skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> How exactly do you want them to justify. Your demand is too vague to be even considered. How do you propose, they should advertise every thwarted terrorist attack, without alerting the other terrorists?

How about they stop doing it and if the level of terrorism remains in the "still kills fewer people than bathtubs" range, we realize we didn't need it.

> All security is plain unproductive overhead, which is compulsory in the presence of adversary.

All security is compulsory? Madness.

Security is risk management. All government activity is risk. You spend a dollar on surveillance technology instead of scientific research that would have led to safer products or life saving medicine and people die. You take a dollar from the taxpayer who now can't afford those products or medicine and people die. Government waste kills more people than terrorism. To say nothing of the people bad governments kill much more directly.

> You're basically saying, "don't trust the govt" and that is the recipe for total anarchy

Only if by anarchy you mean democracy.
Agreed, that feels wrong too. But is npm supposed to be the recess supervisor in this metaphor, taking the ball back and giving it back to the other kids?
I think Pink was making a even stronger statement than you give him credit for.

His statement in the book is that traditional methods of improving performance -- more pay for more work -- just doesn't work for tasks that require problem solving. In fact, counter-intuitively, experiments have demonstrated lower performance when paid to accomplish problem solving tasks.

What Pink outlines is that to improve performance on problem solving tasks (including creative tasks) you have to provide people with Purpose, Mastery and Autonomy.

The latter thing is often missing from most managerial textbooks since most managerial textbooks seem to have been written for industrial workers where precise control is emphasized. This totally backfires for IT jobs (and other types of jobs), and everyone has seen those disasters.
Along the same lines you propose for "grew up with internet" there will always be a next new hotness. For example many new grads will have no idea what its like to run a physical server because of cloud platforms.

Same thing for Android/iOS programming, or mobile websites, or microservices, or NoSQL etc etc. Some will have had them from school onward, others will have encountered them late in their career.
Me too but in German you can make compound words out of anything. I mean Rechtsschutzversicherungsgesellschaften anyone?
What about markdown files and relative links? Works on Github and MacDown.

https://github.com/blog/1395-relative-links-in-markup-files
What would Stallmann say?
The Oligodynamic Effect: How Some Metals Kill Off Bacteria
react_demo$ du -sh node_modules/
25M node_modules/
react_demo$ ls node_modules/|wc -l
79
react_demo$ cat $(find node_modules/ -type f ) | wc -l
287767

I think I installed react, react-dom, browserify (globally), babel. The exact details are not really important, being inexperienced with react I probably installed stuff that is not strictly necessary. However, the ease of pulling in a huge amount of dependent code makes me concerned. For a long lived stable application you will have to maintain those dependencies (at a minimum, have 3rd party maintainers who you can trust to maintain it, not break your app, not inject security issues into your app, etc).
Good question! Nope!

What's the saying "the markets can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent"?

I've played the biotech markets before and quickly realized I'm not cut out for them!
> brouhaha, this is why you should not put node_modules into .gitignore (same for PHP's composer.lock and vendor/ folder).

You should obviously not do that if you are writing a library. You shouldn't publish vendored modules on npm. If everybody did this everybody would end up fetching 100MB packages.
I find that you should but basic tests in place, but you beef up tests where you find bugs.

You have to build tests to debug things, anyway, so you might as well put them in your test suite afterwards.
One interesting thing to me, is that it is pretty clear that the kik lawyers pretty dramatically over enforced their trademark.

For those who don't know, the purpose of trademarks is to prevent customer confusion; essentially we don't want people to be able to sell cheap knock-offs of someone else's thing without the general public being able to easily distinguish between them. In practical terms, trademarks are "scoped" by their "goods and services" declarations.

For example, Apple the device manufacture[1] and Apple the record label[2] could both be trademarked because they had non-overlapping goods and services declarations... until iTunes started selling music[3].

If you look at kik's trademark application[4], you can clearly see that the trademark is limited to chat/media consumer applications, a pretty obvious over enforcement.

[1] http://apple.com

[2] http://applerecords.com

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Corps_v_Apple_Computer

[4] https://trademarks.justia.com/858/93/kik-85893307.html
I've kind of given up on worrying about being judged about being Bipolar. There is nothing I can do about it, and I think there are some benefits to being Bipolar. I'm not saying I always enjoy it, but it is part of who I am.

Being up front about it is part of the solution for me. It forces me to own my condition and focus on avoiding situations which are triggers for me -- to embrace my limitations.

I'm not sure of the nature of your condition, but for me it isn't like it is a constant struggle. It comes and it goes.

It has also become apparent that there are A LOT of people out there in very successful careers who have mental conditions. I don't have any data to support this, but I actually think it is becoming a more significant issue.

