skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I find that only bad managers ask "how long will this take you?" and idiot manager will take what ever time you give them and try to cut that short or judge time for the developers or engineers; like "this should be easy and will only take few day".

Good manager that have "developed" before will ask "how much work is left?" and "What are some of the out standing problems that need to be resolved?"

Look for the good ones avoid the idiots.
Especially after a system restart
Yeah, though I doubt very many people format the card when trying it (the size did look correct beforehand). Though, he did let me try several cards so maybe you're right.

He was also selling (very clearly to me anyway) fake iPod Nano devices. Did he know those were fake? Maybe he's never seen real ones? To me the whole thing looked so cheaply made and the UI is incredibly ugly.
DataMatrix is also nice.
> don't build it yourself.

Of course not. I've built several petabytes worth of storage systems in the past 15 years, OTOH.

> Using desktop drives, when 24 are mounted in a single chassis, the vibration from those drives will cause a higher rate of failure.

Absolutely. However this is not always directly applicable to all desktop drives. In fact I'm going to reveal a secret : physically, desktop SATA drives are exactly the same as professional grade 24/24h operation-guaranteed SATA drives. When they fall off the assembly line, they're tested for reliability and performance. Over a certain threshold, a drive is deemed professional and receive the pro firmware; under the bar, it's a desktop drive.

What is the most important difference between the desktop vs pro firmware? The desktop drive is supposed to be used alone. In case of an error, it will retry, retry and retry again endlessly to ecc-correct the error. OTOH, the pro drives "knows" it's part of a RAID array; at the slightest fault, it will simply cry "I'm failed" and give up. So in case of a transient error, your IOs won't be blocked.

There are some other differences depending upon the maker: for instance all Hitachi GST drives carry an accelerometer, but the desktop drive firmware don't know how to use it to compensate for low-frequency vibrations.

WD desktop drives have particular settings that make them extremely dangerous to use in RAID arrays.

Note that the "pro/consumer" threshold can be moved to reach some volume threshold regardless of the actual drive quality. This happened, I've been bitten.

Anyway, prefer the pro drives even if there 50% more expensive. It will save you some headaches.

> When a single drive in your 24 drive chassis fails, how do you know which one it is?

First, I suppose the maker (in my case, my team), carefully checked that all drives are properly labeled (so that drive 1 is labeled 1, etc); second, decent RAID controllers can flash a drive LED (Adaptec 5xx5 or 6xx5 series come to mind).

> Can you handle a double disk failure without losing data?

With drives of 1 TB or more, RAID-5 is definitely out and has been so for several years. RAID-6, RAID-6, RAID-6 is the way to go.

> These are things that enterprise storage vendors spend months with engineers designing.

E-xact-ly. BTW I'm an enterprise storage vendor. However I'm really too far from Louisville to be able to ship there and support it. I just mentioned what is possible; don't forget that nowadays, when you're buying an SGI (or many other big names) storage system you're buying Supermicro hardware.
How I learned to stop worrying and love the unicorn...
As well as hundreds of local businesses who would pay quite a bit to advertise to them directly.
Oh man oh man, this right here.

I like to think of myself as someone who has a lot of common sense, but reading McConnell's "Software Estimation" made me feel like an idiot. He lays out the most important stuff right at the start of the book: an estimate is not a commitment is not a plan to meet a target. Reading this, I realized that where I work, the term "estimate" is often used to mean any one of those three things at different times, but most often is used to mean "commitment." Not knowing any better, I fell right in line.

McConnell's basic strategy for delivering an estimate (give a minimum, a maximum, and an "expected time") is great for so many reasons, but the reason I like it the best is for its communication value - by giving three numbers, none of them being an "I can have it done by..." number, you reinforce the idea that you are delivering an estimate and that the point of delivering that estimate is to help the project manager control the project. If it turns out that the PM is lazy and they really do just want a commitment ("sure, sure, whatever, when will it be done?!"), you can adjust your communication strategy accordingly.
Thanks for posting this... after reading all the FUD, it really made my day.
It is easier to estimate time for repetitive tasks, and (ideally) programming is not a repetitive task.

once something becomes predictable, it is probably also script-able.
On a related note, don't know if anyone's noticed this, but I remember people using voice chat on the old XBox so much more than they do now. Not sure why that is.

More people using Live means more people using Live that you don't want to talk to. Just like any other online community, when it is a niche you have a greater chance that the members of the community can appreciate things like civil conversation.
They only mate once before dying. I assume waiting 29 years would increase the odds of a pre-mating death. Maybe even death from old age. How long can an insect live?
The Internet has always been social, folks
Free Boston SEO and Cambridge SEO Meetup
Since you wrote the article before they offered to do a case study, it seems that the veracity of the article wouldn't be in question. And I'm not sure about conflict of interest-- it seems your interests are aligned.

