skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Need Guidance for IT Department at $200MM+ Company
Hello-
I work for a rapidly growing OEM manufacturing company in the US and we’ve have been having difficulties with our IT leadership, their ability to deliver results and communicate in layman’s terms.. The owners of the organization would like to actively pursue an overhaul of IT leadership but do not have the knowledge base to execute a transition without outside assistance. We are having a difficult time getting information from the current leadership and don’t believe there to be any other members of the IT staff that could manage our infrastructure during the process of finding someone new.

We have a SQL server for inventory and sales orders, ~50 Wyse terminals and 75 Dell laptops for employees, a cloud hosted website and an internal order system which is very old, full of custom code, is no longer supported and is deteriorating in it’s ability to keep up with organizational needs. We are several years into attempting to implement a new ERP but deadlines continue to pass without delivering or clear explanations as to why.

That’s the extent of what I know for now. Would be able to find answers to adhoc questions if it would help.

We’re hoping to find a company/consulting group that can come in to maintain and audit our systems in the interim, and possibly make suggestions for upgrades and new hires.

Questions:
1.	Are there companies that manage transitions like this?
2.	Is there anything else equipment/software wise that would be useful to know?
3.	Any general advice?
And if everyone followed this advice, we'd have no Kahn Academy, no Wikipedia, no Linux and a much poorer world.
Japan's Softbank to invest $50B in US tech startups
I know that dang has been making a concerted effort to encourage the Principle of Charity, something which I definitely commend.

That actually could be a good way to moderate political threads by requiring an even higher standard of conduct. So you must not merely be civil, but actively apply Rapoport's Rules.
Annotations is how MVC in C# works (sometimes), too: https://www.asp.net/web-api/overview/web-api-routing-and-act.... It's a great way of doing things, although I hope debugging the routes is a bit easier than it is in .NET
I read "optimal strategy" as slightly tongue-in-cheek, considering we don't have direct control over our moods.
I don't know where this idea of games being a storytelling medium even comes from. I've never seen a game that tells a story. I've only seen games that are interrupted by story. Or maybe they're stories that are interrupted by gaming, if you want to look at it that way.
maybe it got some flags for being "political"
This makes me wish I became a mathematician. Anyone know of modern day self-taught mathematicians that contributed to research? I'd like to learn maths on my own, but if there is no possibility of research contribution, then I guess my time would be better spent with something else.
Cool! Wonder if it would be worth mentioning it in the guidelines. I can see keeping them relatively brief is worth something, as well.

I can imagine pushback along the lines of enforcing speech rules, which I'm somewhat sympathetic to. That said, I think keeping them in mind is worth it.
Word of caution to anybody looking to use a similar method working with SQL Server: the SQL Server uniqueidentifier type is stored differently on disk than binary(16). Instead of being ordered by bytes 0-1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-10-11-12-13-14-15, uniqueidentifier values are ordered by bytes 10-11-12-13-14-15-8-9-7-6-5-4-3-2-1.
Anecdotally it sounds very stressful and even if it turns out that 50% of people think they have depression that would also be a sign of a huge problem
Conference slides have been tweeted.
> A user of these IDs my not realize that the reliability of the ordering can be substantially reduced depending on where the IDs are generated.

That can only be addressed with improved documentation and shared understanding of the subtleties and pitfalls of distributed time synchronisation.

> Some applications may be able to tolerate inconsistencies in ordering, others may not.

Indeed. Proper thought must be but into this sort of thing. ULIDs aren't an exception nor a silver bullet.

> How many bits of approximate time does one really need?

Entirely application dependent.
amazing, but what kind of display is that? how does an LCD render the white noise so smoothly? very strange.
Actually, Apple is one of sponsors of this year's NIPS conference: https://nips.cc/Conferences/2016/Sponsors
There are a lot of people out there who know that Trump's campaign was founded on promises to harm them and their families. Do you think they get a break from it? Do they get to just take a week off because they're a little bit fatigued from all that "politics"?

If they don't get a holiday from it we shouldn't get a holiday from it. That's our responsibility to our fellow humans.

Oh, and how convenient -- to do this when he's about to meet with a bunch of SV notables! And to make sure any mention of it is forbidden on HN! Do you think those tech folks going to NY are going to have a nice apolitical holiday?
Mocking with var redefinition considered harmful
Thanks! Yes, I wanted to make the "pastebin of calculators" :).
Yes they have to be done at runtime. In both cases the optimisation could become invalid if you load more classes, so the optimisation also needs to be reversible at runtime.

