skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A combination of two things: (a) my own failings over the years in trying to learn how to write; and (b) strong beliefs about what lawyers should be doing to serve their clients well when they write things.

As to the first, my first language was Greek, not English, and I spent literally years going through all the resources available (S&W, Zissner, Hugh Blair, many others) in trying to lay a sound foundation for how to write well. Even as I did so, though, I realized that technical rules were insufficient in themselves to help you master the art of writing well. This essay identifies other factors that affect good writing but are not normally discussed as part of technique (thinking for oneself, mastering languages, etc.). I wrote this piece in part to try to give others a broader perspective on why it is important to focus on more than technical rules if they want to write well.

As to the second, I have seen all sorts of ways that those in my profession would mess up in connection with written items, and these often went far beyond writing technique. I wrote this piece in that sense both as a caution to lawyers and also as a guide to clients in what to look for in good lawyer writing.

This, then, was my attempt to articulate a broader perspective on "good writing" (not focused on technique) as it applied to the things lawyers do. I thought it might be useful to the HN community both because many here are keenly focused on the topic of writing and also because many are consumers of legal services.
I'm interested in knowing what really happened, but the popehat primary source is so heavily editorialized it's hard to even read.
Stop spreading FUD.

Websocket protocol is perfectly fine. What's insecure are broken proxies.
soup-to-nuts one-man app stack... porn music plays
Any knowledge about your data set, how much of it varies, etc can vastly improve your performance over any canned standard library solution. Sorting ints? Radix-sort that mofo.
Focus on creating a coed group of friends, it makes it far easier to get feedback from both sexes, as well as expand it from both sides. If you're capable of being a friend with a girl, it makes it much easier to sustain a more complicated relationship. Then again I had an odd group of friends where exs tended to stay friends. (I had 4 exs as guests at my wedding.)
I have found the fortunes (and the cookies themselves) from Golden Dragon Fortune Cookies, in Chicago, to be the best I've encountered. Not only are they interesting and enjoyable; their diversity and number are kind of astounding.
Bernie Madoff's son committed suicide
Being lonely is easily one of the best things that has ever happened to me. When I was in high school I was quite social, never found myself alone.

Since high school I have become an entrepreneur. I can count the number of friends I have on one hand (not including acquaintances) - and I'm 100% fine with that. The more relationships you actively participate in, the less time you have to code, work, and change the world.

Just make sure you have enough really close friends to count on one hand and you're fine :) I'm always glad to be your friend too! eric@esft.com
'severe economic consequences' is too vague. By this definition, the US government could have seized control of Visa/MasterCard/Paypal during the recent DDOSes.
I'm a huge metal head, but unfortunately most of that music easily distracts, whether it's the vocals, some killer riff, a favorite solo, etc. I think a big reason I've been adding some post-rock (Sigur Ros), trip-hop (Massive Attack) and dubstep (Burial) to my playlist is because they're moody yet rarely depressing. The vocals are minimal, the beats slow paced, and the samples interesting but not distracting. A new favorite of mine these days is the Lush channel on Soma FM.
Any good boss wants his people to be successful. Assuming he has even a bit of maturity and genuinely likes you, he's going to encourage your growth, even if it means you move on to another group.

The alternative is that you stagnate and become miserable, and that's no good for either of you. He gets that, I guarantee, if he's even a tenth as great as you say he is.

So in short, you have nothing to worry about. It sounds like you're both menschy guys. He'll help you out, you'll help him out, and you can be friends after all of this.

Ask him to grab coffee, lunch, or something else private. Be direct, be honest, tell him what's up. He probably already expects it, if your frustrations are such a common topic of conversation.

edit: Yeah, listen to swombat, he said it even more efficiently than I did.
Someone has to see it to buy it in the first place right?
Hiring: Date Before You Marry
If the point was to convince paypal to restore the account, posting the same text to his business web page and then linking to it from reddit would be an instant 100x credibility boost.
I would rather teach them:

1) how to write a program that guesses a number you thought of by doing binary search.

