skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes... to hazard a guess, the team members may be coming up with superficial reasons. They may be correct, but not touching upon the more relevant underlying problems. Maybe there's even unnecessary self-blame occuring. If the OP's assessment is correct, that they're "talented guys", then parts of the problem may be solvable without resorting to firing.

BTW, are the coworkers talented in the context of the company's technical goals?

In this situation, I might ask what these coworkers think about working away from home. Like at a nice nearby coworking facility. (I'd offer to mandate this for X days in the week, in case they need to externalize the blame to me in front of spouses who've come to expect their presence.) Working from home is often psychologically difficult, due to whatever upbringing or natural predisposition.

Having a short daily stand-up could help. I think some of the idea behind it is that people want to have something to say in front of their peers.

http://howwework.thinkrelevance.com/stakeholder_narrative.ht...

Maybe more from that page could translate into this telecommuting situation. Teams frequently don't learn from their mistakes, beause they're not institutionally accustomed to thinking about them. (Like with retrospectives/postmortems.) Especially if they're mentally stuck in the leader/follower model, where they don't stray far from The Way Things Are.

There's another red flag: "I don't want to micro-manage". In my view, this often means, "People should independently work on their things, at least as far as I'm concerned." I suspect this frequently happens when you have an individually competent person with weaker team skills. To use corporate-speak, maybe the synergies of working in a team are under-utilized.
What prevents you from walking away without paying? (that's a genuine question, not a flippant remark)
I do more of my traveling from airport to suburbs than inside the city, so I get to use a car service. It is pretty simple: I call American Taxi (by way of Bangalore), they send me an Eastern European immigrant with a car, and he whisks me home for the published flat fee.

Their incentive to not screw me is that they value my continued custom (and chargebacks are a beast). His incentive to not screw me is that he values his cell phone continuing to buzz with new fares. They transparently operate in a low-trust environment: there are cards in the back of the back of the car for who to call for a refund in event of a dispute.

Putting this on an iPhone makes it geekier, but does not appear to change the threat model. No medallion, and pretty close to a technolibertarian paradise. I feel the need to illegalize something to wipe that smug look off their faces. :)

Sadly, they are legally prohibited from offering exactly the same service if both endpoints are within Chicago proper.
Don't know if this relates directly to the question about scalability, but the main site is not loading for me, nor is the demo site.

It looks like the tracking script hosted on demo.piwik.org is slowing the main site down.
Ken Thompson: Regular Expression Search Algorithm [pdf]
Check out js-prolog: http://ioctl.org/logic/jsprolog-history

It's a quick-and-dirty implementation of a Prolog interpreter, but it's a great resource for prototyping. JavaScript ports very well to Lua, so you should be able to port the code in a busy afternoon.

I made a couple of suggestions to increase the speed of the interpretation, but I'm not sure Jan ever integrated them into the code. The big one was using a trace to destructively modify environments rather than recreating them on choice points; WAM and tabling would be great, but it's a non-trivial piece of work following Warren's tech report, even with the help of the (very good) tutorial.
Ask HN: Would like a 2nd set of eyes to look over some http traffic captures
http traffic capture: http://pastebin.com/bzKeMtJi

I had 1 open chrome window set to the new tab page, but network activity was blinking pretty steady. Paranoia leads to inspection and I found this strange connection posting back and forth from facebook. It appears it opened while I was reading a story on money.cnn.com but it never closed. Note that the capture start time is after i closed all browser windows and cleared all browsing data in chrome (habit of mine to do that before i close chrome completely).

I wasnt aware this was possible, to keep the connection going completely outside the context of any webpage, and beyond that theres some strange data thats a bit new to me. Specifically the X-Cnction: field that they put in, and some of the options placed in the Cache: field (must-revalidate?).

