magnetic Recording 101
A lot of people don't realize that shipping is incredibly cheap now, in both money and energy. It takes less fuel to ship a car from London to New York by container ship than it does to drive that car fifty miles.
Why use Gmail when IMAP will sync all your devices? Android has a good IMAP client. On desktops, use Thunderbird. What value does GMail add? Besides ads, of course. And Google building a profile of you.
This makes no sense. The whole point is to find a model for feeding 7 billion people that preserves the environment. Local and organic do _more_ damage to the environment than producing the same equivalent amount of food industrially. They use more land and more energy.

A solution for the environment cannot involve starving the world, or needing to allocate even more huge swaths of it for agriculture.
Cutting snacks is a great signal to employees that they aren't worth the $2/day of Dr. Pepper they consume.

Instead of cutting snacks just cut the job of whoever proposes that as a cost cutting measure. Probably save more money and nip a lot of other problems in the bud.
Climate Informatics Accelerating Climate Science Discoveries with Machine Learning [pdf]
Because the fact that the USDL is currently acting on Tata's and Infosys's attempts to break the H1B laws shows that the system is enforcing the rules.

Meaning if there was a cap (or no cap), there would still be enforcement making it a non-issue.
I wonder when people do realize that data about themselves is really valuable and stop giving it away for free or cheap and making themselves products that are traded like slaves without anybody asking their permission.

What do you have to hide? Everything.
Taking away snacks might cause grumbling... Take away coffee and you might as well put the company up for sale.
An extreme example of a non-Xeon that supports ECC: Atom C2750 :)
Interesting point on managers. Yeah I've seen that happen. They are highly paid, engineering team is smart, small and self reliant, So management doesn't have much to do. But that doesn't mean they won't do much. So they throw themselves full on into "process", "communication", "meetings", new agile workflow, reorganizing the team, implement new metrics etc, etc.

A lot of it makes sense from the point of view of end of year reviews. They have to say they did "something" to justify pay raises and bonuses. The sad part is that a lot of times that busy works makes everything worse.
I frequently, in Chrome on OSX, get Google Maps in such a state that attempting to interact with the map at all will cause it to "freak out" and randomly zoom or pan somewhere unexpected.
> I'd rather get the share of money spent on the junk food and do whatever I want with them.

That would be true if not for taxes. A meal at the office is effectively 40-50% cheaper than the corresponding paycheck increase.
"Before the software was even finished, PoS software was able to interact with the API and insurances had sent out millions of cards."

Yes. There are hard constraints in many projects. If you know exactly up front what you need, you do not need Agile approaches to handle the uncertainty.

However, there is plenty of uncertainty to be managed behind this API.

"Agile is far more suited for constantly changing environments, where you also can just break support for any third parties depending on your API. But obviously, that’s not really quality software when every software depending on yours has to be changed every few years."

One doesn't have to change an API to evolve the software. Old school HTML and HTTP from 1992 still works on an evolving web.

"But obviously, that’s not really quality software when every software depending on yours has to be changed every few years."

APIs can be made to be backward compatible or versioned as they evolve.

Again, you presume the people asking for the software know exactly what they want. IF they do, then you are fine. It is very rare in practice except for simple or well-understood predictable domains. If the stakeholders do not know or agree on what they want (most of the time), something like Agile is appropriate to manage change.

Most APIs evolve a lot as parties learn more about the problem space, but this does not necessarily mean older versions automatically break. This really has little to do with Agile vs. Waterfall, it has more to do with the design decisions made for evolvability.
I think there's something to this, but I would put it in terms of Ben Horowitz's blog post "Ones and Twos":

http://www.bhorowitz.com/ones_and_twos

Larry Page is a One, Andy Rubin is a One, Eric Schmidt was a Two, and Sundar Pichai is a Two. I think Jonathan Rosenberg is a Functional One for product (he left when Larry became CEO, before I had a good sense of Google internal politics, and seems to have come back now that Sundar is CEO of Google). Marissa Mayer is a One. Make of that what you will - IMHO it explains much of the executive changeover in a couple different Silicon Valley tech companies over the last couple years.
What languages have nice IRCs? I ask b/c I was very pleasantly surprised by the extremely civil and noob-helpful #haskell.

Are there other nice ones out there? Good to know...
And now imagine a big company develops a software interacting with yours at point 2, and finishes it at point 5.

You’ll have to add backwards compatible wrappers that emulate an older API in 7 and later.

Or you can actually test with proof-of-concepts, with mockups, with other tests, before you even write the design.
Sigh. Yeah, that's obviously the only other alternative, right? (How do you mark up sarcasm here?)
Unless I'm at Google (or Facebook, or a few other places of that quality), I seem to end up mainly bringing my own snacks. Companies usually provide crappy shelf stable junk food.

I'd love an office which had great drinks even if it had no food.
Better late than never. I stopped using Google maps for anything serious. Was driving to Point Reyes lighthouse once and lost the connectivity, and spent the next half hour aimlessly driving and came back. Felt like an idiot.
How does this compare to Signal[0]? Seems to be offering similar feature set, actually minus secured text messaging...