This is an example of how it possible for a JIT to out-perform a static compiler.
Too bad Google's founders fly all over the world on private jets, doing far more damage than these measures prevent.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_aviati...
Yes, interesting project, and I think it would work. But femtolisp would work fine too... In the end I decided not to use a Lisp because it wasn't making me more productive. It felt a bit unstructured.

Instead, it looks like I will generate a lot of C++ from Python to control the complexity (and line count).

For example, right now I'm working with Zephyr ASDL, which is basically a DSL for algebraic data types which can bridge Python and C++. You can do this in Lisps too of course, but Python works just as well in this case. Julia is interesting because the lexer and parser are in femtolisp, and that enables Julia macros.

If I'm reading your page right, Python handles signals the same way -- it receives the signal in C, and then runs a Python handler later on the main interpreter loop. I think you pretty much have to do it that way.

(But Python has some logic about turning certain signals into exceptions on the main thread, which I don't want to bother with.)

I wrote on some related topics here:

http://www.oilshell.org/blog/2016/12/05.html
Even worse, you can't use your watch one handed. No way around that.
Ya same feeling. I wasn't sure if I got that across in my original post but you summed up what I was trying to say.
On a Mac!? That's impossible. There's no malware on a Mac!
If this goes through, best of luck to everyone from Pebble and Fitbit. Hardware is tough, but we all need it.
Excellent post. Here are some personal experiences:

1. Keep salaries secret. I like this part. I do not like socialist way of deciding salaries. I worked at a place where salaries were open and left within a year.

2. Give raises randomly

Know several employers and CEO who do this as a policy. It is mostly like 'yeah lets give them $200 monthly raise' by making it sound like a big deal and then make them work on Christmas to recover it

3. No conferences

Make fun of conferences before your employees. Tell them only bozos go to such idiotic nerdy places. We are cool guys we don't go there. I know several companies that work hard to deny their employees any networking opportunity.

4. Spy on them.

Not aware.

5. Make a deal with competitors

Dont know.

6. Promote corporate values

I fell prey to this once. Not again. But the author has ignored trashtalking others. Saying things like "only morons work for google", "facebook is in death spiral".

7. Help them survive

Correct. Innumerable examples of how employers use this techniq. This is most common when the employee is H1B. He/she feels indebted for getting the visa.

If the employer does not have 401K plan that employer is not worth working for more than 2 years.
WH Smart Cities program grants Bellevue $75k to design a “city vitals” platform
Does "fail early fail often" necessarily lead to fault intolerance and non-robustness?
Validating e-mail addresses
I can't possibly call someone a decent person who downplays peoples' personal health as mere politics.
We are going back to far less compressed music.

Every vinyl purchase I've made in recent memory has come with a download code. More often than not, these are 320kbps MP3s, which are indistinguishable from CDs, although stores like Bleep.com offer flac and wav formats, too.

BTW, the study tested against three levels of LAME compression -- 112 Kbps, 56 Kbps, and 32 Kbps.

Buying vinyl these days is the smart choice for music lovers. You get all the convenience of MP3s and sound quality of CDs (via the download code), the superior artwork of the LP, and the aesthetic joy of using a turntable when you want to.
How to Framework Your Kindle Family Library?
I was doing a puzzle and it showed me a button to a "restricted area"- is this normal?
Is this real or some accounting trick? Anecdotally, I saw a lot of these being worn in public after they first came out, but there's been a sharp drop-off since then. This applies to Android watches too -- I don't think the product has been compelling enough for people to put up with nightly charging.

So are we supposed to see another glut of people wearing these things after this holiday season? Then maybe followed by another drop-off?
> I can imagine pushback along the lines of enforcing speech rules, which I'm somewhat sympathetic to.

That's why I suggest this higher standard for only political threads. It's a lot better than banning them entirely.
Traveling Salesman Artwork with Weighted Voronoi Stipplings
Not bad, the decision to cut the article right there. Of course, it's just clickbait, but very precisely executed. Makes me curious to know if WSJ editors use analytics software to engineer these.

If not, perhaps I can interest you in a demo of one? If you don't see an increase in turnover, well make the trail period free!
Thanks! I'm fairly new to JS. I introduced a new dependency on a node module and for some reason gulp-uglify isn't working on production mode. I'm going to give this a try.
The "study" is based on 20 test subjects.

Doesn't seem right to publish a paper based on such low numbers, especially when, as here, the experiment seems to be pretty cheap.

Direct link to study:

http://www.aes.org/tmpFiles/elib/20161206/18523.pdf
A Study Path for Game Programmer
An iPad is an expensive solution if they've already got a PC, and Linux is a great free way to resurrect computers that the commercial operating systems have left behind.
Leap Motion VR Hand Tracking
Yea that would be awesome. Maybe I can work on it in the next version.
Upvoted.