This is mostly a curiousity as im trying to decipher purpose, and also generally if my concept of JavaScript security is way off (I was under the impression closing a website where the JavaScript was loaded would terminate it?). My best guess so far is that theyre trying to compile data on what people read, whatever they can wring the browser into telling them via JS, but i may be way off so if youre familiar with HTTP traffic and ajax/xmlhttp id appreciate your thoughts. I put it up on pastebin - http://pastebin.com/bzKeMtJi
Some of them know, couple of them quite new hires who started with a very bad performance (I've no clue how the hell this is possible! - maybe my fault)

Also I openly discussed all these issues and invite them to find a solution all together. So far not going well.

In some cases after being informed of possible serious consequences their performance got back to normal for a month or two then cycle repeated itself. So maybe every 2 months I should remind them that they very close to getting sacked.
I used it for a little bit, but as always, switched back to Envy Code R. At 12pt on my Mac Terminal, it renders with no anti-aliased blurriness.

http://damieng.com/blog/2008/05/26/envy-code-r-preview-7-cod...
that doesn't have a link to an explanation of the product

It has demos. It's has example code. But it doesn't say what the library is meant to do. A quick one-line "Hey, we've released v1.5 of our awesome vector graphics Javascript library" would've been enough.
Police don't care about guilt or innocence, they care about clearing their cases - and they rationalize this by shifting that responsibility to the courts. Their goal is accountability, not in the moral sense, but because it makes their job easier.

Every year their lobbies push for more invasive monitoring techniques that they euphemistically call "tools in the toolbox", which of course are usually granted during an election year.
Wouldn't the fact that you're charged through Ubercab prevent a lot of this kind of thing?
See, this is why computer applications keep failing "average" users: "Stupid users, why didn't they RTFM? Had they done that, they would have realized that Facebook's definition of the word 'like' is drastically different from the English language word they use every day."
What's even great is that all these technologies are more or less platform agnostic. What is developed on a PC will work instantly on a Mac/iPhone/tablet/what not!
America is a puritanical Christian nation. I'm surprised they allowed the Catholics in.
Heavy drinkers outlive nondrinkers
Could you quantify 'larger'? Just wondering at what point this starts to have problems.
The Cloud Server for Linux Training
You can see it in the logs but ill point it out specifically, origination point seems to be money.cnn.com which I was reading at one point. I do not visit facebook directly or have a facebook account if its relevant.
Will Google Wave features be built into Gmail?
Ask HN: What does your development environment look like?
I'm curious as to what others' development environments look like. Screenshots are best. I'll kick it off.
http://imgur.com/LYjiE.jpg

It's a pretty standard Rails hipster setup on a Mac using TextMate as the editor.

I'm using a 27" Dell U2711 display.

The left hand Terminal is used for monitoring autotest (an automatic test suite runner for Ruby/Rails) and messing around with the interactive Ruby shell (IRB), git, etc.

The right hand Terminal is used for monitoring requests as they come into the development environment's web server.

The Windows XP Professional is running on VMware Fusion and used for IE testing. I use Visual Web Developer 2008 for debugging in IE.

I've got two Chrome windows, one for API documentation and one for testing, with a permanent Developer Tools window at the bottom right hand corner of the screen.
Scala Style Guide [pdf]
That's how every phishing plot works, no? And still they get data. This makes it a step smoother.
Even though I disagree, this is a valid opinion, which is sufficiently explained that it should not be downvoted.
I've been using "Envy Code R" ( http://damieng.com/blog/2008/05/26/envy-code-r-preview-7-cod... ) for awhile. I find it much more readable.
clickable: http://www.pdfcal.com/
Patrick,

After almost 5 years of doing this and thinking the tide would change "any day now" for the better, I can see now that it will never change... sans bits of income here and there, I will never support my family doing this or create the working environment I've always gunned for, for a few dedicated authors.

That pretty much blows.

Your replies couldn't be more detailed or to the point... or right. I appreciate that... and I might add that you really have a way with words, I agree with the other replies saying you should write this stuff up if you don't already... or give advice to startups or something.

I don't have the time/resources to compete with UGO, Tomatoes or 1UP. And no, I have no idea what it would really take to differentiate myself enough to offer that unique pizzaz to cause someone to bookmark and always come back for their movie reviews (or toilet reviews... or whatever the heck I review that day).

