skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think it's extremely misguided to assume that the problem here was a matter of writing style. I think it's naive to assume that the people who received this memo weren't aware that it was bringing attention to an engineering issue that could lead to loss of human life. I think it's misguided and not supported by the evidence to assume that was the gap in understanding that lead to the problem. They're working on rockets. People working on rockets know what the stakes are. These are the risks engineering projects like this are structured around dealing with.

And I think it's pretty disrespectful to the engineer who is still haunted by this to say that what he really should have done was switch some sentences around and that would have totally solved the problem.

This is a strongly worded document.

Making safety a priority doesn't mean starting every engineering document with the words "loss of life" which is a really common outcome of engineering failures on programs like this. Making safety a priority means putting the risk of an engineering failure up front and knowing that an engineering failure in a life-critical system is critical. Making safety a priority means people don't have to tell you what the stakes are every single sentence, because everyone already knows and so what you really communicate is how much risk there is, not the fact that risk exists. Making safety a priority means even if you're working on an engineering problem that wouldn't lead to loss of life, you fix the thing because you might be wrong and it might be part of a correlated failure one day that does lead to loss of life. Making safety a priority doesn't involve writing engineering documents in a way that makes them more amenable to skimming.

It's a rocket. Engineering doesn't have to go that far wrong on rockets for people to die. When someone sends a letter to a VP of engineering which begins with "This letter is written to insure that management is fully aware of the seriousness" then everyone who receives that memo is paying attention and if they aren't then it's not the writing skills of the people involved that are at fault.

I don't think a single person who was aware of the O-ring issue was unaware of the stakes. That didn't show up in any reports on the panel. What did show up was they estimated the risk of the problem wrong. The first sentence of this engineer's letter went towards establishing the seriousness of the engineering failure. Because that was the part that needed to be communicated most clearly.
> Btw, you're site is down on my end

Hah, because it's been defunct for a while now. Thanks for the reminder, removed it from my profile.
Linux support is, as you say, non-existent. That might be better with the new Dell Skylake laptops. That said, I've never found a pen-aware Linux sketching program that had any utility and I don't have the time to write one.
China's censorship does not work that way. If you could read Chinese, you could find plenty of criticism and diatribes against the Chinese government and its leaders, not unlike in the US. What China censors are any content (news or posts) that may lead to people self-organize, whatever their views are.

I am a Chinese born in and lived in China for 24 years. That Chinese lives have been dramatically improved in the last decade is as common sense as the earth being round here.

This discussion is off-topic. You should message me if you want to learn more about China. Your views on China is obviously through the lens of Western media, which are not wrong on the facts but usually misleading as they willfully ignores anything positive here.
Sure, in theory, but in practice we're seeing big companies like Amazon Music, Google Play Videos, Youtube not being able to move on just T-Mobile.

Complexity also increases as each ISP gets to choose their own rules.

Besides, I, as a consumer want to be able to use Amazon Prime Music / Video at 0, whether Amazon wants to take the time to set it up or not.
I would even go so far as to say that you are not an engineer until you are a PE. This is coming from a "Software Engineer".
Word is the perfect example of a lazy, mediocre product dominating a space through sheer inertia.

The current Mac version can't even keep track of recently opened files. Working with styles is torture. (You can't search them, you can't group them, you can't sort them, the ribbon selection seems to be random.)

The ribbon itself is an unusually eccentric example of software design.

A competitor could easily produce a leaner, better product. But it would never sell, because Word has so many corporate users that anyone who exchanges files with them has to use it too.

Locked-in products do sometimes fail, but they usually only fail to competing products from large companies. The textbook example is the move from QuarkXpress to InDesign, which only became possible because Quark were so famously greedy and lazy about Xpress they literally pissed off the entire print design industry.

Adobe not only had a better product, they also had the sales team and industry relationships to push it. Without those, it's likely Xpress would still be Number 1.
Of course, but their skin tone is a few shades darker, so nobody talks or cares about them.

People would rather argue in ivory towers about abstract problems that don't exist in the real world (sexism in video games, Internet feminism, etc), rather than work on unpleasant and unsexy problems that can easily be solved.
Maximum Wage
It's been said a couple of times by people smarter than myself in this area - Trump has a high floor [of votes], but a very low ceiling.
I don't think he believes it, really. Not to the extent that he spouts; there are though charges of racism stemming from his time as primarily a landlord in the 80s and 90s.

What I think rather is that this is just another reality show for him. He loves being in the spotlight. In his biography, he said as a kid he admired Broadway musicals and wanted to grow up to be a producer. This is a man who loves show and spectacle. Remember, he was in the WWE (the phony wrestling organization) for a time. No billionaire needs to do that. He did it just because he wanted to be part of the show.