[0]: https://whispersystems.org/
The point of food forests is to create solid reserves of food at local level, not to replace industrial agriculture - it's a buffer to have food growing near you, and it makes everyone safer.

The point of local food production is it is resilient. If you add local composting, greenhouses, local gardens, community gardens, local farms etc, to sustainable practice in industrial ag, then you have a model that can feed everyone with launching us off a cliff when for example the cost of oil begins to rise as supply falls or war hits in some region or other.
The way those comments are reported, completely removed from the context of the conversation, makes it very hard to draw any conclusion from them. It's impossible to tell whether they go towards the point presumably made by the title that there is a "toxic work culture in Europe" (full disclosure: I work in Europe).

For instance, this comment: “Be a good soldier, do what you’re told and that’s it.” Was the person being told to "be a good soldier" actually a soldier? Is it metaphorical? What's going on there?

What about this one? “You need to learn, the contribution you can give right now is very limited.” What is the context of this? Is the person being told so a new graduate, and the person speaking a senior dev? Why are they being told off? What's the situation?

“When I talk, you shut up and listen.” Again, what is the situation? Is this really in a professional context (I find that very hard to believe)? Why is this presented as evidence that the climate in Europe is "limiting innovation"?

“You make it seem like you’ve been doing this for 50 years or something.” Irony? Has the person really been doing that for 50 years? And what is "that"? Mainframe programming? Washing dishes? Animal husbandry? What?

Besides, in the last few weeks I've read a bunch of articles on HN that are very harshly critical of the work culture in the Valley, which I assume is supposed to be the counterpoint to Europe's "cultural climate" (whatever that's supposed to mean).

Maybe what's limiting growth in Europe is that we're still emerging from a global economic crisis- and maybe the fact that despite all that Europe is one of the most prosperous regions in the world with one of the highest standards of living is actually a reason to celebrate its work culture.
And now imagine Healthcare.gov was Agile and its API would change every month completely.

And then imagine how every insurance would complain and how, after 2 or 3 months, everyone depending on healthcare.gov would have stopped supporting it because after the third rewrite of the parts of their software interacting with healthcare.gov’s API they’ve gone mad.

Every time you interact with third parties you have to provide stable interfaces.
Obviously I'm not making a particularly convincing argument…

At the end of the day, agile development is primarily about ensuring that you can respond to change quickly and with minimal disruption. Change occurs in all software projects, and agile tries to avoid some of the pitfalls that one can fall into by architecting an entire system in advance.

"Even if you’re agile, you can still do waterfall." is not quite what i'm trying to get across. Rather, it's that agile doesn't mean you can't provide documentation in advance if that is a specific requirement. Bear in mind that external APIs that must be stable are quite distinct from the rest of the system; indeed, it's a horribly design failure if you can't completely swap out your implementation without changing those APIs!
like with any assisted navigation system you shouldn't blindly follow it, memorizing the route, POI's, and looking at road signs is well kinda mandatory....
Did you miss the next sentence?

"(T)aste is more dependent on the variety of tomato than on the way it is grown."

The grocery store tomato is not the same varietal as the heirloom tomato grown in small scale gardens.
Watch Next: Four Ways to Nap at Your Desk

I found this a highly amusing follow up to this article.
Did anyone else read this and have the sudden urge to steam clean their entire apartment?
Then there are locational issues. For example, it takes more (human-generated) energy to grow tomatoes in NZ than it takes to grow and can tomatoes in Italy then transport them to NZ. It sounds crazy, until you remember that tomatoes in Italy grow on hills and tomatoes in NZ require greenhouses and attendant infrastructure.
So I initially wasn't too interested in the temperature changes. It seemed like fairly considerable changes but I didn't know what to reference each change from. Was it the delta YoY? Maybe I missed the info explaining that in the page.

When I looked at CO2 ppm I got really scared. Talk about hockey stick growth.
And if your implementation never changes, but you just do minor changes – isn’t that the maintenance phase of Waterfall again?
I think you missed my point there – I'm not describing an ideal agile process. It doesn't matter how many proof-of-concepts, mockups, tests and design documents you produce in advance. Change still happens.
That supply chain exists for the Whole Foods in my area at least.
WAZE also had it from day one but it's a very specific navigation platform, HERE doesn't find the correct address for businesses (and if we are talking about actual businesses e.g. not coffee shops, stores, restaurants etc. then 100% of the time it will fail you) most of the time, fuzzy search isn't going to work, public transport is almost out of the question, Google Maps just beats pretty much everything when it comes to coverage, information, and commute options.

HERE is very good as an actual map I would call it a Garmin GPS replacement more than anything else, but it's navigation and city living/POI location features are kinda lacking.*

Based on my experience YMMV
No, I'm just saying that large-scale car factories are bigger, louder and takes up more space than consumer electronics factories. Apple does invest quite a bit in its production facilities, but most other manufacturers of consumer electronics don't.
While that might be true in a few cases, in most it flatly isn't.