You described it pretty succinctly and to answer the nail in the coffin: "Why are you competing with them?", I was never trying to... I was trying to do something I loved and turn it into a profession.

You know, that crap about "do what you love and the money will follow?" -- but now that I look through your points I realize that I have to face the fact that I am competing with these guys... in as much as I'm trying to make money from this, so I have to get my racing jersey and stand at the starting blocks.

I'm gonna read through the rest of the replies now. For what it's worth your words have helped a random dude on the internet take some time to think about what the hell he wants out of all this.
Especially not in this case, where people just saw it on /b/ and then posted it to Reddit.
i have actually been implementing this algorithm in c using a VM based approach. there are analyses of these techniques that are a little less dense than whats in the paper here:
http://swtch.com/~rsc/regexp/regexp1.html
and
http://swtch.com/~rsc/regexp/regexp2.html

the really amazing thing about this algorithm is stated in the third to last paragraph where he explains that strict bounds can be put on the size of the two lists that are used to manage the runtime state. this turns the algorithm from a potentially exponential runtime to O(MN) where M is the size of the regex and N is the length of the string being matched
ah! wallflower that is it... I couldn't put my finger on it, but that is what Pat does. Breaking complex topics down into a bunch of edible nuggets with examples and clarifying content.

That is an art.

I am actually good at doing the opposite... I can add fluff and content to complicate a simple topic to the point of tears.

It isn't so much an art and I have not yet figured out how to monetize it. I should probably be a senator ;)
W3giftcards is an excellent online gift card service! The set-up is simple and currently free of charge to the merchant. This service provides consumers with the convenience of purchasing gift cards instantly online. What better way to boost your gift card sales without having to mail or ship cards to consumers. It doesn't make sense not to offer this service to your customers.
Like does this ticket takes an hour for X and a day for Y.

Out of context, comparisons like this are meaningless. Maybe the ticket took a long time for Y because he was assigned 30 tickets and spent most of the day suffering paralysis of choice, maybe that particular subject is difficult for him but he has other strengths. When you blamed him for it his knee-jerk response was to get defensive and make excuses (eg personal life problems).
I've known many police officers who care deeply about guilt or innocence.
> And that's a good thing.

Not all of us agree with this. I'd rather that we all just chilled out about drunken Facebook photos, and that we start seeing court rulings that "it's impossible to accurately associate this posting with an individual, acquitted due to lack of evidence."

Those who give up their freedom for a little bit of safety deserve neither.
You can pry ProggySquare from my cold dead hands.
A bad habit I can get into is thinking about a feature in terms of all it's parts and getting mentally stuck on starting trying to put the whole thing together from the start. When as the advice in the article gives it is much better to focus on getting the critical path of a feature working. The mental block of thinking about the whole can easily lead to procrastination for me, something I am trying to avoid.
Thanks! That looks fun.

I'm planning on doing a C VM-based implementation with tabling* . I'm not sure about coroutines, and the VM will not necessarily follow the WAM design verbatim - Peter Van Roy has several suggestions for improvements in his thesis.

* Prolog-ese for memoization
What kind of traffic does your site get rkalla? Amazing to me that you could have 2000 posts over 4 years and not be doing 'well'. Does "make it" for you mean Internet celebrity/millionaire or simply pay-your-bills and a little extra money?
Chilling interview, well worth the read.

Also check out this video: it's a criminal defense lawyer explaining why you should never talk to cops, even if you're 100% innocent. This is followed by a veteran police officer who mostly confirms what the defense attorney says:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i8z7NC5sgik

One thing though: this is a very inaccurate title for the article.
It seems apt to me. What is it "loaded" with?
> I view Prolog as almost a scripting language

Me too. I want to take this idea and run with it - it would probably work better as an embedded scripting language, like Lua or Tcl.
The comments in response to that article are a microcosm of the problems we've seen with this debate.

When this issue entered the public consciousness it was as if everyone had made their minds up before there was any evidence for or against AGW.