2) solve 2-queens

3) solve n-queens

4) solve knapsacking or some other combinatorial problem requiring memoization or DP. Of course, I wouldn't tell them any of those buzzwords that are meant to scare them away from just hacking on it.

Their mind will be blown regardless of the language they used and they'll get a feel for O() without even opening Cormen.
Sounds like a like of guessing, lies and FUD.

There's some activity from that general area, so the nuclear site must be still infected? What kind of logic is that?
I would definitely recommend college and I would even go as far as to advice you to get a university degree. The thing is, say you're 25 years old and you have 5 years of work experience but no degree, employers will be very eager to hire you since your friends who did study for a degree (same age) will have zero work experience. The amount of work experience definitely makes up for the lack of a degree when you're 25 years old (and also because you'll be relatively cheap as a 25 year old, something that employers like very much).

Now fast forward 10 years into the future. By that time you have 15 years of work experience and still no degree. However, your friends will now have 10 years of work experience AND a degree. Suddenly those extra 5 years of work experience you have don't mean an awful lot anymore. Someone with 15 or 10 years are basically equally experienced. It's similar to when you where 7 years old. The 9 year old kid down the road was someone you didn't communicate with because of the massive age gap. However, when you're 27 you'll have no problem hanging out with a 29 year old.

So, yes. Get a much education as you can get your hands on. While you study, spend as much spare time on your passion as you possible can. Take advantage of the fact that you can stay up all night (because by the time you're in your late twenties that will have disappeared :).

Most digital agencies have no problem hiring people without credentials. Just be aware that you'll be at the bottom of the food chain. Don't expect to be at par with the big guys there. If you go for that, just do what you're told (within reason of course) and try to do the best job you can. Again, be honest, humble and sincere. Agencies are always looking for that "awesome junior" which basically means someone who can do great work but they don't have to pay 'm much because of the lack of professional experience.

Again, good luck!
Google can obviously afford to handle this kind of case, but what resources are available for individuals or small businesses who can't afford going to court with a patent troll?
I think it is ok advice:

What he means, is don't hire mobile engineers that have worked at big telco provider (samsung,motorola, or carriers). It is well known that these companies just don't have good talent.
I'd rather work with a good generalist, than a crappy mobile developer. But, a good mobile developer will run circles around a generalist.

"b. Don’t hire “mobile” Product Managers (PMs)"
Again, same thing. He equals 'mobile pm' to somebody that has worked in crappy telco related companies.

That's not true. There have been plenty of mobile companies that are not telco related. Even before iPhone came to change the landscape, there were plenty of companies that were both mobile and consumer focused.

..

"For example, on the early Google mobile team we had a PhD student from Yale with no industry experience, an expert on enterprise Java from BEA, and a research scientist at Google. These people helped form a formidable core for mobile engineering at Google."

Ah, this explains why the Android api seems like something that came from the desktop. It has everything thrown into it, even the kitchen sink. Comparing to the iPhone sdk, it is clumsy. Also, this probably explains a lot of the usability problems Android has in general.

The sad fact is that developing for the android is twice as expensive, and produces less good looking application than the iPhone.

Perhaps this guy should have hired mobile engineers?
>Some subsection of users have trouble with a large organization. Big whoop.

Quite an understatement. You seem unconvinced of the overwhelming number of people who have had issues with Paypal, and the relentless pain they had to endure just to get their money back, buyers and sellers both.

I don't deny the existence of the regulations they have to abide, but Paypal isn't a bank and doesn't operate like one either. They're given a great deal of freedom in their contract to seize accounts at will.

I would like to see the relevant law that Paypal was abiding by to seize Wikileak's account.

