skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I see a lot of bad behaviours on all sides here and have to agree with many of the posters below that it may be time to jump ship to a different company. Or if the company you work for is large enough you can transfer to a different department, just get away from where you are now.

In regards to some of your points above, I think that it is often an issue that changes are made by upper management or by someone in control/power that do not make a lot of sense to everyone else. I'd suggest taking a positive and proactive approach to this situation. You can begin by approaching the individual responsible in a friendly manner and ask something along the lines of, "It was interesting how you decided to do XYZ. I want to understand your thinking here. Can you tell me why you decided to do that?" The basic idea is to get them to open up to you. They may have a very good reason for their idea that you aren't aware of. Maybe it will make perfect sense to you afterwards, or maybe their idea is sound but how they implemented it does not make a lot of sense, or could be improved. If the later is the case then you can work with them to help improve it, maybe start with, "That's a really interesting idea. Do you think that it would be helpful if we were to move the link over here to make it more visible to users?" or something along those lines.

A good technique when you have to say something negative is to make a sandwich out of it. Start with something positive, state your negative, and finish with something positive.

Shame on your manager for passing blame. IT sends a bad message to everyone. A good leader takes responsibility for their team work even if someone else screwed up. If someone is going to get fired over it, then it's a slightly different story, but for the most part a good manager is a shit shield for their employees.

Passive-aggressive = bad, unhealthy attitude
It will only cause problems and you'll lose respect and friends
Being a whiner= bad, you can "complain" constructively so it doesn’t come across as whining. You'll get a lot more accomplished and gain recognition/status in the process.

Decreasing team moral = bad. It's not always easy to say the right thing or be "politically correct", but if you want to be a good team member you will need to do so. You want to make change for the better, but you might be hindering the change as much as anyone else. You can be "straightforward and sincere" without bringing the team down.

This book might help you in learning to be a force of change in your company while being positive at the same time:
http://www.amazon.com/Human-Factors-Project-Management-Techn...
A lot of road users are killed each year by collisions with animals.

http://www.iihs.org/research/topics/vehicle_animal_collision...
Where are you thinking of holding the game? We put a little something together pretty much weekly in San Francisco.
I never did enough (or the right type of) drugs to enjoy Pink Floyd.
VMware Announces vCloud Initiative for Enterprise-Class Cloud Computing
Thanks @SwellJoe,

This is the kind of advice I searched for. I actually feel like a jackass, but I don't have experience which such conflicts and I let things get out of control. I actually was under the impression that I could change things just by pointing out the flaws. I was wrong of course.

Unfortunately I am the type of developer that's interested in multiple topics, ranging from algorithms (parsers, data-mining, inductive reasoning), to usability. And it sucks because I have opinions about everything.

Thanks,
I find this extraordinarily interesting, because I've come to the conclusion over the last year+ that I would do a non-software startup if I ever do another. I have all sorts of invention ideas (one somewhat similar to this actually) and figured I'd either run one of those or a restaurant idea I have.
Or partners. Partners don't need to be co-founders, but can have the same control and say.
A real renaissance man, avant la lettre.
All the reviews that compare the Macbook Air with the Thinkpad (and the linked review actually doesn't - only the submission title does) miss an essential point: the Lenovo laptop simply doesn't LOOK as thin as the Air. If the people who buy the Air do so for its looks and prestige rather than for practical reasons, then no, the X301 isn't an alternative.
The ability to swap out the optical drive for another battery is fantastic. I'm still on my X60 (which is easily the best computer I've ever owned) but will probably have to upgrade to this, pending approval from my accounting department (i.e. wife).
Unfortunately, that was a one-time event. A great time was had by all, but I am no longer living in Montreal. It will continue, but in another city and in a completely different form. Faceless Invasion is a broader organization, and each game aims to be both subversive and unique.
Python packaging systems roundup
Your game isn't crashing, it's protesting your strong-arm tactics toward taxation.