Looks like people here have not understood that the original tone of the post is that of satire. Besides just because government does not allow something does not mean companies don't do it. If a large reputed company like Apple and Google did it clearly smaller fish must be easily passing through regulatory net.

Did Apple and Google fire anyone over the episode ? Late Steve Job continues to be a tech icon.

All companies are required to interview American candidates for every H1B they hire by law. Are you saying they genuinely wish to kick out the Indian guy they have already interviewed if they find an American person or is it just one bullet point on the lawyer's list of things ?

Real world != What government allows.
This could make a good "Show HN" if it meets the guidelines.
https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html
To be honest employer do indeed employ these tricks all the time.
Good idea to avoid amazon.

Did you try unsubscribing from all their newsletters?
Using Linux to Clone a Windows Partition from an MBR Disk to a GPT Disk
Yeah, I've had much more success "leading by example" than by trying to fight against the tide the "correct" way.
Neat. Personally I would say "turn it off and on again" while this says the reverse. If it's targeted at a non-technical user, it needs to be foolproof. I have helped users before that would see this and literally turn their computer on and off, and wonder why the computer isn't working while off as instructed.
follow your dreams i suppose, but aren't game programmers the most miserable developers, because of market pressures?

i have found that lowly SQL pays the bills quite nicely, and leaves plenty of time for side projects
Nice. Wasn't aware that was possible. Would you opt for encrypting boot partitions over isolating them on a USB?
>Of course! What researcher would want to work for a company that prohibits scientific publications?

Depends on the compensation and several other factors. Lots of military/intelligence related research for example is not published either...
Actually, nerves has decent API support built in! The tricky part is getting all of the registers setup correctly for the radios. Alternately, there's a C++ library for it, that's gpl, but could be setup as a nif or a port.
What you're doing on the site today is pretty much textbook trolling. Yes, I understand your argument, but a much more civil and effective way of handling it would be to, say, compile a list of the submissions, argue why each of them is political, and, showing an understanding of the intent of detox week, argue why it's not needed or provide alternatives that would accomplish the same goals. You're throwing a snark tantrum across all submissions on the site makes it very difficult for people to engage with you effectively and with respect, especially as you've argued that the guidelines don't apply to you or your behavior.
My experience is very similar to the post/experience from throwaway7312 above.

> You mean well, and what you're saying may be helpful to people who struggle with certain feelings from time to time. But statements like these are extremely frustrating for people with actual depression.

Discussing depression goes down-hill everytime someone pivots to what people "should" or "shouldn't" say.
We're not trying to actively console someone with depression here, we're merely having a discussion on our thoughts/ideas/experiences of depression, so I think your defensive retort is quite misguided.

Regardless, I agree with your statement, but I'm at a loss to your intent.
I've been depressed and yeah, it's not really helpful when others say something that translates to:

> Depression is the result of how you interpret things.

But looking back on it - at least from my perception and reality of the world; it's 100% truth.
However, is stating this helpful? is it the right approach to trying to help someone who is going through depression? absolutely not.

Don't let the social politics muddy the raw discussion when appropriate, please.

> Your belief in the inevitability of depression is only leading to more depression.

This was definitely the biggest hurdle for me.
The echo-chamber of "This isn't your fault! depression is a disease we'll have a cure for one day!".
The vortex of negativity and the constant apathy was fed by these sorts of statements.

Mindfulness was my cure.
An ultimatum of either "I end my life" or "I do what is within my control, to change the way I think."
It's alot more complicated than that in reality, but the heart of what I'm trying to say is there.
It would be extremely unwise for the CEO of a very public company to make such a statement if it weren't true.

The lift in units sold must definitely be affected by the recent price drop.

Anecdotal evidence: we have a fitness app that connects with the Apple Watch, and we have seen a large number of users connect their Apple Watch (about 7% of our total user base). We get data from these watches on a regular basis which means the watches are on and being used.

The battery is still terrible (barely runs a day) compared to Fitbit Blaze (5-7 days).
HN itself is a community. Close HN?
The Model 01 is reprogrammable. Add a space key for the left hand if you like.
You should read "Thinking, Fast and Slow", it will change your life. Hint: you're not too far off base
I wonder if that would that change your workflow in any way?
Usually people use typescript compiler to compile TS into JS and usually it's being executed by some runner (grunt, gulp, bazel...).
Adding tsickle + closure compiler to the process should be essentially just adding couple of lines in the build process. I agree that it may be slower and have bugs - is that the worry?
Would having them compressed not work?`
The bitrates they chose were also a joke. I haven't seen an mp3 lower than 128kbps in over a decade unless it was a podcast.