He doesn't really care about becoming president or fixing the country, either. It would be nice for him, a bonus, but it wouldn't be his life's crowning achievement like it would for the other politicians in the race. It's more about the process for him.

So to answer your questions, 1. No, he doesn't believe it, but 2. No, he's not just doing what it takes to get elected; he's doing what it takes to _stay in the spotlight_. That's more important to him than being elected.
Yeah but hypocrisy doesn't take away from the point the author is making. Something can be true and also be ad hominem.
regarding the architecture: basically is (or is very much like) event sourcing, right? I mean, kind of like an append-only log, that will grow forever.
Trump only exists as a candidate because of politically correct bullshit which is about to go the way of the dodo. Only in Europe can it be seen as viable that the majority of people can be on the government dole.
Assuming an ASP of $800 for Surface, approx 1.7m units.

I think the reality is that Microsoft is essentially gaining market share as an OEM at the cost of its former Windows PC OEMs like Dell, HP etc.
I Hate the Lord of the Rings [video]
As a banker, I figured I'd offer my perspective:

I don't think Goldman did anything illegal, but they certainly did a terrible job serving their client. In my view, investment bankers have an obligation to offer whatever financial and strategic advice the particular client needs, which is a function of that client's sophistication. Some clients are highly sophisticated, don't need any advice, and just want you to find them a buyer at a good price. Others can, for example, simply be good technologists but otherwise not be particularly business or finance savvy, and so will need additional guidance along the way.

To look at this particular case, moving from a 50/50 cash/stock deal to an all-stock deal without an increase in total consideration, or without the client REALLY loving the stock of the acquiring company, makes no sense. Guaranteed money upfront is always preferable (unless there are unusual tax circumstances, which I don't see being the case here). This should have been a major point of discussion and negotiation. And if an all-stock deal was decided upon, the client should've been advised with no ambiguity that there are substantial risks involved in such a deal.

In any case though, even for the 50/50 deal, substantial due diligence on the acquirer should have been recommended. Spending $50k to verify the quality of $290mm+ in sale proceeds is a no-brainer. This legitimately falls outside of the realm of responsibility of the banker to conduct this due diligence though, and should've been performed by a third party with guidance and oversight by the bankers. The bank here is conflicted anyway - their incentives would clearly be to give the "all clear" sign. Falsified revenue is extremely easy to catch - just follow the cash.

I guess the lessons here are don't work with service providers who don't value you, and always keep in mind that ultimately, as the client, you're the one that has to live with the decisions that get made.

I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that there are better sources of financial advice. At my firm, we take pride in deeply aligning ourselves with our clients by only charging fees upon successful completion of a transaction, and by being compensated in the same form that our clients are (e.g. had we advised Dragon, we would've been compensated in L&H stock, and would've therefore been highly incentivized to strongly recommend due diligence!). The Dragon/L&H deal is actually one of the case studies that inspired the genesis of our firm. I'd love to chat if this resonates with you: lharris@belstone.com.
I kind of wish that software issue trackers/ALM/SCM/whatever-the-fuck-its-called-today would be a bit more opinionated and enforce some set of practices. I think some people are looking to these tools for help building an effective software workflow and are left with a configurable product that can work great -- if you've run projects effectively before. But if you haven't it turns into a nightmare.

I know that workflow, work item types, how to transition between states is kind of a deeply personal thing -- but often I wish I could just eliminate the mental overhead of trying to figure out how this project, manager, and team are using Jira/Rally/TFS/Trello/Pivotal and what state I need to put something at what time and which fields need to filled out and if we are using tags and why adding this critical bug to the current sprint is giving me a big scary warning and are we calling this a feature or a story or an epic or an enhancement or a task or a subtask and if I want to be looking at what this tool is calling a burndown chart or if its really the milestone progress chart in this project and what was that filter you used to see bugs that were open and also defined because I'm not seeing the bug that my customer is asking about and are we supposed to put new information as a comment or in the description or is it a new linked issue or a new child task or a new child bug or a link to the integrated wiki page...

(maybe I'm just the only one with these scars...)
Nuitka is already faster than Cpython and it seems a majority of the speed work has yet to be done.
I personally derive great pleasure from the Cassandra-like voice of the prophet Scott Sumner crying in the wilderness.
I found this absolutely hilarious. Happy Friday. :)
Hmm. When technology basically took away musicians's ability to sell digital music files, the world pretty much said, "figure out a new way to sell music."

So, "figure out a new way to advertise." Welcome to disruption.
The Book-of-the-Month club operated for 75 years before they had even a website.
There is no way to configure mirrors with the project-specific tooling (AFAIK).

