skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: What helped you go from an indiv. contributor to a tech lead/manager?
I'd like to see those who have moved from being an individual contributor to more of a lead or a mgmt. role, the steps they took to get there or help and resources they've found to be helpful.<p>I ask since software engineering as a discipline usually does not emphasize the skills needed to lead or manage engineers. Some shops just award promotions based on seniority, but more often than not that turns out poorly - or disastrous, if that person has no interest in management to begin with.<p>For those who started out putting on headphones to pump out code to eventually inspiring a team to come together to create an awesome product and attract other top engineers, what's the secret?
That will happen if the role of editor is replaced rather than (as Yahoo is doing) augmented.

I don't think you should fear a decline in editorial quality as much as you should fear the devaluation of news. If people want quality they must be willing to pay for it. If they don't want to, whose fault is that?
Remains of Satellite May Never Be Found, NASA Says
The competition table is lacking, I think Riak hits all the points the author is aiming at: http://www.basho.com/products_architecture.php

(I don't want to diss creation in general or an open source project in particular, but the presence of a "competition" table implies that this is going to fill a gap)
I've shied away from Clojure because I have no Java experience. However, I really love Lisp, and I'd love to get some practical experience with it.

Has anyone used Clojure as their introduction to the Java ecosystem? Did you survive?
Walking around airports, going through customs, switching planes, waiting for matinee, paperwork, hotels, etc.
While I find Jeffries's attempt to make a sudoku solver with TDD a bit embarrassing, he's still done more to contribute to the debate than people who are standing on the sidelines being smug (or posting snarky comments on github). I admire his openness and humility.

Also, it's another example of iterative change causing something to go in circles around a local maxima. One issue with TDD is that this can still feel like progress - your tests are still changing from red to green, after all.
Am I the only one who thinks this is a major embarrassment for NASA?
I mean, after all the publicity, "will know the location 2 hours from impact", etc, etc, they fail to know where the damn thing crashed...
The day Steve Jobs saved Apple
Engineers are actively working on APIs for this, but it's quite a bit more complicated than it may seem at first. Low-level capabilities like these need to be implemented such that they don't conflict with our extension permission model and general security posture. For instance, we don't want an extension with the WebRequest API to be able to prevent you from uninstalling it, or to manipulate other extensions and internal browser configuration.
You sure about that?

I already do click-to-play for plugins in Chrome, and it doesn't seem to help much. According to Panopticlick, there are 19.75 bits of data in my Browser Plugin Details, and for the "value" it describes all the plugins I have enabled.

Also with click-to-play enabled, Panopticlick can see my system fonts (20.75+ bits of data, one in 1,769,122 browsers has this value). Apparently Panopticlick is not using one of my plugins to get that data... I haven't whitelisted eff.org or otherwise enabled plugins there.

Looks like Panopticlick is using JavaScript/CSS font detection methods:
http://www.lalit.org/lab/javascript-css-font-detect/

Hmm... Panopticlick reports "No Flash or Java fonts detected" when I try it with IE9 on the same system. Is IE9 doing something to block Javascript/CSS detection of those fonts, or does Panopticlick have a bug with IE9 or what? Looks like that method worked for IE6/7...
Glad to hear that you've identified another recruiter who will best represent and look out your interests.

Contractors are clients of recruiting firms and the companies to which they are applying. If you don't feel you're receiving the kind of "customer service" you truly deserve feel free to explore other firms or work with other recruiters from the same company. The recruiter who you have the best rapport with will return your inquiries or be proactive in giving you a status update in a timely manner, no matter how busy their schedules become.

The economy in the last several years has presented some hiring circumstances I've never seen before. Some companies have decided to hold off on hiring abruptly or discharged people they recently recruited given incoming news.

Good luck and embrace the times as a learning experience.
SEO - Fehler, die unbedingt vermeiden sollten
I use noscript, ghostery and requestpolicy, but so far, I haven't managed to integrate requestpolicy into my daily browsing (I have it set to 'allow all' with a few blacklisted sites) because it's too much effort to figure out exactly what is needed by every single website.