/tongue-in-cheek.
"In letting Lehman fail the federal government puts a fine point on an obvious question: Why didn't they let Bear Stearns go, too? This business about the markets having time to adjust to Lehman's problems is baloney. The markets didn't adjust to Bear Stearns collapse; the markets looked at what the Fed had done for Bear Stearns and assumed they'd do it for Lehman."

From http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601039&sid=ai1w...
It does look like a dogs dinner though, what are all the bits and pieces around the LCD?
What are all the holes and chunks of missing plastic in the base?
The Game didn't really start the genre. Microsoft was doing ARGs internally before 1997, and possibly provided some of the inspiration for the film. There was also Dreadnot which predates the film as well.
I still can't figure out why I need my laptop to taper down to a thin point like that. With the iPhone, the thinness is pretty boss, since it takes up less valuable pocket real-estate. Having gone from a Treo to a Moto Q, I totally understand why I want my phone to be thinner, and find that one of the more appealing things about the iPhone.

By my notebook, not so much. I want it to be lighter, sure, but somewhere below 4 lbs even that becomes irrelevant. (It might not if I were older.) My X60 is slightly thicker than this X301, and it fits in any carrier's laptop pocket with ample room to spare. I can even stick it in bags not designed for laptops, but rather for paper notepads with ease.

Why do I want it to be thinner? And who spends a few K on a laptop for looks?
Well its easy when they have all that info on their whois info, but with Google anyone can be a private eye, most people make it very easy to find their info since they use the same usernames on all the sites they visit. So you have 2 options really, a)use a separate username for each website or b) use only one username but make it so generic that if someone searched for it, they'd get a lot of irrelevant junk
I think most of his analysis is reasonable, certainly I think many of the Mac icons work better at smaller sizes.

I think he cuts the Safari icon too much slack, however - I didn't realise that there were continents painted in the background of the compass, and the compass is fairly weak as a metaphor for the Web.

I think the Finder icon is poor too.

Disclosure: Another Mac user.
Sorry to hear about your situation.

I can't speak for the options available in your city / work pool, but it sounds like you've gone about as far as this job will take you.

If you are perceived to have a bad attitude (regardless of your actual intent) it is going to make your progress at the company difficult. Forget about moving up, and expect your opinions to be ignored because you will be perceived to be submarining the company. So much for that.

Brush up your resume (sad as this last year may seem) and consider what you learned here and what you'd like to see in a future role. Cast the lessons you learned in a positive light and try not to harbor any bitterness.

A former manager of mine (probably borrowed but) once said: "What do you get when you don't get what you want? Experience."

A lot of the things you're seeing are realities of the business world. Management doesn't outsource to overseas to argue with them, they just want something done cheap. Your management may not be doing the most they can to register their dissent, but it might be in the interest of saving their job, not in some form of ignorance. This isn't specific to overseas/outsourcing relationships, it's disappointigly common in conventional middle management, as well.

If it's any consolation, not all places are like this. You may find you can transfer to a better team within a company or may have to get a different job. I was in a similar place once (twice, ugh) and it was a huge weight off of my back when I got in to my new role where dissent is appreciated.
Google Chrome running on OSX and Linux
A discussion of what it took to do it:
http://www.codeweavers.com/about/people/blogs/jwhite/2008/9/...
Agreed. I've seen the 300s IRL, and while they look a little less sloppy than they do in photos, they definitely are not pretty. They're very functional in appearance. If you're buying a laptop to impress girls at Starbucks (in which case, you might want to do some serious self-evaluation) this ain't the one for you. If you want to get things done while traveling, you can't beat it.