There is no law, they did it of their own accord. I won't make any assertions about why but I'd say there are two or three guesses, of which at least one is close to the mark.
What I don't get is why they're not disabling Java and Flash support too, then?
I think it's worth mentioning that the Android version of this player, although not as full-featured as many of the other alternatives, is also quite elegant.

http://instinctiv.com/android/
Beautiful. We really need more cynicism on HN.
Okay... I'm probably not the person to take advice from on this issue... but I have to say, if it was me, and if your boss is a nice person, I'd just take what you wrote up there, and copy and paste it into an email. Or just send him the URL to HN.
Nothing in life has zero risk.
I really recommend "Mew"(http://www.mew.org/en/) as an option for email in Emacs. I was able to really customize it to my needs. Its exactly like Emacs in its extensibility.

Gnus is a little overrated in my opinion.
When people argue efficiency as a compiler implementation detail that is going to get worked out, they forget about many who have fallen before them.

Yes; see also http://prog21.dadgum.com/40.html
This is a great example of making something that is challenging for a novice, yet not so challenging they give up. The reward is much higher than watching some numbers show up in the correct order and you tend to cover more of the language (2D array or your own abstraction of such, I/O, control flow, etc.).
Tried it myself , really helps especially when you are working alone.
Totally agree. Worrying about it ahead of time always ends up being worse than actually doing it.
This post cuts through the hysteria and offers a solid analysis of the issue
I just deleted my Facebook account. Did I commit suicide?
I did not want to look at the similar albums after every 15-20 minutes. I did not want to Like anything, I did not want to see any more pretense.

I've also written a little poem about it all.

http://muddle-hood.posterous.com/kool-with-a-capital-k
Ever since W started tacking "Homeland" onto everything he could find, the presence of that word on ANYTHING has been a guarantee that that thing a) sucks, b) is unnecessary, and c) is a grave threat to civil liberties.

Thanks for the useful shorthand, W!
How do you verify that your code behaves correctly in different browsers when developing in JavaScript on Chrome OS?
Offer to pick and train your replacement so that your boss has the best of both worlds

and do not tell him an email, this needs to be face-to-face
Tornado solves the specific problem of building web applications. What compatibility was tossed in accomplishing this goal? As far as I can tell, Tornado is compatible with HTTP, HTML and other related web standards.

What are some of the things that you can do with your version of Tornado that I cannot do with regular Tornado?
"During the 1960s, researchers at Cornell University conducted a series of tests on the effects of working with music. They polled a group of computer science students and divided the students into two groups, those who liked to have music in the background while they worked (studied) and those who did not.

Then they put half of each group together in a silent room, and the other half of each
group in a different room equipped with earphones and a musical selection. Participants in both rooms were given a Fortran programming problem to work out from specification. To no one's surprise, participants in the two rooms performed about the same in speed and accuracy of programming. As any kid who does his arithmetic homework with the music on knows, the part of the brain
required for arithmetic and related logic is unbothered by
music—there's another brain center that listens to the music.

The Cornell experiment, however, contained a hidden wildcard. The specification required that an output data stream be formed through a series of manipulations on numbers in the input data stream. For example, participants had to shift each number two digits to the left and then divide by one hundred and so on, perhaps
completing a dozen operations in total. Although the specification never said it, the net effect of all the operations was that each output number was necessarily equal to its input number. Some people realized this and others did not. Of those who figured it out, the
overwhelming majority came from the quiet room.

Many of the everyday tasks performed by professional workers
are done in the serial processing center of the left brain. Music will not interfere particularly with this work, since it's the brain's holistic right side that digests music. But not all of the work is centered in the left brain. There is that occasional breakthrough that makes you say "Ahah!" and steers you toward an ingenious bypass that may save months or years of work. The creative leap involves right-brain function. If the right brain, is busy listening to 1001
Strings on Muzak, the opportunity for a creative leap is lost.