It's hard enough with noscript to randomly guess at what should be allowed for a given site. You take a guess, then slowly expand the number of temp permissions til the site eventually loads properly.
Yea that was a concern and a choice we made. It would indeed be completely trivial to follow people who tweet at the bot.

In the end there were a couple primary reasons I think we decided not to do that.

First: Nobody really uses direct messages. I don't think I've ever received or sent even one.

Second: The idea is for it to be trivial, little things. Things that would be meaningless if seen by someone else. Eg, not "colonoscopy ; tomorrow 3pm", but more mundane stuff like you know you're going shopping tomorrow so you ask it "don't forget to buy milk ; tomorrow at noon". I check twitter randomly throughout the day, so these sorts of jog-my-memory things are useful.

Lastly: We thought that perhaps if it gains any traction a direct message option could be something available to premium account holders, or something :)

Definitely don't think of it as a replacement for an alarm on your phone or something, it's about casual stuff.

"@lmklater check on lmklater post on hn ; in 3 days" :)
scary...
the fact that Riak underlying storage is plug-in based (bitcask, innodb, leveldb) makes it even greater.
Clues To Amazon’s “Prime eBooks” Loan Program Found In Kindle Code
> e.g. using machine learning for handwriting recognition

This is one of the problems with software patents. Using machine learning for handwriting recognition is a pretty obvious "innovation" to anyone with a little background in AI who has thought about the problem at all. If we allow people to patent "using machine learning for X" for all activities X, that blocks a lot of innovation. The field is moving so fast right now that people are thinking of new ideas all the time; we don't need patents to encourage that.

There are some non-obvious algorithms that are worthy of patenting (that is, if algorithms were actually patentable). One that comes to mind is the fast inverse square root algorithm (https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Fast_inverse_...). In our field, trade secret (e.g. compiled source code) is usually sufficient to provide protection against a competitor stealing a novel algorithm, rendering patents largely unnecessary.
"... Display of superior knowledge is as great a vulgarity as display of superior wealth — greater indeed, inasmuch as knowledge should tend more definitely than wealth towards discretion and good manners. ..." [0]

Perfectly valid Adam, but clearer if you use a simpler non-romantic, common use replacement. The objective is to communicate, not impress.

[0] Fowler, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Dictionary_of_Modern_English_...
The videos are already available at http://www.justin.tv/startupbootcamp/videos, although I don't know why the quality is so poor.
OK, I was sceptical until the Q&A (about 45 minutes in), when he is asked about blue-sky research. His answer - private companies and foundations do a lot of blue-sky research (think Bell Labs), and governments are actually pretty lousy about doing it as they only care about economic growth (and the next election). It would be nice if it was expanded a bit though.

Towards the end, he also points out that patents in pharmaceuticals are acceptable, because of the costs of regulatory compliance. If 99% of your costs are getting FDA approval (which are needed, to stop drug companies pushing ineffective and dangerous quack treatments), then the patent is needed to protect you.
What's the consistency model?
I assume eventual consistent, if not then what the availability model?

The description of distributed data store should specify the tradeoffs w.r.t. the CAP theorem.
Fender Stratocaster Guitar
IIRC click-to-play doesn't prevent detection of the plugin; it just prevents it from initializing. And you should also be able to get at fonts by using CSS, SVG, or canvas just to name a few.

