skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Since this is turning into a bit of a FAQ, I'll ask something I've been wondering. DDG is dependent on its competitors. If DDG gains significant market share, what is to protect it from them just blocking it?

Obviously there is a symboitic relationship with some of its sources, but not all. How does Google/Bing benefit from it using their results?
I like the idea, but I do think the UI could be simplified a bit.
Kiva's Auto-Lending is God's Gift to Web App Features
Where did you pick up the fact that his actual point was to hold tiny focused meetings? Working asynchronously is pretty anti-meeting, and frankly it's totally independent of a culture that supports silos. I work in a very asynchronous culture right now. Very few meetings.. but that's not to say we don't communicate. We communicate very thoroughly.

However short and focused they are, my definition of a meeting is a schedule block of (any size of) time where a number of people are expected to party on something and decide on some action.

To extend Zach's metaphor, meetings are a communication mutex. They force a topic to be wrestled by a group of people at the lowest-common-denominator of pace. I think they're rarely the best or most efficient way to collaborate.
In the specific case cited, yes, but the article is talking about the general case of engineers and social ineptitude. That doesn't need to change any more than we need to stop letting everyone else get away with technical ineptitude.
"I find the argument reasonable."

Care to share a reference that backs up that argument? I'm not doubting that there may be an argument, just interested to read that point of view.
The fact you use a connection to the internet opens yiu to many nefarious means to "screw you over". I can think of subtle things like changing adservers to backbone providers, router protocol redirections, ssl master cert spoofs (care of us govt), and many others.

Unless you were the types that freaked out on mm256.dat and nsakey, use standard security and you're fine.

If you did freak out, im sure we can work out a GPS-login script that watches location, bloodtype, retinal scan, passphrase, and voice scan to get a guest account.
yes and no. Going back to the MP3 analogy, their were many MP3 players that were much better deals on paper; a fraction of the cost for more memory. But they didn't have a scroll wheel or iTunes, so consumers found them to be cheap knock-offs.
Benefits of the Open Source Software Market Identified
When I procrastinate, it is quite often a task I do want to accomplish for whatever reason. But I put it off because I'm tired, just don't feel like it, etc. The authority figure you refer to is the voice of wisdom telling me that if I don't go ahead and do it, I will regret it later (this figure is right 99% of the time).

My personality is a high 'C' (for compliance), meaning that I have an appreciation for authority. I think your original essay misses the fact that we all have different personalities and motivations.
Unless you are making a point I can't understand, I think you mean "posterity" instead of "prosperity."
Introducing the [Windows 8] team
Yes I totally agree, only one chance to make a first impression and all that.
The vast majority of web hosting shops are not "companies" with "employees" and "management." They are one or a few guys with some dedicated servers and most tier-1 support outsourced to huge web hosting support shops.

This seems like a whole lot of attention over what seems like one guy who is an asshole.
It takes 6-12 months to become competent in a language. You could maybe be at the level to make modifications in 1 month. Remember that it's not about a language really, but a platform.
I have dozens of faults. If I spent my time trying to change them all I would have very little time to spend on my actual life.

...and my actual life takes up a lot of time...

As adults, I think its pretty mature to accept ourselves the way we are, and move on without wasting time agonizing over our many imperfections.

Faulty or not, I still have stuff I need to do.
August 24th is Stranger's Day
So you think that each state should have a light bulb plant? If not, then we are talking interstate commerce, which means federal standards.
Most engineers focus in meetings about "what I got". The reality is meetings should be about "what the organization gets". Sometimes an engineer may come away with nothing but the organization profited significantly.

That said, too many meetings are intensely toxic for any company, and nothing is worse than working at a company that thinks meetings are "getting things done".
Maybe you see it that way, but you're not pathological. I had people demanding such or so or they were going to demand a refund.

...

Granted, not many.

Also, the principle "you're not the customer, you're the product", while well-known to you cynical kids today, had not yet really been invented in 1999.
The system was never very unstable. The error rates are all low. The point is that it's now much more stable.

The reason I didn't sort error rates by month was to preserve statistical significance. If we try to only look at error rates from specific periods of time, we have to decide how short those periods of time are. Too long and we don't have data from some of the browsers; too short and we don't have enough data to form a significant opinion. It may have been possible to find a middle ground, but why bother when we can still get unbiased results for 80% of the browsers?
Major outage hits Microsoft Office 365
There's a difference between "that guy's kind of a jerk, but I don't think he knows it" and deleting paid accounts and backups over some words on Twitter.

Yeah, there's a not-so-subtle line there.

I would be concerned if an employee of mine exhibited that behavior, because I've seen it before. We had a technically brilliant, but socially ... scary ... individual working as a sysadmin. He blew up about a decision to abandon all of our 1-off mail platforms and switch purely to Exchange (rather than GroupWise, which he preferred and most in our location used).

