skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Good point on the terror. On the individual level, A/B/C players is your average self-justifying dichotomy: I'm better than those people because I work hard, I work smart etc. Yet on the system level, it's the perfect rationalization for companies too lazy to hire correctly and too impotent to own up to mistakes.

"Why couldn't these folks go above and beyond like these other teams? It must be that they are inherently not good enough. Fire them and get a new team in."

I would even go so far to say that it's the CEO's and senior management, not the employees, who push this myth the most. In somehow all formulations I've seen, the persons's boss, who is amazing (regardless of context), and her or his bosses who are also amazing, are the judges of all performers in the company. Because the system is perfect or filled with perfect people (read: the top part is), any point of failure must be the employee, by process of elimination.

Further reading:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitality_curve#Criticisms
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Welch (the
A great book was published on this topic 2 months ago, called Risky Medicine: http://www.amazon.com/Risky-Medicine-Quest-Cure-Uncertainty-...

Podcast interview of the author, released yesterday: http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2015/11/robert_aronowit.htm...
This seems obvious, as the largest MacBook or MBAir one can buy is 512GB.

Also, the B2 service doesn't come with a backup client, AFAIK.
This is what happens when the CEO of a startup is a liar.
It is a shame, but it is unsurprising.
By "compare health tests", I'm including the process of going to the clinic, waiting for the appointment, getting blood drawn via the vein, etc. etc. Apparently that's enough of a wait time and process to discourage a non-significant number of people from even getting prescribed tests. For those of us who don't have a problem with needles and can make time for the office, easier testing may open new avenues of inquiry and awareness for our health, if testing is as easy as a needle prick.

(yes, I'm leaving out the major issue of over-diagnosis...but that's an issue all kinds of testing and medical practice has to deal with)
This was absolutely fascinating. If you haven't been, I thoroughly recommend taking a trip to Hearst Castle (a lovely drive down the pacific coast highway) which is a monument to bought/stolen European antiquities.
This has been the single most useful article Ive read all year. There is much to be said about setting up an unknowing amount of companies with the lessons needed to essentially, NOT MESS THIS UP. Thanks for this

StepUp,
Stand Out _E L E V /A\ T E D_
Why, are you planning on reproducing the drawings? Copyright on the drawings has nothing to do with producing the objects described therein. You don't need a license to cook from a recipe.
Interesting. I slowed a game down to 1000ms per move so I could realistically follow what was going on. The game started 1.Nf3 Nf6 2.e4?

So White sacrifices (loses?) a pawn for no compensation on move 2. Not really sure what this says in respect of the experiment in general, but it does smell a little.

Also; Showing the dark squares would be a massive usability advance! And it would be nice if they respected some simple and fundamental chess conventions (for example presenting the moves in the way I did in my comment above - move numbers increment after whole moves not half moves)
The wrapping in cycles is where it lost me - is there a quick explanation of that?
perhaps you could lay concrete down shortly before the machine goes over and it'd adhere that way but I had the same thought.
> If the parts that are done don’t change much, it’s not Agile.

Most agile methods focus on prioritizing the parts that are both most certain and highest value for the cost as a way of managing requirements uncertainty.

> Agile is if no piece of your software can ever be called "done" because you are constantly changing things to be able to react to the market, as the market always changes.

One of the aspects of uncertainty many agile methods address is change in market, sure; that doesn't mean that every piece of the software is changing all the time, it means that those methods focus on having mechanisms available that are intended so that when market changes create a need for changes in the software, that change can be implemented on a timely, efficient basis.
Actual results with low likelihood tell us a lot. Results with high likelihood tell us a little.
It only pays for itself a priori if you are profitable. If you are not profitable then burn-rate is an existential threat which no one will take seriously if the founders don't.

I definitely agree that you should give developers everything they need to maximize their productivity, including spending an extra few thousands on their workstation, but it should really be what they need. For the typical startup I'd really question the need for 1TB SSDs, or the fastest CPUs. Focus on big displays, good ergonomics, ample RAM and good software tools, but that's just me.
Not on mobile carrier Internet, those can appear as very far from where you are
That's a management issue. If the correct remote work processes are in place things like this are easy to overcome. It also helps when 90%+ of your company is remote.