As for the larger question, I really don't think there's any way of preventing sites from uniquely fingerprinting a given browser installation. There are just so many places where fingerprints leak through (and the behavior is relied on) that I'd expect it would take a massive overhaul of the web as we know it. Although, I'm a security guy not a privacy guy, so maybe I'm just too pessimistic.
Abstract:

> The current research explores how roles that possess power but lack status influence behavior toward others. Past research has primarily examined the isolated effects of having either power or status, but we propose that power and status interact to affect interpersonal behavior. Based on the notions that a) low-status is threatening and aversive and b) power frees people to act on their internal states and feelings, we hypothesized that power without status fosters demeaning behaviors toward others. To test this idea, we orthogonally manipulated both power and status and gave participants the chance to select activities for their partners to perform. As predicted, individuals in high-power/low-status roles chose more demeaning activities for their partners (e.g., bark like a dog, say “I am filthy”) than did those in any other combination of power and status roles. We discuss how these results clarify, challenge, and advance the existing power and status literatures.
We put the source out there and try to be as transparent as we reasonably can. In the end though, people make their own decisions.
One year after accidentally falling in love with Rails
what is the link to the deaded article
"The Flow" [video with annotations]
Is it possible to restrict requests to the host in the URL I'm visiting? XSS, DNT, etc. become much less of an issue when you can block all external resources requested by a page.
More thermodynamics than causality. Most physical processes are reversible.
A kernel.org status update (no more SSH for developers)
Baseball vs real life
My first guess would be triggering (Person B sees a post by Person A and decides to post their own).
I read SICP in high school, and it really changed how I thought about programming. Before that, the languages I knew were Python, Java, C++. Ooh, ooh, and TI-BASIC. It seemed to my naive like languages were done. I'd written a language of my own, and looking at it now, the changes I'd made look so shallow nowadays...

SICP changed that. SICP didn't talk about classes/objects by introducing the syntax, it gave a problem where polymorphism was a perfect solution, and built up an object system from scratch. SICP didn't talk about mutation as just something you do --- SICP discussed how it solved a specific problem. Not claiming that SICP is the be-all end-all of textbooks; but if you're motivated and already know how to program, it is an a brilliant excursion into the fundamentals of programming. In any case, after SICP I realized that language theory is a branch of computer science itself; a branch I soon fell in love with.

There's a continuation to this story --- the summer after high school, I wrote a compiler and started reading lambda the ultimate. Learned type theory, started writing Haskell and Common Lisp, and quickly produced several dozen interpreters... And now I'm doing research under Sussman himself!

And so for this Kindle-optimized SICP, thank you!
I'm sure it will get at least one more young hacker into language theory...
The calf grew into a cow at about the rate that Milo grew into a man.

Calves grow for a year or so.

A rather freakish man apparently, since grown cows can weigh over 1000 lb.

Also freakish since he had the maturation rate of a cow, or had a knack for breeding cows with the maturation rate of a man.

The point is, the calf grew old along with the boy.

No, it didn't.

I have been pondering this story for a couple of years...

Have you really been pondering this story for a couple years? Maybe not that closely.

Your metaphor is broken. Milo lifted lots of different calves.
Ikea does indeed sell online. But I agree: I don't think this would provide any significant value compared to just going to the site.
A lot of the barriers are in your head ;-)
Why being a female founder sucks... and rocks
"... Facebook's friend recommendations are a good way of being able to tell who has defriended you. ..."

how?
Thank you to the poster and the author of this document.

Trying to read SICP on the new kindle in PDF format was impossible!
I want an API to tap into time itself. Eventually, I'd want to be able to travel through it, but in the beta I'd settle for just the ability to pause it whenever I like. :)
That will be possible with the WebRequest API, yes: http://code.google.com/chrome/extensions/trunk/experimental.... For example, you'd be able to intercept and block network requests from a particular tab that didn't hit the same domain.

The API in experimental now, so download a dev release of Chrome/Chromium, enable experimental APIs via `about:flags`, and start filing bug reports. :)
Only we care about this. All the privacy invasions facebook has forced upon its users have been readily accepted, and it keeps growing. Facebook knows this. Most people care more about UI changes, rather than this invasion.

I run facebook on the iphone, or in a separate browser, to keep in touch with some relatives in far away countries. It is great for that, and I am very happy to be able to do that.
I still cannot believe that Google was willing to $6bn!
The non-scaling nature of GroupOn always seemed obvious to me.
What's the story behind the name?