It all seems obvious when you skim the study. Of course introducting artifacts will affect the emotional impact of media. It's distracting.

No different than poor jpg quality images or bad movie rips.
Artificial Intelligence Just Broke Steve Jobs' Wall of Secrecy
This didn't help me with my high-load mongodb server issue... :(
I got Linksys WRT1900ACS at home. The router works very well with original firmware but as you expect is very limited in terms of features compared to opernwrt(and others open source alternatives). I was running openwrt for almost 6 months. Even that it said even on the box it works with openwrt the wifi support is complete shit! The wifi driver is performing so bad it will turn your life in to living hell. Expect disconnects and low bandwidth when using wifi (for both 5G and 2.4G). Recently I restored the original firmware and the wifi is performing great but is just a wifi router now. Nothing more. I lost all the additional features that motivated me to buy it. I want to throw it out the window!! Imo stay away from linksys if you want open source firmware and advanced features.
streak.com is the way to go. integrates right into gmail.
I do not share your suspicion. The initial 20161106 wapo article had this: "U.S. officials spoke on the condition of anonymity because the investigation is ongoing."

Pleading "ongoing investigation" suggests the source was in law enforcement, not authorized to discuss the case, discussed the case anyway, and used anonymity to avoid the consequences. A victim or friend can safely go on the record with a reporter, an investigator cannot.

In any case, the friends of Raphel seemed quite upset about the leak when they were spoken to for follow-up articles.
"That's it? Anybody could have done that in a couple weeks!" is awesome to hear. You need to be sure you ask that person what is missing and what you should build next instead of defending yourself.

All feedback is good feedback- just don't take it personally. The feedback isn't about you or your ideas, the feedback is about what someone sees in front of them.

Your ideas will change as time goes forward. People's reactions to what you build will change. You'll make dumb product mistakes. You'll build the wrong things. The only way to learn when you do that is to get people to look at what you're building and let them tell you why it's not good.

You're on the right track and we all go through this. Just calm down a bit and don't take things personally.
We're actually not sure about (1), as 'kevinstubbs points out.

(2) It does appear that David, the IT Director, was responsible, though he was out of town during part of the process. (What? In 2016 "out of town" means "not reachable"?)

It's on (3) that I totally agree with 'cthulhuology and disagree with you. Changing the value of an integer constant in code is far less risky than what the code reviewer demanded. As others have argued upthread, the original one-line change should have been put through to production as it was, and the additional changes should have followed later via the established process... if indeed they were truly necessary at all. (As someone else pointed out, a variable whose value changes once in 10 years probably doesn't really need to be a configuration parameter, though making it into one probably counts as a slight improvement.)

For (4), okay, here I don't entirely agree with 'cthulhuology. There is a place for enforcing standards; code review isn't just about comprehensibility.
Lord why? 40M for engineers who will quit as soon as possible? What is the point?

《Edit》honestly I read the whole article, please explain how this makes sense from a fitbit perspective.
>Yet the world insists on using red/green as bad/good indicators. Drives me nuts.

Well, it has to use something, and other people would be colorblind in other colors, plus some will be blind too.

In this case, one would expect there'd be some OS-wide color utility to alter colors to the ones the user can discern.
From purely technical viewpoint that is correct and engineer in me agrees with you 100%. However: if you look at the bigger picture you will notice that the feature list is not known in advance. Which means the nice abstraction you made are probably unsuitable and will make repurposing software more difficult, not less. Because nobody knows what the end product will look like, so it pays to ship fast, iterate on product design and refactor / rewrite later.

But I know what you are saying, I have struggles with that inner engineer daily and he just won't shut up. :)
Anecdotally, I've noticed more Apple watches on random wrists in the last few months. And I saw my first Apple Watch boarding pass swipe two days ago.
Oh, yeah, I understood that. Even some of the long-established users on the site react strongly when they feel their free speech is being encroached upon. I still think it'd be worth a try. (After all, I brought them up :) I know it makes me more understanding of others arguments, not dismissing them in a knee-jerk fashion.
Here is another unsubscribe dark pattern: http://imgur.com/a/lLZAE

* Do I check the item if I want to unsubscribe from it?

* Or do I uncheck the items I don't wish to receive?

50-50 chance -- which I'm sure they love. Clicking "Update" gives no feedback either, just reloads the page.
Maybe I do not use mine to its potential, but it is midnight here just before bed, and my series 2 is at 73%. Certainly not 5 to 7 days, but far longer than barely a day.
How to Write Copy Like Apple by Using Rhetorical Devices