My theory is it better to accept your condition and do what you need to do to take care of yourself than to ignore it and pretend it doesn't exist (which I think a lot of people including myself in the past try to do).
Really important distinction: if you fire a customer you've lost some of your income; if you fire your boss (i.e. you quit) you've lost all your income.
In contrast to a smartphone?
You missed part of the story. From the article, it sounds like npm decided to play the "We're a private company" card and was threatening to take control away from him, so he decided to disassociate himself from them. And because of the way npm's system works, this broke other packages and the new maintainers had difficulty fixing the problems.
If it's hostile takeover, it's because the shareholders want to sell. Who care what management wants? They gave up the right to run the company independently when they sold shares to the public market.
We have over four decades history of portability being valued over correctness, stability and security. I'm not impressed with where it's gotten us.
Sorry, but was there actually a lawsuit in this case? It sounds more like KIK emailed some people at NPM and NPM just said, "OK", then replaced a known module with some other thing.

It's only a matter of time until NPM is socially engineered into replacing a module with something more malicious, if it hasn't already happened.
A Contrarian (Peter Thiel) in Biotech
Is this related to ycombinator? If not, the page styling is a blatant rip-off of their branding. I feel like someone's trying to trick me into thinking this is something that it's not, which leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
First impression of the submission title: "please not another 'we are bad at interviewing people'"

Opened the site, read about the goal, and I think this idea is neat and clever (also entertaining too). Imagine you can turn this into "guess which company is that." BTW, I like the simplicity of the UI but I suggest moving the content more toward the center. left-align is really tough when 80% of the right side is empty.
> Some serious land-grab opportunities there

It sums up the biggest issue with npm. Modules shouldn't be a name but a namespace + a name , just like composer. Someone shouldn't be able to have a monopoly on names like "web" or "async". It should be "some-namespace/module-name".
Same here, especially when the study surveys ordinary workers. People who run larger companies and banks typically score higher on the psychopathy scale (see the documentary "I am Fishhead"). Just because individuals may desire autonomy doesn't mean those type of people make it into leadership roles.
There was a threat of a lawsuit. npm's lawyers decided that this threat was not frivolous.
The problem here is that there is a single petname space (pet namespace? pet name space?) administered by one organisation but used by everyone.

With a different system, the author could have a key $foo, and call his package ($foo kik), and that wouldn't interfere with (us-trademark-office kik).
This type of thing is one of the reasons I suggested before that a module registry could and should be a distributed peer-to-peer system.
Given what I know about your politics and philosophy, I find it pretty funny that I have to say this:

1) As "just a fact" it's irrelevant. With some interpretation added, it contributed something. However...

2) As participants in a market economy, the lawyers' primary interest may not be the letter of the law or what is theoretically winnable in court, but what will give npm the least hassle. I'm not sure if that's the case in this particular trademark case, but we all know lawyers sometimes do counsel the path of least resistance. And maybe that's even wise. But it's worth being clear about that ambiguity, rather than just saying "lawyers said it, I believe it."

P.S. I think your comment isn't super helpful but I didn't downvote you.
> but the reason builds are failing right now is that he decided to unpublish all of them

If builds are failing, it's because people did not set things up correctly to account for the fact that npm can and will go down or not be reachable. There are well known, well established practices for handling this. Frankly, if this affects your builds, you probably have bigger issues to address.
Great post, good advices.
GPG isn't strictly necessary if you trust NPM's authentication system (of course, that's a big "if" for many folks).

Publish forever (barring requests to remove for legal compliance or whatever) is a good idea. Or at the very least, it should be a default option. And if you install a dependency that isn't "publish forever", you should get a warning.
Great website. The title on https://osi-model.com/data_link_layer/ needs to be changed to "Layer 2".
That's not necessarily true if Kik were planning to open up some kind of API. Also, the way the law works in the US encourages corporations to overreach. If you don't try to protect your trademark from every possible angle, it can lead to your loss of it in a court battle. A lot of times, lawyers will send out letters without caring how the recipient responds -- they only need to have sent the letter at all to have covered their bases.
Generate a new project directly from Git(Hub) using a simple schema
I like this comment a lot because it resonates with what I think I could stand to benefit from learning multiple paradigms, i.e. learning what to apply to what type of problem. Can you expound maybe a paragraph or so as to what each "family" has to offer, in your personal experience?
Hmm, that's surprising to me, since all the cards are loaded into the DOM regardless of whether or not the extension is active. The only memory footprint should be from the extension itself, which should be minimal since the code is so simple.

In fact, you might even observe a speedup because fewer elements are being painted, but the difference as a whole should be marginal.