He was the technical lead for our GroupWise deployment, so to voice his dissatisfaction with the decision that idiots in upper management made, he did us the courtesy of wiping out a swath of our employee's mailboxes contained on one of the servers. And, much like this guy but on a grander scale, began erasing the current set of tapes that had backed up most of our servers our location.

We didn't end up losing much, and I can't remember why (we had tapes stored off-site off-line, but they were only moved weekly). The thing that was most shocking was all of the profanity and yelling originating from his cube while he was packing up his things under direct supervision of a member of corporate security. He seemed genuinely surprised he was told his services were no longer necessary (they even laid him off rather than firing him for cause, allowing him severance pay and unemployment during a hiring boom). At no point did he seem like a stable guy. His boss liked him because he was very smart and the result of his cleverness was enough of an improvement to services and reduction in costs that his instabilities could be argued away ("He launched this project that's bringing in X revenue, he's just a little strange, that's all.").

Sad thing: he continued to find employment and continued to get laid off (5 places, I believe), then died at 37 of a heart attack. The guy who noticed the obit forwarded it out to our team like it was some sort of vindication "See, he DIED because he was such a jerk!". Even normally decent people have a mean streak about them, I guess.
I just couldn't pass up the obvious joke. He had it back up a few minutes after I posted that, which makes him a winner compared to some. I posted a real comment as well.
True, he did. I was talking about something slightly different -- laziness in terms of learning to interact well with other humans.
And not a single word about the patents themselves.
I would imagine 2 things are happening here:

1. Less people are buying PCs and laptops as they are realizing that browsing the web and checking email can be done with tablets and netbooks (and smartphones). A few years ago you got a PC. Now you get an iPad or iPhone.

2. Less companies are buying servers as they are moving to the "cloud". The "cloud" is of course bullshit (no real scalability, piss-poor performance, etc) but the marketing won.

My understanding of Dell is that most of the profits they make are derived from upgrades and from the more expensive systems. All their "deal" PCs and laptops are loss-leaders (break-even at best).
Or the infamous flight attendant grabbing a beer and pulling the escape chute...

I'm an engineer with "people skills" who has worked large and small organizations including a hosting company and many freelance jobs. No one should be really surprised when a hosting company employee goes off, because it is one of the shittiest customer service jobs you can have in terms of the entitlement factor and low margins. That's not to say the guy should be excused, but just pointing out that it doesn't necessarily means he lacks people skills, it may just have been the straw that broke the camel's back.

As far as engineers talking to customers goes, I think that depends heavily on the company. Obviously engineers can provide better customer support than someone with little technical knowledge, but if there are many customers then there's most likely more bang for the buck solving technical problems that affect many people. Personally I've often felt visceral frustration with taking the time to provide quality support when I know full well that I'm sacrificing potential productivity to help one person when there are issues affecting hundreds or thousands that are still unresolved. I justify it by chalking it up to the (perhaps) intangible benefit of providing truly exceptional customer service.
You can get more free VM time from EC2
No Server Required - Jekyll & Amazon S3
Well, then you object to more than just the section head, right? Because he didn't suggest anywhere that he approved of short, focused, tiny meetings. As far as I can tell, he meant precisely what he said in the title.
That's a list of all the people who are on officehours.tv (http://officehours.tv/faqs), not Dustin's CV.
Java Oyunlar
1. Go to File > Open, then click Browse...
2. In 'File name', type 'c:\windows\system32' and press enter
3. Change the 'Files of type' field to 'All Files'
4. Drag any of the files into the 'cmd' icon

Bonus: type `explorer C:\` if you want to snoop around. There's a copy of Safari at C:\Program Files\Safari\Safari.exe
How we came to name our startup after a hobo
Concurrency in Ruby almost as good as Node.js
http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2011/06/ios-5-brings-nitro...
No, I think the author's point stands. He isn't saying that engineers should all go to cocktail parties and mingle, he's saying specifically that you should be able to not be an asshole.

Personally I'm not great at socializing either, but I make every effort to be polite and courteous when speaking on behalf of the company.
There are also people like me -- I switched to Verizon specifically to get the first Droid. (Granted I was on Virgin before...)
Low-spec computer: Alt Linux vs Windows 7 Ultimate - Linux notes from DarkDuck
If it was true, it would be incredible dedication. Lots of people want them dead. To put your life (and your kids' lives!) on the line like that for either cause (legitimate bigotry or reverse shill) is insane regardless
> Fill the slot that was created when IBM sold thinkpad to Levano.