Now if you were claiming to be a reviewing many/all web platforms and accepted help from FB, that would be a different story. Disclaimer: I didn't read your article.
It's because programming is as much an art as it is a science.

You don't ask a painter how many hours it will take to complete a masterpiece. Nor do you ask a composer how long it will take to write the next great hit. Or an author how long it will take to finish a great book.

Sure, we can ask an artist to be done by "next Tuesday", or in 20 hours. And the artist will say, no problem, but there is no guarantee of quality.

Programming is no different. Yes, there is a method, a science, to getting things done, but when it comes to creating a finished work of art, it is not a time oriented task.

If you want quality, don't put us on the clock.
tl;dr (my interpretation anyway). In utility theory a completely specified preference ordering is the starting point and a utility function can be derived to represent it. These functions are unique only up to a monotone transformation. In the recommender systems we take the quantity as a given and infer the preference order for missing items. If you reassign assign all the 5 stars items to 10 stars, it is perfectly consistent with the ordering, but your inference method may be (will be!) sensitive to such reassignments. To me this suggests you should also be estimating the shape of the best transformation of the rating system. Think of it as an opportunity to reduce bias. The next step would be to see if your particular decision problem is sensitive to such parameters. If not, chuck those parameters and go about your business.
I'm glad to see Sundar will have the ear of the king, ChromeOS hardware may be the single most promising near term development in computer security for the common man. I expect to be buying several for my family once they become commercially available.
A forum is a place where people come together and talk. The word comes from ancient Romans. Many people still use it with its original meaning, no need to nitpick.
Anyone from Twitter who can comment on the cultural/engineering ramifications of this?

I would be tremendously interested to hear from former Ruby hackers who have been shifting (back?) to Java via the Netty tool mentioned in the OP.

Definitely a different tack that we are used to hearing hear on HN . . .
Absolutely. And it was a good post.

If I didn't require a "build" step, I would still want some sort of solution that could do things like pay attention to checkins, run automated tests, deploy to staging, run tests against staging, deploy to production, run tests against production, and let me know if/when anything doesn't work as expected.

Based on the limited set of tools I have experience with, I probably would still use TeamCity, because it's great at all of the non-building tasks it needs to do as well. But I'll check out Capistrano based on your post.
What are the real advantages of using version control from the designer point-of-view?

In most cases, a good backup system is what they need. Use Apple's Time Machine or Crashplan and backup every 15 minutes automatically.

From a programmers point of view VC is great. We actually have the tools to deal with different versions of text files: find differences, resolve conflicts, merge, split off new versions, etc.

And designers? What do they get beyond a more complex and opaque form of Backup. Sure it makes it easier to get the designers output into our programmers workflow, but the way this is usually sold is a Pain in the designers backside with no real benefit.

If programmers want to win over designers to version control, we need to sell them on real advantages. We need to show them tools like pixelnovel's timeline that integrates SVN diretly into Adobe CS and provides an in app version viewer. Or Kaleidoscope.app which allows the visual comparison of image (and text!) files.

http://pixelnovel.com/ (SVN only)
http://www.kaleidoscopeapp.com/ (Git, Mercurial, SVN & Bazaar)

However, even these tools only scratch the surface of the power that programmers gain from the pain of version control.
The original post is about forums, not comments, it's in the title. They're the sites where the conversation is the focus. (And most of them have very little truck with "niceties", don't make the nerd mistake of assuming a degree of chatter isn't valuable or is dilution -- it's sync, feedback and flow-control. Even SMTP says helo.)

That aside, bringing the most valuable comments to the front might save you energy at a glance, but it also brings you comments limited by their hit-and-run nature and costs you energy if you want to later return to a thread and discover what's new, because there's none of the flow and context you need to rejoin a discussion.

On the best forum sites, you get to converse with the incredibly smart and talented people. That's far more valuable than just looking at them in awe.
I can't speak for those other blogs but at ReadWriteWeb (the most fabulous blog on the internet, if you ask me) we did some polling and ran this post on pay rates 3 years ago http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/how_much_do_top_tier_bl... To be honest, given the economy, I doubt things have changed that much since then.
> It doesn't work. If you've never used version control, "just learn git" can be a multi-week project. If you've never done design, "just learn photoshop" is the same.

Most of us have learned to use Photoshop to perform basic tasks without needing to push it all on the designer - things like resizing images, cropping, saving from source PSD to usable formats like JPG, etc.