The creativity penalty exacted by the environment is insidious. Since creativity is a sometime thing anyway, we often don't notice when there is less of it. People don't have a quota for creative thoughts. The effect of reduced creativity is cumulative over a long period. The organization is less effective, people grind out the work
without a spark of excitement, and the best people leave."-Peopleware[http://www.amazon.com/Peopleware-Productive-Projects-Teams-S...]
That's only partly true. The early city was the standard sprawl-out-from-farms kind of thing. Later on, Manhattan was planned pretty well. But the outer boroughs are still a mix of grids and patchwork.
The cached contact page for Tapanaris shows he uses a nick "t4pan"

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:PPhOZgL...

After some googling:

t4paN 01-29-2008 11:33 AM

"4chan will get them, don't worry."

http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?p=781716

Looking like he is associated with anon to me and that it isn't a false flag
WikiLeaks row: why Amazon's desertion has ominous implications for democracy
as a new sailor, traveling with kids. it would probably be much better to use a regular monohull sailboat instead of a catamaran.

would cost more, but
regular listener to the following online radio stations, falling in that 22% who listen to electronic

Sense.fm (trance),
chilltrax,
Trance clubber

I think the main reason is when in the office environment other peoples conversations is more distracting than music, so a good pair of headphones really helps
They can simply require a security measures that is protected by existing IP, thus leaving network security up to the biggest patent-trolls with a lobbying budget. I would much rather entrust security to market-driven solutions, not some herp derp government agency.
Yes. http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/2009/01/08/5-time-management-t...
Some of the questions seem really stupid. ``Where did you register the domain name?'' seriously? How is that ever an issue. It could have been so much better if there had been a real interview. Lazy journalism?
"Don't worry about other people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats."—Howard Aiken
Comparing Compiler Optimizations
If it didn't help their business, they wouldn't be on the system.

It's an ultracompetitive business. I'm sure any restaurant owner thinks he'd be doing great if it wasn't for credit card fees and rapacious landlords and city codes and taxes and whatnot. But if those went away the business environment would still get as tough as it needs to get to keep out the non-hackers.
I work on large distributed systems. I've found that Go is a much cleaner and simpler language than C++ or Java, by far. You get the compiled speed and control over memory layout of C++ with the garbage collection of Java. The concurrency model in Go is a natural fit for programs that make heavy use of disks and networks; it neatly sidesteps the threads vs events debate (and both of those can lead to some nasty programs). But most of all, the language is pleasant to use and the compilers are really fast (ever tried to compile a million line c++ or java source tree?).
Tomorrow evening I will give mew a try. Thanks for the suggestion! Any interesting configuration part I may need to be aware of?
Wow, I have too much faith in humanity. The follow-up replies to my comment have reversed my position on this. As is typical, I reserve my strongest belief for things I know least about.
Peopleware was a beneficial book, but these stories need corroboration. I talked to one of the authors at a conference once, told him how much I loved one of their stories (that the Dutch East India Company, once the greatest corporation in the world, still exists with a mere 50 employees who do nothing but fill out paperwork) and asked him where they'd found it. "Did we say that?" he asked. Yes, absolutely, I said. "Oh," he replied. "Usually we only make stuff up for our talks, not our books."
It's not a zero-sum game.
Yes, I agree. I wasn't actually suggesting to sprinkle instanceof-checks throughout the code.

What I was trying to get to: if you accept the existence of single-method ducktypes (like "things that have a walk() method" oder "things that have a quack() method"), then by intersecting these concepts, you arrive at things just like interfaces, whether you call them interfaces or not. If you want the pond system to work with your two-legged bird-sound robot, you perform the same mental steps as when implementing an interface. Hence, ducktypes could be seen as interfaces without an instanceof-operation.
Interesting. I find the only kind of music I can listen to that doesn't seem (as far as I can tell, at least) to interfere with my ability to do hard creative work is deep ambient: Steve Roach, Robert Rich, that kind of thing.
Your very sane boss knows what he loves, and decided to go get it.