Shame that not many Latitudes have trackpoints these days. You can tell that Dell has been trying to be "almost Thinkpad" for years now with that line. What would they have to add (or ad) to make the jump?
Nick Jones is Leaving Facebook
I haven't had the patience to go that high (or bothered to script it), but I've gotten about halfway there before. Depending on what kind of profile it is, though, and what areas you're following people in, many of the follow-backs can be pretty low-quality. If you're in any neighborhood with lots of other people trying to optimize their twitter followers, you can get a bunch of auto-followbacks from people who don't ever read their twitter stream. Produces an interesting situation where there might be dozens of accounts all following each other but not reading each other, a fake attention economy with nobody paying attention. :) Perhaps as if magazines upped circulation by agreeing to buy copies of each others' magazines and then throw them away.
Really you have come to the conclusion that self-publishing does not produce cheap high-quality books.
A good bit of the "cloud" is run on Dell servers....
MileWise Launches Search Engine for Frequent Fliers
The problem is that too much stuff on the Web is pre-digested pap. In terms of what Stephenson wrote in In the Beginning Was the Command Line..., it is turning Morlocks into Eloi.
> helps them see through the seemingly-meaningless boilerplate and social grease that we call people skills.

Seemingly-meaningless boilerplate? I disagree: (1) There's plenty of meaning to be found if you want to pick up a psychology, PR, or sociology book and actively try to learn something about people, (2) People skills are extremely important if your company needs to deal with the public or forge business relationships. You are just making your life difficult if you refuse to acknowledge or learn what most of the world takes for granted.
Text Editors Must Die
> I'd much rather have seen Zach focus more on his actual point: holding short, focused, and tiny meetings.

That is nowhere in sight in the post. In fact, the content of the section is even more damning than the title:

> I tend to loathe meetings even more than 37signals. I despise them.

> meetings pull you from doing actual work in order to talk about doing work.

> meetings are utterly forgettable. Even if you take meeting notes, you can’t capture them all.

Zach does not say he likes "short, focused and tiny meetings", Zach says he hates meetings as much as a human being can hate a concept.
I'm reading a bit into his words, yes. Here's the part of interest:

"""You don’t have this problem with chat transcripts. Forcing people to reduce their otherwise rambling thoughts into concrete sentences helps focus discussion, too.

We’ll have meetings at GitHub, but I can count the number of full “meetings” we’ve had in the last year and a half on one hand."""

The former bit implying that the focus of sentences helps, the latter bit implying to keep the membership of the meeting to only those required.

Again: siloing is far more toxic than meetings in my experience. It's far too easy for a dev to wander down a path that has no value when operating in a silo. Agile tells us that we need to exist in a state of constant communication and feedback. This necessitates meeting with people in some fashion.
I remember buying from dell in the 90s when they had decent customer service and made good (for a large OEM) computers.

1. There website was much simpler and not at all like the overload piece of crap site they have now. People use to go on Dells website to configure a computer. That was their advantage, configurability. But now doing that involves one of the worse web site UI I've ever seen. That tab thing to go through options suck. Just bring back the long form. HP does the same thing and it sucks (HP website is the worse website i've ever seen, it's painful to use. But they own the retail store market)

2. They need to get back to making decent computers again. The build quality has gone way down compared to what they used to do. They even managed to make Alienware suck ;p

3. Their customer service is nothing like what it used to be.

They really sold their soul (Where the dell dude?) to save cost at every corner and it shows.
There could still be an opportunity for them to gain some traction in mobile devices, possibly if they could leverage their PC cred and release more customer-centric Android phones and tablets with unlocked firmware, and a focus on early (and sustained) adoption of OS updates and empowerment of users, business IT departments, hobbyists and hackers.

One big disadvantage for Dell is a lack of software design expertise, which limits the depth of their contribution to the computing state-of-the-art. This also makes it very difficult for a company like Dell to differentiate itself from their competitors, and be more than simply an interchangeable part of a commodity computing ecosystem, one in which they no longer have any kind of efficient manufacturing and distribution chain advantage. A further disadvantage is that Dell has traditionally had a lack of relations with retailers and distributors, which worked fine when you were selling a familiar product with incrementally faster specs, but not so much when you need to educate your customers about a new type of product.

Ultimately, Dell's true success (represented by a large growth in stock value) would seem to depend on getting back ahead of the curve to drive large growth in demand, for example with advanced form factors such as head-mounted display technology and wearable computing/NFC. They'll have to do something to bide their time until they can deliver a complete novel mass-market solution of some kind, which will have to be very polished and obviously valuable to consumers if they are to have any kind of lasting advantage over their competitors. This would require the acquisition of some serious software and UX design chops, along with a rethinking of their distribution to feature 3rd party retailers, and a shift to marketing something truly novel.