It's hardly so much to ask of a designer to learn commit, push, and pull.
Hans Rosling's 200 Countries, 200 Years, 4 Minutes, 4 Minutes [video]
This reminds me of an old stock tip scam. A scammer would mail a large number of stock tip letters, 50% claiming that the market would move up the following week and 50% claiming that it would go down. The scammer would then repeat this each week, but would only send new batches to the people who had gotten the letters that had the correct "prediction" the previous week. After a while, some people would believe in the scam letters, as so many of them had "predicted" the market correctly. Falling for the scam, those people would send large sums of money to continue to receive the stock tips, leaving the scammers rich.
Ask HN: Am I being offered a fair startup equity?
I work for a technology startup that has raised 3 million dollars in angel investing so far. The comapny is now ready for first round of manufacturing and attempting to get the next round of investing.

I've been in the company for two years and instrumental in getting their software and hardware products developed from scratch. I get a slightly below (or maybe avg for mid-west) market rate salary.

I'm being offered this

* 15% salary hike
* 1% of the "net proceeds of any company sale and profit distribution"
* and a promotion to head of software development in a Dir of Tech role.

My questions are

* is 1% of "net proceeds" same as 1% equity stake in the company?
* Will I still have 1% stake in the company after subsequent rounds?

Posted from a throw-away account. I've been on HN for couple of years now.
For the screen, build a model with a grey market PSOne display and a touchscreen layer fitted. That'd be amazing.

You should submit to http://hackaday.com as well. They'd most likely feature it.

Also, have you heard of http://hexler.net/touchosc ? It's brilliant fun on the ipad, I've never tried it on android, but there is a port.
Android chief Rubin's response to Android critics misses the point
Institutionalized, legitimized corruption is a different thing entirely, and yes it's at a new level these days.

I far prefer to have corporations run ads in elections to having corporations purchase senate seats. And when I say purchase, I do mean purchase. Prior to the 17th amendment senators were generally appointed by state legislatures, and it was surprisingly common for corporations to pay the legislatures to make their man senator. This was the impetus for the 17th amendment.

If you want institutionalized corruption, read up on Tammany Hall.

If you want legitimized corruption, read up on the history of how the 14th amendment was so narrowly interpreted to prevent enforcement of its plain intent. We are not talking about minor injustices. For example in the Colfax massacre over 100 blacks were killed. Everyone knew who did it, only 3 were convicted of anything, and those convictions were overturned by the Supreme Court. This decision was widely applauded.

If you think that things are worse today, I'll need some serious convincing.
This is pretty impressive. It will be nice to see a way of adding your own domains though.

The video was a little hard to see though, but the simplicity of the process probably negates that fact.
Only when scrum is extended into the overall strategy of the company can it solve that problem.

It makes no sense if only the developers and designers are doing scrum when the rest of the company is expecting deadline deliveries.
Since when is learning/using git "being a programmer"?

A designer's job is to design and a programmer's job is to program. Both of those jobs require tools to make their jobs easier.

I'm sick of designers getting away with things programmers never would in their jobs. Programmers learn skills such as: organization (files and directories), communication (comments), workflow management (version control), etc. In my experience with designers, none of them care about things like that. You'll see 5 versions of PSDs filled with Untitled layers and no logical grouping.

These are things that are just expected of programmers and they should be expected of designers as well.
This also eliminates the inconsistencies between Likert "intervals" across different subjects. Very smooth.
It's funny. I've been using Emacs as my sole editor for about 8 months now, but I still haven't been able to reach enlightenment with org-mode. I have it installed, and I occasionally use it for todo lists, but I guess I'm just not good enough with it to see its value.

I think the main stumbling block is the documentation (as with most things Emacs). There needs to be some use cases or something. Even the enthusiastic bloggers never seen to give concrete examples. The best advertisement for org-mode I've seen is this long Google Tech Talk:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJTwQvgfgMM&hd=1
> Bing was extremely lavish in compensation, making offers to the best hackers for $90K/year

Is this a joke?
Firebug 1.7.1b1 released
He says forums, but his example is "places like Reddit and HackerNews and Slashdot" - articles are the focus, he's talking about comments sections.

"Looking at them in awe?" What's wrong with lurking to learn?
The primary market for this are people who glaze over when you start talking about DNS Servers or CNAME. But that is definitely something that would be cool to add.
superblock. 2006. wicker park now.

though i don't consider my company a startup, just a plain old small business.
Not necessarily, "Bing : Microsoft" is not analogous to "Google Search : Google." Bing just needs to fill a small gap in Microsoft's total product portfolio whereas Google Search is the crown jewels for Google. In other words, Bing can be a cost center for Microsoft and still contribute to the company's bottom line by contributing to increased revenues in other areas, but if Google Search starts losing money Google is in real trouble.

So long a Bing provides meaningful statistical data regarding internet search,keeps Google from data mining searches performed in Redmond, and serves as a productive R&D platform it is successful for Microsoft because they do not need to generate significant revenue from advertising to be profitable.
If that is the case then awareness of the corruption is what has changed.

Actually a century ago people were very aware of the corruption. It was the impetus for a number of important reforms.

