skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Overall, the article generally reeks of employees that are too lazy/complacent/comfortable to pull out the big guns and aim for what they want in a big company. Obviously if you've had your big guns out for months/years and you still feel ungratified, then yeah, probably time for a change.

There are my initial reactions to all the points.

1) Bureaucracy getting you down? Tear down/bypass useless red tape.

2) Can't find an interesting project? I'm sure there are hundreds of interesting teams nation/worldwide you haven't met yet.

3) Poor annual performance reviews? Learn the system and work it, even if you have to play kiss up every now and then to important people. It's your money in your bank, after all.

4) No discussion around career development? No lead is going to turn you away if you go into his or her office and ask for it.

5) Feeling jerked around? Stand your ground and don't be a yes-man (or woman).

6) No one holding you accountable? Call for your own brainstorming sessions and peer reviews.

7) Can't find smart people? See note above about finding an interesting project.

8) Don't understand your company's vision? Either take ownership and try to influence it if it's that important to you, or keep your head down and keep doing awesome work.

9) Encountering closed-minded imbeciles? See note above about getting jerked around.

10) Don't like your boss? See note above about finding an interesting project.

The reason why I generally dislike working at my big company (wonder if they'll see this!) simply boils down to a lack of challenge. Not intending to come off as arrogant, but if I can dedicate 20% of my brainpower and consistently get rave reviews from everyone around me, something is seriously wrong with the picture. So I generally wait until the last minute, code sprint, say "check please," and go home and do something more interesting with my life.
I take issue with that tactic. "Show me the evidence!" is a worthy battle-cry, and I certainly don't take issue with those who use it, but it's not always applicable in all cases. DF articles are regularly posted on HN, and regularly make the front page. Many of us who read them have noticed a systemic bias in Gruber's writing, such that most everything Apple does is terrific and most everything their competitors do is terrible, or at least not good enough to measure up to Apple. Sure, he gives reasons and arguments, but they're always one-sided. These aren't really the kinds of conclusions one can give evidence for, beyond "read what he writes". Certainly, reasonable people might come away from his articles disagreeing with those of us who think his bias is growing more extreme, and that's fine. It's not, however, useful to say that we're wrong because we "have no evidence". We have the same evidence you do, and we interpret it differently.

Put simply, whenever I see a link to daring fireball on HN, I can say with ~ 2σ confidence that it will a) be about Apple or one of its competitors, b) argue that, whatever the issue, Apple Does It Better, and c) have its arguments picked apart in the comments. This has been such a long term trend that it has become thoroughly predictable.

That's fine, and Gruber's entitled to write whatever he wants about whatever he wants. That doesn't stop us from labeling him an Apple evangelist, and it doesn't mean we're wrong to do so.
(Somewhat-smart-ass response alert!)

Well, the only two people I personally know who would get all 100s are Peter Norvig and Sebastian Thrun, and I personally wouldn't mind hiring them!

Of course, in reality, Peter Norvig and Sebastian Thrun are working on projects that have long time horizons, e.g. self-driving cars and search. So perhaps you're still correct: The people you would hire to bang out code to meet a short deadline are probably different from the people you would want to work on your long-term technology bets.

In general, I disagree that knowing a topic incredibly well is necessarily overfitting. Deep knowledge can only aid new insights. You often hear about mathematicians and physicists who think by inhabiting their own mental world, composed of insights that they hold so deeply that they are _intuitive_.
This is offensive, I will just have to stick with my computer engineer barbie instead: http://gizmodo.com/5470587/computer-engineer-barbie-has-a-ph...
Ask HN: How and in what to specialize to become consultant?
Recently, I was thinking about how to become a consultant. I don't know anyone who is a consultant, I've only read about these guys here and in some other entrepreneurial-is forums. In theory, I know that I have to specialize and acquire fairly advanced skill(s) in something that is somewhat a niche but at the same time relatively widely used in order to have consulting gigs at all. Here, I'm seeking advice about the technical skills aspect, not the 'soft' skills.

A little background:

* 30 y old

* 10 y of professional experience (in chronological order):

* 4 y desktop CAD application development (C++, graphics, Windows)

* 1.5 y embedded game development (C, graphics, networking, Linux)

* 3 y game development (C++, graphics, game consoles)

* 1 y web development (PHP, JavaScript, C)

I'm looking for advice in what to specialize, that is considering the following factors:

* My professional interests: I'm quite interested in high performance sites/apps. I've planned in the next couple of months to read and go though a couple of seminal books for websites performance, starting with the front-end (Stanford CS193H by Steve Souders), then moving to the backend (with a couple MySQL performance books), going through the 'classic' webservers (for instance, there is a book about writing Apache modules in C) and into the heart of the C10K problem and solutions, in the meantime strengthening my network programming skills by going through the Steven's Unix and network programming classics, also parallel/threaded server programming. I've planned a course about distributed computing (by reading the online resources by the schedule + the textbook).