I'm guessing that chunk of missing plastic is the little latch for the drive bay. Probably you push it to release the optical drive and swap in the battery. I'll let you know for sure when I get one :)
That view is remarkably well entrenched. On the last team I worked in, before coming to JTV, we were talking about the big Java project we were working on. I said if I had my way it would have been written in Common Lisp. Many on the team thought that was hilarious. One guy's response was "yeah, maybe if we had a supercomputer!"
Don't forget the Department of Energy and the various military funding agencies -- they fund an awful lot of external research as well (in addition to any unpublished stuff they might be doing internally). I'm sure the Department of Agriculture etc are also handing out plenty of grants in the relevant fields as well.
I have two comments:

(1) Though you didn't say it, the comparison to startup life is always implied here, so let's just be clear: most of these problems do not go away at a startup. The pressure to "just get things done" instead of "doing it right" is greater when it's your own company on the line. GitHub, for instance, was apparently bootstraped by shell-out'ing to the "git" command line tool. Shudder.

Yes, you can mess around with aesthetics and hack on cool things without getting yelled at your own company. But on the other hand, a lot of the time, when you do that, you're killing your company. I might rather get bitched at.

(2) You seem to care about some unimportant things. For instance, the "visual appeal" of your current app versus the company standard. Or the download footprint of your Javascript libraries. Or the soundness of your company's UX hired guns.

If you loved the app that you were working on, loved it for its own merits, you wouldn't care about trivia. You sound bored. It doesn't sound like a management problem. Maybe you just need to switch from payroll and pension benefits management software to Flash games? You can do that; just be prepared for the pay cut. Supply and demand, yo!
Point of caution: "Leave and start your own company" is exactly the same advice you're always going to wind up getting on this site.

You'll get it in response to any question from "I think I have a great idea for a company, and..." to "My coworker slurps his coffee" and "I can't decide what colour tie to wear today".

That doesn't make it bad advice, of course.
It makes me wonder how can he did very well as a scientist, a physicist, an anthropologist, a comparative sociologist, astronomer, a chemist, a critic of alchemy and astrology, an encyclopedist and historian, a geographer and traveller, a geodesist and geologist, a mathematician, a pharmacist and psychologist, an Islamic philosopher and a theologian.

Today, even to become a decent mathematician is not an easy job!
I think you should leave YCNews and start your own company.
well not at my crapy apt.

there is a 24 hour starbucks near by apt in laurel heights, but i wouldn't mind going to haight asbury, the lower haight, japantown, north fillmore, or.... somewhere else, just as long as i don't have to take 2 buses or a cab to get there.

i am still new to the area (june 30th), but i am getting the feel for the place.
where is your game?
Thinkpads have looked the same for nearly 2 decades...good looking is not the point.

Ask anybody that owns one and they will rave about their durability and keyboard quality. I've had a T40 for 6 years and it is still in great shape.
One would say students never heard of the IRC undernet ...
> who spends a few K on a laptop for looks?

Apparently lots and lots of people.

/not one of them.
Especially if you just registered to post this. People would be more tolerant if you've been around awhile and actually contribute to Hacker News.
CodeWeavers ports Chromium to Linux and Mac
I'm not sure I'll be a regular user of Stack Overflow, but I do hope they replace Experts Exchange as the top search hits for all my random programming questions.
Google Tweaks Its AdWords Algorithm
The official blog post: http://adwords.blogspot.com/2008/09/quality-score-improvemen...
Hasn't the Air been pretty much a dud?
back in the golden age people had true thirst for knowledge ithout any greed for materialistic gains.
If making lisp run faster would save someone millions of dollars, lisp would run faster. Sure, it's practical for Google to use C++ in this case [1], but I am imagining a fantasy world.

[1] Unless of course bugs that C++ ignores would be caught by Lisp. Perhaps there is a minor type error in Google's code that makes the search results not quite as good. If CL's type checker caught that, they would have gotten super-rich sooner and would own Microsoft right now.

But like I said, this is all fantasy. My real argument is "You are not Google."
i just realized the HN meetup is this thurs. but i'll definitely pop on over for the game next week.
We hold a game in SOMA, which might entail two buses or a cab... It's still a cool game, though. Shoot me an email if you want to be put on the list.
While I won't touch on the credibility of such a graph on a blog at treehugger.com, I will add, simply, that any additional oil production benefits everyone worldwide.