Git, (and like most other DVCS) supports mirroring. For example Linux, hosted on Github, (https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commits/master) is also mirrored and hosted on kernel.org (https://git.kernel.org/cgit/). Or, the apache projects (https://github.com/apache/cassandra), which are also hosted on apache.org (https://git-wip-us.apache.org/repos/asf?p=cassandra.git). Generally when commits are merged with upstream, they are mirrored to all other hosts.

The tools, however, are generally configured with only the GitHub address (or the author of the tool only publishes to GitHub), and the tools (unlike say Perl's CPAN) don't offer to maintain mirrors of the libraries published. So when github is down, a tool like npm will give up, even though the author could have another git repo host elsewhere.
EVERYONE calls the platform "Windows Phone" even people who work at Microsoft.

Your correction is like saying "don't call it iOS, call it iOS 9.3.1!!!" or "It isn't Android anymore, it is Lollipop!"

Sure, the latest incarnation is Windows 10 mobile, but realistically it is going to be called Windows Phone as an ecosystem because versions come and go, a platform name is forever.

Microsoft MIGHT be able to convince people to call it "Windows Mobile" (instead of "Windows Phone") but they have a lot of marketing to do.
Sketching or note taking? Xournal is a pretty good note taking software and I've been using it for several years at this point.
You might want to know that the HR readings are crap. [1]

[1] http://www.dcrainmaker.com/2016/01/microsoft-band-review.htm...
The idea that anything that might be tangentially useful to someone with a medical condition must be a medical object is an absurd result of an overly litigious society and overly zealous regulatory agency. Speech-to-text software should not suddenly become "medical software" just because someone with unsteady hands wants to use it.
Unfortunately, as a consumer, you don't have the technical resources to integrate your video provider with T-Mobile for them to support BingeOn. Your options are to wait, or move to another cellular provider (which doesn't, of course, have BingeOn).

That is why BingeOn is offered. T-Mobile receives a network efficiency benefit, which they pass along to their users as unlimited video. Just because the user complains they want something, doesn't mean they get it.

As always, the customer is not always right.
It is very common for Europe to believe they are more diverse, they are not. Look we have Swedes, Norwegians and Finns. Very diverse.
I agree, but unfortunately what I've also seen is that cutting major costs frequently amounts to leaving areas altogether, which then torpedoes a lot of opportunities.

I was stoked to move to cheaper area and work remote for these reasons, but it put a serious brake on career/income growth. And all it takes is some old-school mgmt to come in and then you are treated like some pariah.
Managing all your secrets with Vault – Review and Walkthrough
Pricing will be comparable with similar tools - probably on a per-seat basis, but we'll do something special for early adopters.

It will always be possible to export all your data. We have that now, it's just not exposed yet. Here's an example of the demo database: https://www.dropbox.com/s/ujix7vch7ramlmx/data.json?dl=0
Thanks. They cite Kim et al (1994) and Shay and Bacchetti (1997). Table 2 of Kim et al shows up to 38% telomerase activity in normal tissue (ie head and neck) and in only 25% of breast cancers. Similarly Shay and Bacchetti reported telomerase activity in many normal tissue samples (eg table 2 GI tract normal was 25% table 9 normal epidermis was 44%).

Also, Shay and Bacchetti write: "With very few exceptions, tumor cells were assayed by the PCR-based TRAP protocol... negative samples from the few studies that used the less sensitive assay without PCR amplification of telomerase products, have been disregarded".

These papers are pretty old, so I thought it would be interesting to find out what has been learned about the TRAP protocol in the time since. Today, we know those methods lead to false positives:

"The original TRAP method has several drawbacks. Initially, the CX oligonucleotide, which complementarily overlaps with TS for several bp, is used in the amplification of PCR products. It results in the dimerization of primers and products that emerge due to the interaction between primers. Even when using the optimal ACX primer with the noncomplementary TS end, a background signal may emerge during the analysis of concentrated extracts from tumor tissues [14]. An additional problem is encountered when using reverse primers which completely correspond to telomeric repeats. The primers are not annealed at the matrix edges during PCR (as a result of periodicity in telomeres), and hence false signals emerge."
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3347595/

It would be interesting to see more recent data on this.
Tell you what, hard engineering problems are never not a hit. But nobody cares, because they require so much money and so much hard work... Same with bio-engineering, and whatnot.

No, let's just make yet another app which brings insignificant incremental deveopment to calendar viewing apps.

Be serious.
Elsewhere in the article he specifically talks about how he was having to patch together project budgets using his own funds--and having lost half of those funds, it's not unreasonable to imagine that that is perhaps what pushed him over the edge.

I'm willing to bet that that half of a fortune is not being put into as many economically active projects as the part he'd kept is.
I've been thinking about this a lot lately.