Also, do you think the "Built with" blurb at the bottom adds value to the site? I know I think it's cool when I see stuff like that, but I can't imagine a non-developer caring.
Yes, it's based on a literal translation of a latin idiom: petitio principo (IIRC). A more unambiguous phrasing is: assuming the antecedent.
Why not just use Chromium?
Walking around the streets isn't quite the same thing as walking around your own place, though.
I'd suggest changing the name. It's very hard to remember and doesn't seem to be an obvious abbreviation or misspelling of some other word.
Totally agree. I'm based in the UK and I'm looking forward to putting his methods into practice over this side of the pond.
Sorry, I can't. It wants me to log in with Google ID which I don't and won't have.
I use Ghostery as well, but few people seem to be aware that you can also use AdBlock for this. Subscribing to the Fanboy (or EasyList) "Tracking/Stats Blocking" filter will block cross-site requests to sites like Google Analytics and Facebook just like Ghostery will.
It's a bit of a silly dichotomy. No linguist will deny that certain sentences are ungrammatical ("cat sees I"), so they are just wrong. And lots of philosophers believe that normativity, what is wrong and right, is an important part of language. But it appears to be something dynamic, language changes over time, yet I can't change language by pretending dog means cat today.
So prescriptivism is wrong in the sense that you can't claim to have the sole authority on something. But descriptivism is vacuous, in that it doesn't explain the pervasive tendency for people to consider things to lie on continuum of wrong and right.
How narcissistic must we be these days to think that our friends actually care about every little thing we do? It has apparently reached the point that we just want to share everything we're doing without applying any kind of personal filter to the stream of data we are sending out. This is silly. We're going to be swimming in a tide of noise and get sick of this whole social thing if someone doesn't slow down and consider what it is that we actually care to know about our friends.
It's amazing how much effort has gone into phoney-baloney correlations between personality and signs of the zodiac, when there's so much real correlation between your personality and your birth order.

Also: how old you are compared to the rest of your class at school. The older ones tend to wind up more dominant, the younger ones less so.
That's not the point and you know it.

http://www.douglasadams.com/dna/pedants.html
I'd describe you as a possessing several traits that make you well suited for a career in medicine.

Hypomanic personality. Characterized by low need for sleep, excessive energy.

High IQ/ general intelligence.

Low tolerance for risk.

You are probably making less money than you could as entrepreneur or in finance but that's consistent with your risk tolerance.

The professional medical career path is almost ideal for you and the author of the original post would probably acknowledge this. This is probably less true for many of the individuals who are steered into medicine by the elite educational system.
I never thought I'd want to post a facepalm picture on HN.
I don't think it adds value, but meh, I just added it and forgot about it honestly haha.

Basically, I wanted to originally create a documenting system to track bugs, so that is where the idea originally came from. I was basically trying to find a good domain, and dcmntr.com was available.

The way I remember it is to just spell 'documenter' without any vowels
It might not be a perfect metaphor but it does introduce the concept nicely. I have no reason to doubt his claim that he's pondered it for a couple of years.
It's a Greek myth, so how much realism do you really expect? For what it's worth, the way I've always heard it was that the boy and the calf did grow up together.

Seriously: your only problem with the story is that the cow and the boy grew up at about the same rate? Really?
I'll take that into consideration. I was originally going to be called appchat, but all of the domains were taken, and I already had purchased dcmntr.com
Here is an interesting article that sees telecommuting as an increasing phenomena:

http://mashable.com/2011/09/17/work-from-home-infographi/

Telecommuting reduces overhead cost (rent, utility, etc) and gas usages but it's still important to maintain rapport with your team. Yay video teleconferencing!
Can Unlicensed Drivers Get Auto Insurance Coverage? Illinois House Bill HB3385
Any help on how to get this on to the kindle. I've cloned the repo but I'm not sure how to transfer it to my kindle.
Also, it's by far the easiest way to generate brand evangelists.
Sounds like FB is recommending people he thought he was already friends with, but who stealth-defriended him somewhere along the way.
Heh, no thanks, I'd rather not know.
i think venturebeat.com wins. viewing an article there shows 18 blocked pieces-of-crap.
I do the same thing, and it really doesn't take much. I've been blocking 3rd party cookies for over a year now, and the only one I had to add was rememberthemilk, so that I could include my TODO list in a GMail widget.