There's evidence for and against, and instead of doing analysis we seem to just be slamming the table, condescendingly dismissing dissent and calling each other names. Of course there are probably people out there doing real science, but from what I can see (ok, from the media) it's people making up their minds and then finding the data to back it up. That's not science.

I thought Lomborg's initial stance was refreshing.

Hopefully it's just the media making drama out of it and real work is being done to get to the bottom of it. Here's to hope.
Left-Leaning Red-Black (LLRB) balanced binary search trees for Google Go
Droid Sans Mono looks nice to me, but if you can't tell a zero apart from a capital o then you're asking for 30 minutes of trying to figure a really stupid bug at some point in your life.
Converts versus equity deals
/b/ has gotten a dude to admit that he had sexual feelings for children and then send them a picture of his penis. I don't remember the rest of the details at the moment, but he did end up being convicted.

If I remembered his name, I'd grab the source right now, but I'm not about to go searching for this while at work. Anyone recall his name?
True. I imagine it's the same as in programming -- trends get hot and people run with them.

A craze for MVC full stack frameworks in web development is not entirely dissimilar to a craze for subtly textured backgrounds and slab serif typefaces like Archer in design.
Absolutely not. As you gain domain knowledge you should feel exactly this way. I'd suggest that you be concerned if you didn't feel this way. When I finished highschool I thought I was pretty damn smart and had a lot of things figured out (clearly not the case). From an academic point of view as I worked towards my Ph.D. I was constantly reminded of how very little I did know. While I did learn new things day by day, my appreciation for how much I didn't know grew exponentially. In fact I think what I'm left with after the whole exercise is not a confidence in my knowledge but rather a confidence in my ability to learn, problem solve and ask questions.
It's needless rhetoric. Many people who aren't privileged nor Western would think that that video was ... wrong. Also, many people do think about the cows on their local farm. Maybe the grandparent wasn't around for the "Ohio cow abuse" video, but there was equal, if not more, outrage.
(Not) Managing Software Developers
This is an interesting announcement. Chartbeat may have $300k annual revenues (2500 * 10 * 12), 5 employees and a ton of competitors (GA, Clicky, and tons of other web analytics tools). And they raise $3m. Probably they have interesting plans ahead.
How do you know this. In the video it's clear they come to some place where all these ATMs stands. Do you think they are affiliated with bank running these ATMs? I doubt bank need such "advertisement" =)
I think both systems together would probably work best. Because---and here I link to the original article---the fight is far from over.

If Flash will eventually disappear it will be slowly, very slowly. Companies are reluctant to get into new technologies. Has DVD disappeared because of Blu-ray? Has Windows XP disappeared because of Windows 7? What about Internet Explorer? And it's the same outside of the tech industry too.

Some sites will be early adopters, some will be slowpokes and most will be somewhere in the middle. And in this last year we've seen a _lot_ of mindshare being gained by HTML5. For a start Youtube, Vimeo and friends. Let's remember that a couple of years ago Flash was basically had the whole market by itself.

I don't know if the iPad/iPod helped, but I do know that Flash is starting to lose its grip. And yes, of course people will still develop on Flash for many years to come, the same way some companies were still selling VHS players a couple of years ago. But the adoption is gaining steam.
AutoCAD Coming to Mac (and iOS) for First Time in Nearly 20 Years
I don't think you're at all correct that they are less traceable than yellow cab drivers. The government bureaucracy makes it much more difficult to fake credentials and make yourself untraceable.

With UberCab, it looks like anyone could steal an iPhone/credit card, download the app, and sign up as a driver all in the space of an hour.
The market for these kinds of services is going to be great over the next years. If you want to make a startup, do it off those principles:

We have all this unstructured data and information - make sense of it, and give it to me in a useful instantly understandable format.
How to build the location database used for adding a conference location? It seems quite comprehensive. Where do startups get this data?
> It doesn't surprise you that cab drivers in Chicago basically never drive you to random destinations, or change fares midway through the ride? The goodness of cab driver hearts isn't what's preventing it.