I think engineers/developers/hackers tend to undervalue the skills necessary to manage a project well. Basically considering the work a lot easier than writing code or building something and thinking that anyone can do it (including themselves in your example).

I think the reason for this is because a lot of people can do a shitty job managing a team and it's not as obvious as when people do a shitty job programming (or at least there are more people that can be a bad manager undetected than can be a bad programmer).

It's harder to bullshit technical skills, but a bad manager could have good enough social/political skills to get power and it's probably also more likely to attract people looking for power. Engineering seems to provide a filter to avoid some of this naturally.

That said being a really effective PM, Manager, VP is a skill different from programming and with a similar depth that shouldn't be dismissed easily. This is more obvious to HN probably because startup founders often have to get better at it in order to build a company. Since it tends to rely a decent amount on empathy and social skills in addition to being able to understand the technical pieces/prioritization it's also harder to know how good you'll be at it when starting.

It is something you can get better at though, just takes investment/learning like anything else.

Reminds me of Tom West from Soul of a New Machine.
It doesn't, it's a misconception.

You see often enough companies hiring H1-B's, have their American equivalents train them, and then fire the American workers.
You can use app called Nine for Exchange, which locks the app only, not the whole device.
hey I’m not trying to troll you or anything, sincere question: Exactly how do you work? On a sofa? Airplanes?

(irony zone, shortly after posting this, I realized that I’m typing from a lounge chair with my laptop squarely on my legs… but this is an unusual circumstance for me)
Splatoon was a really successful new IP by Nintendo. I know my little cousins rave about it. They also love Pokemon just as much as I did in 1999. Which is hilarious because everyone was certain it was just a weird fad ala beanie babies. But nope, Nintendo knew how to roll with the inertia and the franchise is bigger than ever.
I think Nintendo is doing just fine. They're definitely a conservative company but they know what they're doing.

They've been in the gaming industry since the 19th Century.
U.S. Census Releases Rndup of Demographic/Economic Data About Iowa's Electorate
He's not a centrist, liberal, or conservative. He's a populist.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Populism
Yep, Excel is the best way for a business person to build an MVP for their needs. Then "real developers" can take that MVP and build a full-blown application if that's what the business needs - often though, Excel is enough - even if it drives the IT people crazy.
Agreed. That is how we do it (with FogBugz).
Interesting, in lunfardo a dialect of the Argentinian and Uruguayan spanish with heavy influence of italian, laburar means to work... estoy laburando means i'm working.

Being the lunfardo origin, in the tango culture, with its sometimes gloomy view of life, it makes sense that it associates the work with agony and harm.
That's not a very fair comparison. The table is missing almost all of the features that make parse so great. Parse is easy to use on any platform. There is a parse SDK for android, iOS, JavaScript, C... The focus of parse as a product is usability for devs.

Kinto may have parity with parse features in terms of technical details, but the usability is not even close.
> This is how net neutrality dies, if we're not careful.

Net neutrality has been dead for a long time. Honestly it was never a reality, and always more of an ideal. Transit agreements for CDNs and asymmetric peering arrangements have been commonplace since the mid-90s.

> For me, it's strict - the carrier is carrying bits and bytes, and doesn't know/care what they are.

I think a lot of people on the Internet also share this belief, but it is incompatible with the way residential broadband connections are currently priced and sold. Residential broadband uses a lot of traffic management tricks to deliver high-performance last-mile access -- and those traffic management tricks drive down operating costs dramatically to the point where it's possible to have a $60/mo broadband plan.

At least T-Mobile is being transparent here: they're using a network management trick to allow them to offer unlimited data to their customers at a lower cost. Consumer last-mile access is all about making these kinds of compromises, and at least T-Mobile is giving its customers a choice to opt-in to a network management scheme rather than just using a hard cap.

If you want totally net-neutral Internet access, it is available to you in the form of a commercial broadband connection (fiber / metro ethernet). It's also a lot more expensive because the ISPs can't oversubscribe their infrastructure in the same way and still meet their SLAs -- but those customers are paying for a higher level of service.
> The only people it really benefits are wall street

People with net dollar-denominated asset balance (e.g., net holders of financial capital denominated in dollars) lose value with inflation (people with net dollar-denominated liability balance -- net debtors -- are the winners with inflation.)

> The government is basically sucking up all of the value from advances in technology ,and redirecting it to the political class who then profit from the carry trade of investing it in the stock market and the like.

To the extent that's true at all, that's a product of fiscal policy (particularly, the favorable tax treatment of capital gains compared to "vanilla" income, and the additional taxation in the form of payroll tax on top of income tax levied on labor income compared to "vanilla" income) rather than monetary policy.

Which, rather than being a distinct problem from "income inequality", is actually the same problem as income inequality.