My comments criticizing the system have received healthy upvoting, so it would seem that I'm not expressing a fringe opinion.

Tip. When someone adds a ":-P" to a comment, that indicates teasing. The people for whom the system "works" are those with power and influence. You are not one of them, and therefore it doesn't work for you.
I'm aware of the language, but we haven't looked at it in any depth. If you think it would make for a good host language for Bloom, I'd be curious to hear your reasoning.
From an older Slashdot comment on the subject: I multiply all time estimates by pi, to account for running around in circles.
Love it! That's me.
Implementing site search with Django and IndexTank
So maybe the answer is to get better at gatekeeping and selecting members who will contribute to the conversation rather than just troll it?
yeah, legendary and omitted? maybe too much source material for that..hehe; and if you wanna talk about the sound fx that go with the GUIs.....the insane work and science behind all the Trek sounds is craziness....all for a few blips and beeps..hehe...
There are two ways to interpret this: OPTION A) Omg, I'm not going to use Rails, even Twitter is ditching it. OPTION B) Hmm.. They built something really fast using Rails, got it out there, got massive popularity, made boatloads of $$ and now they're maturing and moving to a more robust infrastructure.

I go with Option B. If you're a new startup -- don't confuse this advice and start brewing your own Java-based server just because Twitter is doing this now.
Why don't we use HTTP for email?
When accessed from a mail client, mail servers expect connections by IMAP, POP, and SMTP. The back-end inter-server comms use SMTP. But HTTP requests are standard for many non-web internet apps. Aside from historical reasons (the mail protocols predate HTTP and are well-established) why have mail providers not moved towards HTTP (or HTTPS) as a well-supported, flexible standard for client communication? If the mail protocols continue to evolve, what are the arguments for keeping them separate?
$15 would be pretty low for a major blog, I think. When I was writing for one of the larger tech blogs, I was making about $2000/month for 3 stories per day.
Agreed. Sort of like huge number blogger.com users who just use the blogspot.com domain for their blog even though the CNAME option is there. CNAM-ing seems like an easy advanced feature to add later.
> Where do you, and do people in general, seem to find the boundary between their native language and English in their daily interactions?

* If I speak to other Norwegians, I will speak Norwegian. Always. I make a conscious effort to keep the language free of any [recent] loan words.

* If I speak to Swedes or Danes, I will speak Norwegian. If I see they're having trouble following, I will speak slower and tone down my dialect. I will not switch to Swedish or to English. I understand them – they better do the effort of understanding me. (That's the 500 years as a colony kicking in. :)

* If I speak to a non-Scandinavian foreigner who doesn't understand or speak Norwegian, I instantly switch to English.

* If I speak to ten Scandinavians and one non-Scandinavian, I will instantly switch to English.

* If I speak to someone who has been in Norway long enough to understand the language but not long enough to be comfortable speaking it, I will speak Norwegian. I don't mind if he speaks English, but I'll stick to Norwegian if he actually understands it.

* If I speak to someone who doesn't really speak much Norwegian but tries hard to, I'll answer in Norwegian first – but usually switch to English when I see they're struggling.

All of the above apply within my own country. Abroad, I will try to speak the local language if I can. If not, I will ask, in the local language, if they speak English and then switch. If I'm spoken to in English, I will respond in English.
Looking at the specs for the lighting, it seems like they can pull about 2kw over two ethernet lines. I had no idea you could run that much wattage over cat6!

Must take a special router to support that.
1) no, sounds like profit sharing which is not equity.

2) n/a, but even if it was equity then no, no guarantees regarding dillution.
Thats an interesting perspective. :)
For many customers the issue is not features, it's pain avoidance. If you do just one thing, but better/easier/faster than the established competitor then you can approach customers on that basis. Bonus points if it allows them to save money, especially via employee effort, compared to the "feature rich" competitor.

One awesome book that's helped me with this is "Spin Selling" by Neil Rackham. It's a straightforward method to having productive sales discussions and is based on a quantitative grounding. Their approach is discussion based and a co-exploration, so you're just talking to uncover needs instead of pushing your product. Go check it out.
I am asked to give estimates all the time, sometimes based on something like "A guy down the hall says it crashed, how long will it take you to fix." or "Bob wants a portal site". So I've come up with a method that works for me. Add together hours based on what things I will need to fiddle with to get it to work.

•Involves strange business practice I will have to figure out or gleen from area experts +5h

•I didn't write the code +5h

•Involves something like wcf or msmq +3h

•It is a "it is too slow" bug +3h

•Involves stored procedures +2h

•Involves 3rd party UI component +10h
and so on, and so on.
I wouldn't argue that Habari is probably better code than WordPress, but it doesn't seem fair to compare a 0.7 product to something as functional and battle-tested as WordPress.