Renewable energy is critical going forward, but the technology isn't there yet to flip the switch and say good-bye to oil, and a few trillion dollars (more) in government grants and incentives won't get us there overnight.
The $100M iFund Is Now One Third Smaller
"Firstly, I want to apologize in advance, as I do not write often, and don’t claim to be a good writer. Proceed with caution."

I liked his article, but this is just about the worst opening sentence I've seen in a while. Yeesh. Have those thoughts if you must, but don't share them with your readers.
He's a brilliant mind, no doubt about that. But those who ventured into science, basically up until 150 years ago, were usually royalty or similar, with incomprehensible wealth, and obedient (and often violently oppressed) subjects.

If you never, in your entire life, have to worry a second if you can feed yourself and your family and keep a roof over your head, you're probably slightly more keen to see what a life of sitting down and wondering might lead to.
I don't think that's true. Lisp jobs are few and far between; people who want them really want them. There are many jobs that are like that. Here in the UK nurses and firemen are badly paid, that's because there's always someone who wants the job enough to do it for barely living wages.

The only way to be a well-paid Lisp programmer is to work somewhere where they wouldn't even dream of using Java.
I decided, at the end of the day, that I liked efficiency more than I liked control. I really enjoy control and doing it myself, but I only have so many hours in a day. I should direct those hours to ends where I am either more productive and competitive or personally satisfied.
The but I'm a poet! attitude partially explains Lisp's unpopularity with large organizations.
Good point - I was basing this more on where the companies are now than the talent portion. Also, you could argue that it's way too early to tell. Anyone remember dodge ball? :(.

What google has done to feedburner (one of my favorite sites) has been a travesty. They need to fix it. Soon.
Facebook use 20+ languages in production - that's what Thrift is about.It's certainly do-able so long as certain processes are in place (e.g. if you use a language you are responsible for its bindings to the common message bus).
Our salaries certainly aren't market acceptable but they are enough to have health insurance, a decent place to live, eat fresh food, afford cable and go to the bar occassionally :). I definitely see your point; hopefully, they'll be market acceptable soon.

So cash is growing...so far (we didn't spend any of our own money).
That is one pimp bootineer.
Stack Overflow: Thoughts From A Student
I have to agree with you. First time I saw the Finder icon, I thought it was a metaphor for an IM application.
Same here. I think people would have payed ten dollars for his product.
Here you go. You can see the numbers, straight from the source, for yourself.

http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/aeo/otheranalysis/ongr.html
As Twitter Regains Footing, Competitors' Growth Stalls
Microsoft CSS Vendor(browser) Extensions
the khaki guy is probably in IT
Perhaps more importantly for us - how does this effect publisher?

Can we expect eCPM rates to go up since the AdWords rates have been raised? Will it be noticeable?
I wouldn't call it unreasonable; just biased.

I guess it's hard to be objective, given the pervasiveness of operating systems. I'm sure if I ever succumb to Alzheimer's disease, my grandchildrens' names will be forgotten long before I forget how to use Windows ;-)
Thats strange because i see a lot of job adds requiring creativity and passion. Unfortunately big companies understand creativity as "you should be smart enough to understand your boss's vision" and passion as "You should just do your job and not whine about it".
New iPhone Chip Will Cost an ARM and a Missile
Translation: Very expensive hosting.
Wall Street’s meltdown and the potential technology hit
But those who ventured into science, basically up until 150 years ago, were usually royalty or similar, with incomprehensible wealth, and obedient (and often violently oppressed) subjects.

As a matter of fact, that was not the case in the Islamic empire - the government had encouraged independent research and learning and funded it quite extensively, which is the biggest reason it was such a scientific boom period. It's quite astonishing how far they've fallen, because at the peak of the European medieval times, the Islamic Empire had been encouraging this sort of scientific research and study like crazy. Perhaps most famous of all are the scientific libraries of Baghdad which once held volumes of literature and research pertaining to medicine, literature, physics, chemistry, and biology; and were made available (mostly) to all.