On second thought, that other alternative you mentioned is starting to look pretty good.
The same thing they should do anywhere else, and this has not changed since the days of building cathedrals from stone:

1. Design.

2. Supporting the implementation effort of the design.

3. Governance, i.e. making sure that what was designed is what is delivered.

Of course there are many other tasks that a software architect in particular has to carry out, but in my day job I never stray too far from the three fundamentals above.
Tim is pure infotainment. Some of his stuff is crazy and over the top, and it is mainly there as great fodder for talk shows.
> What do you think "maturity and respect" means in the
> context of interacting with other humans?

We're not talking cross-cultural divides here, we're talking about engineers not being allowed to hide behind the excuse that they're "not good with people" to allow them to be jerks.
Apologies, but my brain turns off when the word 'Agile' is used in a sentence in such a way that it could be comfortably replaced by the name of a deity.

Anyways. Maybe semantics.. My points were just that meetings are basically awful, and that there's a distinction between communication and meetings... Meetings aren't the only form of communication.
Thanks for all the feedback from our dev post on the blog guys. TechCrunch picked us up a couple days later!
For a number of years I had a team in five offices in four timezones, so asynchronous working became the norm. We used Skype however. The only "rule" that needed to be enforced was "Away means Away, Available means Available"

A lot of realtime problems got stymied by people thinking others were ignoring them.
Notch Challenges Bethesda to a Game of Quake 3
they are on campfire, they are constantly in communication

I echoed his sentiments in a post I wrote about working remotely - http://arandomurl.com/2011/09/03/working-remotely.html
The United States does have a central bank; it's the Federal Reserve. They kept interest rates abnormally low for much of the last decade which meant that borrowing was incredibly cheap causing many consumers to overextend themselves. Regulation, government intervention they're the same thing. It is undeniable the government intervened in the housing market and this was discussed earlier in this thread[1].

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2896728
"As a technical person who has worked many customer-facing support roles"

Stopped reading right there.

"I am a technical person who also has ability Y, therefore all technical people should have ability Y."

This is the thinking that would sit Magic Johnson down and say "Your ball game is pretty good, but your golf game is awful. Stop working on your basketball skills and start golf training."

Bottom line: customer support requires ability, certain personality traits, and training. Do not let anyone (technical, non-technical, CFO, anyone) handle customer support if they are not qualified. It will end badly.
Want to Start a Company in the World's Sixth-Most Populous Country?
It seems to me like basing patentability on time constraints actually imposes a distinction between hardware and software, regardless of how you feel about their logical interchangeability. For example, an algorithm for real time graphics processing would be just as impractical to run on ENIAC as it would be to do with pencil and paper, but there's no reason you couldn't port the software. So if the validity of the patent is based on its usefulness in a real-time application, it would have to be something like "running algorithm x using computer system y to achieve the desired result in z length of time." Including both the software and hardware used would be the only way to ensure that the time constraint was actually met. I think it's obvious that very few (if any) software patents could meet that criterion.
Also there is an essay: http://jseliger.com/2010/10/02/how-to-get-your-professors%E2...
It's a joke -- Dell had said the same about Apple way back when.
I think the 2 "skills" in question here are "tact and maturity".

No one is asking engineers to be salesmen or glad-handing PR people. But as so many others have pointed out, any mature adult, no matter their vocation, should have the basic social understanding of "this is ok to do/say" and "this is not ok to do/say" for most given situations.

i.e. tact..

And to all of you who hide behind the "that's not learnable for me, I'm awkward/nerdy/shy/neckbearded" excuses, I call bullshit. Grow up.

I was the epitome of awkward, shy and socially inept (since childhood) as a developer, and in my mid-20s I made the conscious choice to overcome these things. To become more professional and to learn how to communicate and interact properly with my co-workers, superiors, reports and YES even customers.

And I did it by just throwing myself in the fire. It was hard at first, but I figured it out. And it has opened so many doors and opportunities for me.

The combination of my technical competency as a developer and my professional communication skills has been a huge asset for me when looking for work and new opportunities.

Plus, on the lighter side, it eventually helped me with my inter-personal communication and social skills as an added bonus! (i.e. it got me laid more) :-)
Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization freed from Windows fetters
Six things consumers can expect from Google acquiring Motorola
While I really like the idea, I have a hard time supporting something that Dustin Curtis has a hand in, in any capacity. He's a bit smug/arrogant for my taste.
Steal a loaf of bread and get sent to Australia...
I'm emailing customers back and forth a lot, and I like to "humanize" the company a bit. We're based in Toronto, and if we have someone based in Montreal, Ottawa, or Vancouver that emails during the winter I'll usually throw in a jab about hockey.

Something like "You should see it show up in the mail before the next time the Senators win" - 90% of people are at least aware of hockey around here, and appreciate a little rivalry. Most respond back with a friendly jab at the Toronto Maple Leafs, etc.

Doesn't work for everyone, but I've never had anyone say anything bad about it - in fact it usually gives us something to joke about when/if we talk in person.
Street View goes to the Amazon