Are you experiencing actual slowness from using the extension? I'd be really curious to know.
Related old discussion on Rich Command Shells
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8436309
If at all possible (and it's not always), watch the earlier speakers and their presentations. At most conferences there's an overlap in themes, and few things are more annoying for an attendee than a speaker who blindly repeats what a previous speaker said.

If you've seen them, you can reference them. You may still be a little repetitive, but use this to reinforce the point - as X said earlier, etc etc; or Y said this earlier, and I disagree because etc etc. You look like you really care about the conference, not just yourself (and other speakers love being name-checked, so it will help you build relationships at that level too).

Lastly, don't be surprised if there's minimal feedback. I often find myself coming off stage on a high, only to have 1-2 people proactively speak to me for the rest of the event. What really amazes me is how many people remember you - I got introduced a few months ago to a business owner in another city, and his first comment to me was "I saw you speak at a conference in 2008 and you gave me some really practical tips on XYX". Blew me away. Good luck!
What if such a system was implemented using IPFS[0] (or similar) for storage?

[0] https://github.com/ipfs/ipfs
Assuming it's kik.com that complained, the complaint to take down the kik NPM module seems legitimate. They've clearly been around a lot longer, are known by more people, and are in an overlapping market.

It seems like a lot of people would expect a kik module in NPM to be related to the company in some way, and it wasn't.
Honestly, were it not for a web browser I really wouldn't need a GUI at all: everything else I do is a terminal and emacs (sure, both are running in X, but I don't really use their GUI features for much).

I remember when I was a kid with access to a local university's systems, and the only way to do anything was with dumb terminals. I telnetted to MUDs, FTPed software, read Usenet — in a lot of ways those dumb terminals were smarter than my current computer. Sure, I can still do all that, but the magic is gone.
> I'd much rather do a work-sample after the onsite

Pivotal Labs and Pivotal Cloud Foundry teams default to 100% pairing.

What you experienced is basically the actual job. It's perfectly OK that you didn't like it, lots of people don't want to work that way once they've tried it.

But it wouldn't make sense to find potential pair programmers by not pair programming.
Even if Azer had relicensed the code, NPM had a copy of the code released under the original one, which can't be revoked.
There's a PR open to remove "unpublish" from NPM here:

https://github.com/npm/npm/pull/12017
Looks like the npm team will not be removing the ability to unpublish packages - see reply by core committer "othiym23" on https://github.com/npm/npm/pull/12017
Yup, I stole the idea from there :)
Not a Package Manager (NPM)
I've done interviews and I've been guilty of "bulldozing" and I feel bad about it.

It's one of the reasons we try to do two interviews and ideally, remember to tell the interviewee to ask questions.
Customers are a constraint, to be sure, but so are the laws of physics. Customer preferences are just market conditions, and adopting to market conditions is closer to dealing with physical constraints in your product design than it is to being told what to do by your boss.

I mean, sure, in some sense you're "working for" your customers and "working for" a boss, but that's just using the same phrase to describe two fundamentally different relationships. Customers have no meaningful say in anything beyond buying your product or not; they can't dictate culture, they can't play politics, they can't drag you down with pointless meetings... etc.

Customers are many. They're distributed and decentralized and independent. Especially for consumer-oriented products, they're faceless. In a hierarchy, you have one immediate boss and a some bounded number of executives above them, all of whom operate more or less as a single entity. You can't just decide to ignore a segment of your management the way you can change focus to a different class of clients. And you have to deal with your boss one-on-one in a way that you can avoid for any individual customer.

And hey, customers don't misbehave in the same ways. They fundamentally can't micromanage or claim credit for your work. Any customer by themselves probably has relatively little direct power over you which means they have less latitude to be jerks and if they are, it's easier to deal with.

Obviously, this isn't true for all customers. If you're beholden to a small handful of large customers or you're consulting, the relationship is a lot more like having a boss. But for consumer-oriented products and any businesses that scale—basically anything you could reasonably describe as a product—having customers is completely different from having a boss.
So, this has nothing to do with copyright law. The word "Kik" is not a creative literary work. It is a registered trademark though:

http://tmsearch.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=doc&state=4804:lir...

I don't think there's a problem with trademark law here, I doubt that their claim is legally enforceable against the name of an npm module, as it's pretty obviously outside the goods and services which their mark is registered for. The problem is that npm are capitulating to what I suspect is an invalid request. As is often the case, people are scared of lawyers and forget that they have rights.
Domo takes on Slack with $130M at $2B+ valuation
From Angular 1 to Angular 2: The Directives
Having a multitude of small utilities like this is a great thing with many advantages.