Invasions and wars in the region, along with the decline & fall of the Islamic Empire brought an end to that golden age of science and knowledge which is really sad because in that short period of time a lot of knowledge was discovered and contributed, lending to the future discoveries by European scientists in Calculus, Chemistry, Medicine, and more.
Launching the iFund Blog….
This looks like a serious mistake on the engineer's part to post this on their LinkedIn profile. Great move by the reporter to find it, but Apple can't be too pleased. I expect this to happen much more often going forward.
Gears for Safari is officially released
Ads on School Buses
Ask HN: Email website announcements - expected or spam?
When a user signs up for a web-based service, is it legitimate to send them occasional emails letting them know what's new, or announcing major milestones? Should they explicitly opt-in for this, or are occasional announcements just assumed? I'm not talking about email marketing, an email newsletter, or (of course) any sort of third-party product placement - just an occasional "Hi" from the founder, with a clear "unsubscribe" link.

I want to respect user privacy and definitely don't want to spam or annoy users. But I also want to be able to communicate with people who are using my service.
>Google has been rating the value of web sites for years

Well, supposedly, they don't do that. We all are (links). They just do the tally.
...and abuse the tally system from time to time (wiki/knol)
The history of science and medicine in the Islamic world is very interesting. I don't remember any particularly good secondary sources offhand, but reading about the House of Wisdom in Baghdad is probably a good starting point.

Islam greatly accelerated scientific development in the region. Muslims traveling to Mecca brought local discoveries with them, which were shared and quickly spread throughout as they returned. Also, the emphasis on reading the Quran in its original Arabic, rather than translations, ensured that the travelers had a language in common. Not to take away from several real geniuses, but it didn't hurt to have the region so well-networked. This rapid spread of knowledge gave the intellectual centers in the region a wealth of resources to draw from.
(0) Did the "too clean" explanation come from the dealer or the folks who actually make the decision? If you were turned down for credit reasons in the US, you are entitled to a copy of your credit report and a written explanation. Your credit report will say something about why your score is what it is.
(1) Your decision to buy an Element in three years should not affect what car you buy/lease today. If you were getting by with something smaller, why not stay smaller for now?
(2) I'd recheck the numbers. With a lease, you pay for estimated depreciation, which is quite significant over the first three years, with enough margin for the leasor to be wrong and still make a profit selling the car to someone else. I mention this because if you trade, you'll not only be paying the hybrid premium, you'll be restarting the depreciation clock.

You're planning to pay for at least $3k in depreciation and then pay the hybrid premium, which will probably be at least $3k.

If you're set on buying a hybrid in 3 years, buy a used car today. You'll pay less in interest on the loan and the depreciation should be less. You should be able to buy a car that will last three years for less than a new element will depreciate in that time.

Get a car for $2-3k and save the difference between those payments and your proposed lease payments for repairs and a bigger down payment in three years. And, if you can't save the difference, you just found out the easy way that you can't afford to buy a new hybrid. (A lot of Prius' will be coming off lease then.)
opt-in.

i'd delete emails like that without reading them, if they got by my filters.
"Revolution OS" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolution_OS) --- is a great movie about Linux and FSF, and it also features a story about "Cygnus Solutions" startup.
Isn't that a separate issue? You can be part of a company from day one and not have any input into its direction, and maybe sometimes you can join late and have significant influence on future decisions.
NetHack is a good example of emergent gameplay, Daggerfall is another. They do not, however, have compelling stories. All fan-fiction to the contrary, "I kill the kobold and take his chainmail leggings" fifty times in a row doesn't constitute a real plot.

Also, what story does exist is by virtue of how limited the player's interaction with his environment is: he can either kill things or carry them. If his actions were less discrete, or lacked real-world metaphors, there wouldn't even be a fan-fiction plot.