I agree though, remote work only works if your company is full on remote (culture, comms, hr, etc).
Crazy! It would be like a PayPal founder believing he'd have a clue about how to build an electric car, or a rocket ship.
Google Cuts Chrome Support for 5 Operating Systems April 2016
Dark Matter Deniers: Exploring a Blasphemous Alternative
I'll run your company into the ground for you for half what the other guy is charging. Hiring me as CEO will save you just as much as cutting the food budget. You can't afford to not hire me.
* Guess what was the ultimate items they scrimped on? Toilet paper. You read it right and I am not kidding. They swapped 3-ply to 2-ply and that was when I called it quit.*

...I wasn't aware that 3-ply was even a thing. That said, my lack of attention to brand names means I've discovered quite a range of quality in the local 2-ply offerings here.
The A (promoted) vs B grade (fired) perf means:

- No "regularly well performing" employees are kept. You're either promoted or fired. Ensure workforce moves.

- Doing the shitty necessary work such as fixing tech-debt just gets you fired. But I bet people do it anyway, else Netflix would be in troubles. It's just that they get fired after that. Not really nice.

It also means you've to be only doing stuff that has direct visible impact, and refuse any work that does not/place yourself visually above others.

Not saying this is a bad strategy to get stuff to work, not sure if very ethical though.

That's all I noticed was actually interesting ;-)
Interestingly, with this sounding like a somewhat realistic Norwegian/Danish name, it should actually show up at the bottom by the sorting rules of those two languages.

The digraph "aa" is an archaic representation of the modern character "å", the last letter of the Norwegian and Danish alphabets, and should be sorted accordingly.
This view is missing some things. For example, Curator (now at Apache).
<br data-mce-bogus="1">
Netflix doesn't necessarily pay the best, but they pay well. Read this:

http://www.slideshare.net/reed2001/culture-1798664
Dizzying Ride May Be Ending for Startups
No, it's not. It's primarily Google Guice via Governator.
I see snacks and/or sodas as just a proxy. A company who thinks about their employees enough to provider sodas and coffee is often the same company who thinks about career development or helping an employee through a rough patch. Remember, the free soda is not about the free soda as much as it is a signal about how the company acts towards employees.
The Slippery Eel of Probability
We used these and affectionately called them the mullet as in business in the front, party in the rear.

http://www.supermicro.com/products/chassis/4u/847/sc847de26-...
Why Organizations Don’t Learn
Yes, I've been working in MEMS for 15 years.
When You’re Just Drawn That Way: Who Framed Roger Rabbit?
>With a p-value [of 0.01], the result hardly screamed “false positive” like a barely significant one of, say, 0.05 might.

Is 0.01 that low for such a crazy finding? Let's say you believe that it has a probability of 1 in 10,000. And that result really seemed really really unlikely. 1 in 10,000 might be generous. Then, after this study, the probability that it's true is 1%.
What's better than running htmlEncode? Running it seven times!
Carl Sagan's Pitch for a “Contact” Video Game
In HERE Maps the entire Japan is blank, even when the device is online.
This has been posted 4 or 5 times before, with a frequency of 2 or 3 years.
I would like to add that it is not only about online communities, but it applies to real communities as well. All of the developed communities in the world are so pacific (not willing to defend) that it is quite easy for wilder communities to invade. It is happening more now than before.
Build and run Docker containers leveraging Nvidia  GPUs
You joke, but having Product Managers on a "rotation" seems to be all the rage in Silicon Valley these days.
Democrats and Republicans agree: If you can mine it in space, it’s yours
Having a common place with free snacks also allows people from different groups to come together and mingle, exchanging ideas and knowledge through the company.