It's pretty simple, really: Edit Preferences -> Privacy -> "Firefox will: Use custom settings for history" -> <uncheck> Accept third-party cookies. To add an exception, click "Exceptions..." on that same page, type the domain name, and click Allow.

You can still receive normal cookies, but now third-party sites can't track you unless the sites you're visiting are sharing data server-side.
One problem is that Chrome is not open source - Chromium is. But 99% of people use Chrome, and there is no way to build Chrome from source to be sure what code is running.

We have to take Google's word for it that Chrome is identical to Chromium as regards privacy, and as others stated, Google's business interest is clearly to track user information, not to respect their privacy.
Don't miss the "Tracking/Stats Blocking" as well.

Note that these are simply filters for AdBlock Plus. If you're already using it, it's pretty easy to add a couple more filters.
Hi dnguyen... email me at jordanmetzner at gmail
thanks solo.... looking something paid or a partner at a startup as well.... just a good opportunity to work hard and build cool things.
For me, the best way to use Facebook is to "mute" everyone. Family, friends--everyone.

It has the following advantages:
- No one knows that I've muted them.
- I'm still on Facebook, so if people need to contact me through that medium, they can still do it.
- If I'm really curious about what anyone has been up to, I can still look at their page
- No need to log to procrastinate because I never have any updates.

Kind of perfect, for me at least.
From the man who discovered Stuxnet, dire warnings one year later
If you're going to go that route, it's much better to use 0.0.0.0 so that you're not sending HTTP requests to your machine. Otherwise, anything listening on port 80 (or 443, in some cases) will be receiving the requests intended for Facebook.
Dear Facebook: Stop Wasting My Time(line)
Amazon To Possibly Unveil Its Tablet Next Week
Plug it into USB, drag it into the Documents folder once the Kindle comes up as a volume on your machine.
> I read SICP in high school

In my alternative life I would have done the same. Good luck to you with your endeavours.
The .mobi file is a Kindle document. Either plug your Kindle into your computer (it works just like a USB drive) and drop the .mobi into the documents folder, or send it as an attachment to your Kindle's email address. (You can find your Kindle's address here: https://www.amazon.com/gp/digital/fiona/manage/#manageDevice...)
I'm sorry, I was imprecise; I was referring to piecemeal unit testing.
I believe the sicp.mobi file is the one you are looking for. Download it, and copy it to the documents folder on your kindle, when you've attached it to a computer.
What Is This Devops Thing, Anyway?
[Analysis + High Res Photo] Samsung Italy Store Copies Apple App Store Icon
I suspect it will take an extended time of economic malaise to kill the 'trickle-down' mindset. After all, this mindset took root in the western hemisphere during the time of Reagan and Thatcher (read, 80's) and the Horatio Alger myth remains extremely attractive to the temporarily embarrassed millionaires which keep cutting themselves by voting the right - at least the non-progressive part (is there such a thing as a progressive right?) - into power.

[As an Asian, this myth is actually far stronger in this emerging, newly industrializing region. But there is a potential for people to quickly lose faith in it.]
It's a .mobi file. You can transfer it to kindle in either of the 2 ways.

1) Connect your Kindle to computer and copy the book to documents folder in your Kindle.

2) Send the .mobi file as an attachment in email to your Kindle specific email id. For incurring no charges, use the free.kindle.com id. Once you connect to Wi-fi next time, book will be transferred to your Kindle over the air.