Been there, done that.It was awesome. It wasn't a boat though.
Thanks. Beatifully written and I love the print-shop analogy.

It's nice he is into the C&C Portland Wiki, there's golden nuggets of wisdom everywhere. I am reposting the link from his blog.
http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?SufficientlySmartCompiler

Personally of the higher-level languages, I found SBCL to be crazy good at optimizing, of course given a few nudges with a compiler directive or two. By inspecting the dissasembly, I could validate it was doing the "right-thing" (TM), but then again, I do the same to check the C/C++ compiled code.
Please review http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
It's not that good, which is why they gave up on using quicksort in Data.List .
> Ask your boss for a private meeting.

I once emailed my boss to say that I want to talk to him about some career choices I've made. When we finally spoke, he was mentally prepared for my resignation.
Will you be living in Dhaka?

Go easy on the street food, at least at first. Get a water filter or, at the least, boil all your water. If you are fluent in Bangla, always speak it. And if you're not, then best of luck. Don't try and give away that you are from the West, everyone will try to take advantage of you. Know your crowd and where you are; it's still a very conservative country.

I can't speak too much about the quality of infrastructure there in recent years, but the last time I was there ~5 years ago it was abysmal. I don't imagine too much has changed, though I hear you can get somewhat decent internet depending on where you live.

Sounds like a lot of negatives. And, they are, at least to a spoiled American like me. However, there is a lot of beauty in the country as well. Check out Cox's Bazar, St Martin's Island, Patenga beach all in the south. Take a steamer out to Barisal for a day.
This is what success looks like. As a two-sided marketplace OpenTable is a fantastic business with very high barriers to entry. This is classic case of investor patience paying off.
Gnus carries a lot of usenet cruft, no question. But the last time I tried 'mew' or 'wanderlust' I got pretty angry:

http://homonculus.net/posts/nerdism/2009-10-08-attention_jap...
Why base it on C? Programming parallel systems is a new paradigm, one that is distinctly different from the imperative world of C. Just compare the example FFT on wikipedia (https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Opencl) with for example the StreamIt implementation (http://groups.csail.mit.edu/cag/streamit/apps/benchmarks/fft...).

Alright. Damn. That isn't actually that much better. Does anyone know a language that has an elegant yet efficient parallel implementation of the FFT?
I keep seeing that quote on HN, but never any reason to believe it. It's cute, and but plays to an odd kind of elitism that doesn't match my experience with people.

I'll grant that there are some ideas where some particular knowledge and foresight is needed to appreciate the value, but a lot of ideas are good precisely because they establish a connection between seemingly disjoint things that, in retrospect, seems obvious.
These aren't too unique - there are several out there:

http://www.google.com/search?q=usb+random+number+generator

Also, many chipsets have built RNG's that work of thermal or electrical noise in the system, such as many of Intel's i8xx series.

You can also buy hardware that provides RNG's and crypto acceleration - here's a good list from OpenBSD:

http://www.openbsd.org/crypto.html#hardware
Somehow my belief regarding statistics numbers (such as unemployment) that came out from the government has declined year-to-year.

On the other hand, this article is an eye-opener that software is becoming a commodity for certain segment of business.
This.

I'm a math graduate student. I was also once a philosophy student, and so I have a soft spot in my heart for the Socratic method. Unfortunately, it doesn't work so well in my teaching, because the poor snowflakes have been so well-conditioned to avoid thinking. After a year or two I gave up and became part of the problem.

It takes me about thirty seconds on average to sketch the solution to the typical algebra homework problem. It'd be more instructive to lead them through it interactively, but I just can't make the ROI high enough to make it worthwhile.
I don't get how subclasses are supersets of their parents. The set of instances of a subclass is a (usually proper) subset of the set of instances of its superclass (in any mainstream class-OO language).

Also, writing a subclass definition can be seen as adding constraints (of the form "must also have a bla() method returning an int").