At my first job the new good coffee machine was a place we'd all congregate at twice a day for a coffee and a chat between teams and other random people in the company.
Most people should probably just use a third-party email service provider so they don't have to worry about issues like this. Deliverability is a pain to manage if you don't have to.

I didn't know about the existence of Google Postmaster Tools[0] so that was a cool discovery :)

[0] https://postmaster.google.com/
My attempt to easy server side rendering using a tiny Express middleware
It's email. SMTP. It's not instant messaging and it sure isn't a browser.

Point blank, it's easy to see that this is by design and not by quirk or fault. If anything Google are looking to maintain usability by keeping as close to RFC spec as possible.

One of the biggest problems facing email today is SPAM, and general deliverability. Once you veer far off spec it gets a lot more difficult to manage these two issues.

For example, look how nice Greylisting worked in theory, until you realize that most IT or hosting companies don't have a clue how to configure an MTA within RFC specs and do silly things like retrying delivery every 5 mins.

When your dealing with complex systems, it's better to keep each part of that system well oiled and within a predictable spec. And then Microsoft adds HTML support to Outlook so that marketing execs can throw 15 sales related images and some wording about saving trees...

Often, solution providers should have given an alternative when asked to do things that break from standards. As we often say in this field, "Just because you can, doesn't mean that you should."

Kc/
I have always hated the saying “science advances one funeral at a time”. Over 90% of all the scientists who have lived in history are alive right now - heck 7% of everyone who has ever lived is alive right now.
Brick walkways are quite often unmortared. There's not much stopping you from stealing them, just as there's not much stopping you from stealing the dirt on the ground next to them. But bricks and dirt don't have enough resale value to be worth the effort of stealing by hand, and if you have both the resources and desire to pry up a whole section and abscond with it wholesale, then mortar would be only a minor hindrance.
True, for the most part practicing scientists have not had a good exposure to proper software practices.
Yes, it is ill defined right now. Are you willing to bet that it can't be properly defined? Or even that is currently is properly defined, and you just haven't been exposed to the definition?
That doesn't ring any bells to me as a plot element from Snow Crash.

There was Reverend Bob Rife's aircraft carrier, but that's the only re-appropriated artifact I recall.
Thank you - I was under the impression that Soylent was significantly cheaper than Ensure, but after doing some napkin math it seems to be roughly equivalent (powder form) or actually more expensive (bottled form) per calorie.
I worked as an engineer at a place that not only had free soda but one of the multi-flavor fountains like you'd see in a fast food place. It was initially quite cool; you could come in with your cup and just fill up whatever you wanted.

Of course, soda syrup costs literally pennies. Food places pay more for cups than soda, and since the engineering group wasn't buying that many cups (people used their own) the cost was essentially wrapped up in the machine itself.

Now comes the true stupidity. To "cut costs" they stopped refilling the soda dispenser but they kept the machine and even left it plugged in. It became a glorified ice dispenser (when the break room already had a different ice dispenser), consuming electricity. It had a bunch of now-useless fountain dispensers on the front of it.

Think about that. The company decided not to pay the pennies it would have cost to make employees happy, and elected to continue operating a machine that didn't have any reason to exist without the soda. The beginning of the end was signaled loud and clear to employees and I saw a marked drop in giving-a-crap-about-things after that point. The company is not around anymore, long since divided into pieces and sold to the lowest bidder.
Is this in the US? AFAIK quite a few states have passed laws to curtail such takings, after the _Kelo v New London_ debacle.
hehe, i lived for a short time in Arlington Heights, I know exactly what you're talking about.
>When are the insider stories about the culture going to start emerging?

glassdoor seems to be pretty clear on that company/culture (if you skip the obvious 5 star reviews :).
Ninefold Shutting Down: A Competitor's Analysis
What is wrong with firing people to cut the costs?
That doesn't have nearly the general nutritional value. Bananas and milk both spoil far faster. It's also a specific taste that would likely get tiring if you had it too often. It contains two ingredients (milk and peanut) that significant fractions of the population are allergic to.