It may seem simple to write leftpad, but if 1000 projects that need it all write their own version, there will be at least 2000 more software bugs out there in the wild because of it. If you think that's rediculous, you're not being realistic about the huge disparity in skill levels of industry programmers as well as the considerable rush under which many projects are done.

Also important is that every time I can use a public ally available utility instead of writing it myself, it's one less thing I have to think about. The benefit of making less decisions really adds up, saving a ton of mental capacity to focus on the more important parts of my project. Even the simplest methods require some thought to design.

I know there are disadvantages (such as what happened as the topic of this post), but there are also ways to mitigate them. As far as having many versions that all do the same thing, there is usually winners and losers over time. Because of this I believe that eventually the dependency graph shrinks overall.

Note that I wouldn't advocate creating utilities for things that are not very generalizable.
The initial page looked broken; I thought you were pointing out a problem page on HN when I first saw it...might want to reconsider the design as cshimmin pointed out.
> Arrogant absurd process with no basis or evidence in reality.

Do you sell t-shirts? I would like to buy one.

In fairness, though, most people who decide to take an offer have self-selected. Malleability might be one reason. Another could openness to new experiences.
They also require consumer confusion. I don't know how you could confuse a communications app for a javascript module.
Obviously not your choice, but it's a problem of using 0.0.x versions; no flexibility for the crate author to push minor updates.
Trademark disputes (unlike copyright and patent disputes) are often and need not be about money. US trademark law also has a fun "use it or lose it" provision that requires trademark holders to actively defend their mark.
> And... I kind of want to say "once it's published, it's forever".

This is effectively the norm with more traditional, curated package managers. Say I release a piece of open source software, and some Linux distro adds it to their package manager. Under a typical open source license, I have no legal right to ask them to stop distributing it. They can just say "sorry, you licensed this code to us under X license and we're distributing it under those terms. Removing it would break our users' systems, so we won't do it."

The difference is that NPM is self-service - publishers add packages themselves, and NPM has chosen to also provide a self-service option to remove packages. I honestly wouldn't have a problem with them removing that option, and only allowing packages to be removed by contacting support with a good reason. (Accidental private info disclosure, copyright violation, severe security bug, etc.)
Micromanagement is so corrosive to my motivation. I've worked retail for a long time, and it seems that managers with that tendency are usually pushed out. Telling people how to do Every. Single. Little. Thing. is the surest way to foment dissent and resentment. I'm tired of the inconsistency of the skill of people with authority over me, so am now fully pursuing an entrepreneurial lifestyle. Freedom, autonomy, I suddenly realize, are paramount to my contentment.
Hmm... Grim Fandango would make an epic Pixar movie
How do you know what they thought? It seems just as likely to me that they didn't see much merit in the complaint, but didn't think it was worth fighting since IP law is such a mess in the US that even clearly baseless complaints can drag on and become expensive.
Do you have any recommendations on how to write formal specifications?
Use ClojureScript + core.async and get some work done.
Andy Grove speech on the economy (2001, start at 7 min)
"echo" is not versioned and delivered on its own. It's part of gnu coreutils (which contains ~ 100 utilities), or part of various BSD core distributions (more than 100 utilities, plus the kernel and libc), and also built-in to shells.
Newegg has definitely earned a customer in me from their work! I'm going to buy from Newegg to support them even if what I'm ordering is a little more than what I could find it for on another site.
It does.

However candidates for Labs will see stuff our clients consider commercially sensitive (sometimes their mere existence is commercially sensitive), sometimes candidates for Cloud Foundry will see stuff that is commercially sensitive for Pivotal.

Mind you, I did a round of interviews a few years ago and everyone had an NDA at the door. I read them and none of them were silly, so I signed them.
Vizio Releases TV with Google Chromecast Built In
Sharing something doesn't mean people have read it in full. :) I know I sometimes start reading an article, "get where it's going" and pass it on.

More often than not, sharing long article is a form of self-praise (for me). I feel very pleased with myself sharing a piece from Aeon on Facebook, amidst cats and babies and other stuff: "Look at me, I'm deep and I'm making Facebook a smarter place".

So, it makes total sense that long read gets more shares per view, but it doesn't necessarily mean deeper "engagement".
Google’s approach to Cast is similar to Android. Though subject to some licensing constraints Cast is fairly open for use by hardware makers and Google’s related business models aren’t tied to producing hardware. There would be little impact on Google’s revenues if after establishing Google Cast as a standard Google exited the $35 Chromecast business and left it to consumer product manufacturers.
They have the responsibility to defend their trademark, otherwise it could be abused by a rival claiming they did not adequately defend it. That said, NPM could have just said, "No, stop bothering us" and the lawyers might have backed down, satisfied their attempt to defend the trademark fulfilled their duty.