A voluntary medallion scheme would prevent that; the city government could issue medallions to those who fitted whatever standards it chose to lay down.

And customers would be free to choose to use a medallioned or unmedallioned service.
There's still some active research in Parallel Prolog implementation. See this fabulous survey paper of the implementation approaches:
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=504083.504085
Gupta, G., Pontelli, E., Ali, K. A., Carlsson, M., and Hermenegildo, M. V. 2001. Parallel execution of prolog programs: a survey. ACM Trans. Program. Lang. Syst. 23, 4 (Jul. 2001), 472-602.

Hermenegildo, in particular, continues active research in this area and is quite visible and active in the broad programming languages community.
Why nobody knows what they are doing (it's about freelance programming)
http://xkcd.com/325/

Alt text mainly.
I think there's something to that, though - "Object-Oriented" has been used to mean many things.

Alan Kay's definition, more or less: "OOP to me means only messaging, local retention and protection and hiding of state-process, and extreme late-binding of all things. It can be done in Smalltalk and in LISP. There are possibly other systems in which this is possible, but I'm not aware of them."

Erlang has processes with local state communicating via messages, and can do late-binding with pattern matching and hot code loading. It just disposes of classes and other such baggage.
How People Feel About Buying Apps
Adding to that, by the time I clicked on the post, the comments on it were disabled.
So how does Raphaël compare to DojoX/GFX? (I think Google Closure has something too, but I'm not sure)

It seams pretty neat:

As of Dojo 1.2, the following native vector graphics engine adaptations are implemented:

SVG (Firefox 1.5-3.0, Safari(Webkit) 3.0, Opera 9.0, Chrome 1.0(Webkit) (beta), iPhone Safari 2.1)
VML (IE 6-7)
Silverlight (wherever it is supported by Microsoft)
Canvas (Firefox 2.0-3.0, Safari 3.0 including iPhone Safari 1.x & 2.x, Opera 9.0)
Development of a new experimental renderer which uses SVGWeb is also underway.

Other renderer adaptations could be implemented as well underneath these api's. For example (…)

Is there any specific advantage to choosing Raphaël over Dojo?
Well you are covering 2 out of 3 of the supporters of the God with the most previous convictions for wholesale wrath of God stuff.
You only need to rent it out to as a mosque on friday mornings and you should be safe.

Zeus and Thor seem to have retired from the raining down thunderbolts business, Bhudda was never particularly into it and Krishna doesn't do overseas.
This article is dear and near to my heart. I've spent the last 3 years working on solving the issue of the SEO crap chute.

The problem with SEO is that it requires content and links. Content should be the only metric. Unfortunately then we'd have no way to distinguish crap from gold. So links are needed as a popularity gauge. Unfortunately links have become a currency more important than content.

If we somehow had the ability to build our own community of bloggers? People from our blog roll, or colleagues we write with, like building relationships on Twitter. Then we could take the focus of links and put it back on content.

We'll thats now possible, like I said, I've spent the last 3 years working on this. The answer to your SEO problems is something called Arkayne. Here is what you can do with it:

Arkayne: http://www.arkayne.com/arkayne

1. Register, create your profile.
2. Create your own community of fellow bloggers.
3. Outrank any of the SEO Gods in days.
4. Live life as a happy blogger writing good content.

Absolutely leave me and my team a comment, now that we can, shifting this game is fun.
Google Finance?
It would be a great start if Gruber would read it.
I clicked the "Like" button and did not see anything on my news feed. And then I opened up Facebook on my mobile device and it was plastered with notes from patio11's site...
Twilio Releases API Revision 2010-04-01
Right now I am using Mensch font ( http://robey.lag.net/2010/06/21/mensch-font.html ). It is very readable and solid. I tried right now this post's font Anonymous Pro, also Envy Code R and Inconsolata but returned back to Mensch. They were not bad but I didn't liked them enough to switch.
If you have Facebook Mobile (iPhone or Android) check there -- I'm not seeing it on the web but it took over my mobile news feed.