And on top of all of that, it's more time consuming to make and to eat, so I don't see where "simpler" comes from.
I have no idea how Netflix actually treats its employees, but applying the charity principle leads to other possible interpretations:

- B was chosen arbitrarily to drive the point home and could well mean a D on a school grade scale.

- They don't want to be too hard on fired employees or hurt their future employability (e.g. even "above average" people get fired over there).

I don't know anyone who works at Netflix and I could very well be wrong. Their "performance > effort" policy does however resonate with me.
The Balancing Act of Tracking Data in Business
They pay their senior software engineers $350k+ per year.
In other words, in medieval ages, if barbarians had a simple goal of kill all Romans and Romans had a complex rule that says kill only those persons who are found to be harming good Romans, then obviously barbarians would win by the simplicity of their work.
Open Outdoor Robotics platform
The goal of this project is to create a standardized outdoor robotics platform, similar to the Turtlebot.
The platform will be comprised of 2, 4 or 6 wheels with custom motor controllers. The wheels are scooter hub motors( 36V 250 watts). The two wheel platform will just be used as a proof of concept/test platform for motor controller development. The 4 and 6 wheel models use a rocker-boogie suspension. Each motor will have a dedicated battery pack. The motor controllers will be an open source 3 phase brushless controllers based on the arduino zero. I hope to use the SAMC21 which is 5V tolerant. The controllers will communicate via USB to an arm board running linux and ROS(Nvidia X1). The goal is to provide customers with a clean navigation API so that customers can focus on building their applications on the platform.

The platform is a little larger than a push lawn mower.

The business model would be similar to Makerbot’s initial kit model. The basic kit will allow users to easily build the rover saving costs on labor. Fully assembled and tested models will be available as well. I would also like to build applications myself on this platform in the agricultural field.

Any feedback would be appreciated.
There seems to be precious little military utility to such a mode of operation. It sounds like any possible use of it would be a war crime.
I do agree that the maps in HERE are great. The indoor maps are nifty too though unfortunately it doesn't seem to be able to cut across buildings while navigating, which is a pity...
This chance/skill argument could be made for the financial markets.
Disagree about the broad brush. The quality of H1B workers has gone down so dramatically over years these days anyone qualifies. I have seen people with Phd not get visas because a Java developer fresh of the school who can barely write to code qualifies for the same H1B program. Its one of the most misappropriated use of resources. Much of these admin and coding work can be done by anyone in USA if trained. Thanks to the misuse of H1b visas not one american will be trained by our Fortune 500 companies. At the pace of changes in technology with new acronyms thrown around daily there never will be enough STEM engineers as per this gamed system. But unemployment will always be high and jobs hard to come by. I cannot understand how it is worthwhile to educate your self in this country if you will not find jobs. its shameful that no one cares for the locals in this country.
Agreed. Arial is internally inconsistent. The canting of the tails, the length of the strokes, the curves, etc., seem haphazard and ad hoc depending on the letter.

I've never been completely enamored of Helvetica, but at least it's stylistically cohesive.
It's almost certainly playing out of an opening book.

There is a move history, but you have to expand it.
Isn't it only after a certain amount? $80-90k?
Well, it was intended for use in a total nuclear war.
Nice, I wasn't aware of that feature, but the features I'm still not aware of in Perl 6 could fill a small book, since I still haven't gotten around to using it for much. :/
> Now things like Garman have no real purpose (offline maps > was their niche as Google Map's version of the same was
terrible).

I see you've never used a GPS in the back country for days at a time.

Things that are still wonderful about my eTrex 20 [0] is that it's cheap, it takes AA batteries, those AA's can last for 16+ hours continually, and it's not my phone. (phones are great, but I need it to operate as a phone, when I do need it).

And yes, I know your phone can do may wonderful things, and I am as grateful for that as you are, but of the few things they still are not getting right is: use in incremental weather. Like: winter outside, in a snowstorm, on a mountain. Or, being dropped onto things, like rocks. They seem to be allergic to those.

[0] http://sites.garmin.com/en-US/etrex/
I don't understand this at all. AirBnB solves the quality control issue with ratings for both sides doesn't it? I've never used Uber, but Lyft doesn't let me pick which driver I get. Does Uber? If not then the last thing I'd want is an Uber for hotels. AirBnB offers filters and search so I can find exactly what I'm looking for, if OYO is the Uber for hotels is it just giving me a random hotel in a radius? Why would I want that?
I would. The nature of how I would work would change, but not that I worked.
I mention above Netflix pays Senior Software Engineers over $350k/yr. This is far above anything any other company does by a wide margin. I'm not sure how much Google or Facebook employees make, but are they really making upwards of $400k/yr total comp?
Everything You Should Know about Government, Innovation and Entrepreneurship
You could say that Google is constantly under a DDoS attack because the amount of normal traffic they get far exceeds the amount that would constitute an attack for an average business site.
> * Why are the maps still so bad in so many parts of the world? Google maps does not know how to get from downtown Paris to Paris Disneyland by public transport. Google maps does not have public transportation info in Istanbul THE LARGEST CITY IN EUROPE!

I know that there's a lot of deals that need to be made for public transportation data. I think the philosophy is if google can't get high quality data (notably: real time data that has things like delays and line shutdowns) for times of public transportation, they won't integrate it.

The goal being to make sure that all the content is as high quality as possible, and not send people down the wrong way
If somebody finds learning Lua to be difficult, then learning C++, learning basic statistics, or learning machine learning will be impossible for them.
Having pharmacies everywhere is becoming A Thing, since many Americans are on monthly prescriptions and it provides another contact point to come into the store. Budget department stores like Target and Wal-Mart have had them for years, grocery stores are just next in line.

Value-add services in pharmacies are A Thing. In many places, pharmacists can administer vaccinations, and a lot of stores are adding "minute clinics" where you can go for quick health advice, blood tests, etc. Again, offering these services brings patients into the store where they will likely buy something else, and staffing these locations with nurses, nurse practitioners, or even just pharmacists, undercuts the cost of a visit to a medical doctor.
If that was the process I'd have to go through to get cheap hardware like a keyboard I'd be looking for a new job. That's absolutely ridiculous.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10539100
It's better to be well-rounded and doing projects that reach an audience. Maybe a couple small projects and a whale. Or a couple whales. Bonus points if you continue to work on that project for more than 1 year. It helps demonstrate your experience and value.
Why does McDonald's exist?
Sadly it's just a way for you to lay brick without having to kneel, the people on the machine are actually laying the brick. Watch the video.
Have the people who funded Theranos been calling the critics haters? That seems to be common with some VCs. Like calling HN "Hater News" because of harsh criticism of questionable claims of innovation.
McD french fries give me joy. There's really no other reason to eat them.
"For the typical startup I'd really question the need for 1TB SSDs"
And that is why you fail. Your already second guessing my needs. I have a 1TB SSD because the 500 was filled.
Don't guess. Ask and then supply and don't make me buy it myself.
My Life as a Software Developer in India
I meant to say there will be an average at Netflix. When you're being compared to others. Not everone can be an "A" level individual.
Most cloud providers (e.g. Google [1] and Amazon) as well as ISPs block outgoing traffic on TCP port 25 (SMTP) so it's actually fairly hard to run your own SMTP server to begin with.

[1]: https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/tutorials/sending-mail...
I think there's a mistake in the article -- it should say 13 SQUARE feet per minute, not 13 feet per minute.
Show HN: Pick – Cmd line tool to interactively pick items from stdin to stdout
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impostor_syndrome
It doesn't really matter. It's not like authoritarians in the State make principled, consistent decisions, or have rules that reflect the same. FF fleeces customers but State lotteries? Crickets. The State lottery is in the constitution, so it has a magical protection spell around it. It's mostly about picking winners and losers, jumping on trends, protecting political legacies, shakedowns, etc. If D&D came under the same scrutiny, I'm sure they'd try to ban betting on it.