* The unknown to me: what is the most appropriate to specialize considering my past experience, my current interests, and last but not least - what skills/expertise is actually in demand for consulting/contracting in the area defined by the above.

I hope that I was clear, thanks for your time reading.
The News outlets are funny beasts.

But if the tech to reveal who is downloading comes out in the open, it will be a good thing. The industry is apparently already doing something of the sort, but may not be doing a very good job. The only way to achieve rational thought will be to shine a light on them as well.

It'll be funny. But it'll also probably have an affect on court cases.
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> No one is born with an innate desire for that specific Barbie or Lego set. The companies market to you, make you feel like you want it.

True, but it's the fault of both companies and consumers at the same time. It's a feedback loop. Marketing strategies are based on what people are willing to buy, which is based on what companies market. The system feeds on itself.
Well, getting rid of the sides of that human factor that we collectively wish to suppress. You can do it algorithmically with things like karma systems, but it's really nothing new, it's just a higher-tech way of doing what Hammurabi (and others before him) did.
I too have been skeptical of this publication. Others have told me that despite the name, it is quite good.

The title is more meant to be "The Monitor" but it is owned by the Christian Science church. That is why the domain is csmonitor.

Their FAQ page also says:

"Is the Monitor a religious publication?

No, it’s a real news organization owned by a church – The First Church of Christ, Scientist, in Boston, Mass., USA. Everything in the Monitor is international and US news and features, except for one religious article in the weekly magazine and Daily News Briefing – a version of which has appeared each day since 1908, at the request of the Monitor’s founder, Mary Baker Eddy.
In an age of corporate conglomerates dominating the news media, the Monitor’s combination of church ownership, public-service mission, and commitment to covering the world (not to mention the fact that it was founded by a woman shortly after the turn of the 20th century, when US women didn’t yet have the vote!) gives the Monitor a uniquely independent voice in journalism."
Xmas as a replacement for Christmas comes from Χριστός and usage in English dates back to the 1500s. Admittedly the use for Christian [sic] was a bit lazy, but I was not attempting to make any point.

I enjoyed Helianthus' take on it though - goes to show whatever you say can be reinterpreted by analysts to provide a depth of meaning you never intended ;)
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I remember an xkcd to that effect. Something like nerd sniping. Yes, I found it: http://xkcd.com/356/
"Unyielding pro Apple view"? You decide:

http://daringfireball.net/linked/2011/12/14/hollington

http://daringfireball.net/linked/2011/12/13/ios-5-photo-stre....

http://daringfireball.net/linked/2011/12/05/browse-vs-search

http://daringfireball.net/linked/2011/12/05/linen-underneath

http://daringfireball.net/linked/2011/12/01/apple-carrier-iq

{mistakenly put in the wrong box earlier}
The location of their research facilities is itself valuable.
The Mapping Dilemma (David Nolen)
Exactly. The Mercedes is not $30,000 better than the Honda. You're paying for status. Why would you do that unless you were making a statement about your salary, position etc?
The Soda theme[1] is one of the first things I install.

1. https://github.com/buymeasoda/soda-theme
in america this is called having a niche
Maybe there's a safety fallback to normal GPS when the encrypted GPS goes out. The alternative would be no GPS at all in which case they'd need to send an actual human in to shoot it down or capture it.
I like the idea. I just signed up. As I was trying to "create a new house" the site stalled.

Maybe you could upload some screen shots so that I could know what I'm signing up for.
Is it not possible that it's a bit of both? Given this scenario, which is clearly very likely, enforcing gender stereotypes could dissuade a child from walking a certain road down which their nature would have led them.

Boys and girls are naturally different, yes, but as demonstrated by the many women in science, that doesn't mean that all females want to grow up to become hairdressers or models.

Stereotypes do affect a child's development. Please don't limit their potential.
yeah sure, but if he had said Χριστός that'd be obscure formal respect.
Yes, I know what you mean now!
I mean, you're right. 's/unyielding/strongly' and all that.

I've read DF enough to know that Gruber points out small Apple missteps far more often than he points out Android victories (often; never).
You are correct in that this (and many other related articles) are not directly saying what Iran did is wrong... however, I feel the general tone and overall implication is that Iran have "taken" a drone that doesn't belong to them, and clearly are not about to give it back.

So as you say, "law" doesn't really apply, it's more of a moral decision as to whether a country should spy on another country. We can clearly see the outcome of that decision here.
I agree with everything you've just said.

So isn't that a defence of MG's article? It was even titled "An iPhone Lover's Take on the Galaxy Nexus". The point was describing his impressions of the nexus from the perspective of someone who does* care about the things that the iphone does well.

Of course its a combination of lots of things. And for people who like the iphone, they are happy with the combination of tradeoffs that it makes. UI responsiveness and battery life being two of the important ones for the iphone.
"boys still like building"

"girls still ... craft things."

I think this says everything that needs to be said: children like making things!
Payment would be in the form of alliances and protection from US aggression.
And more subtly, the "support windows, support office" mentality that forces each team to link arm-in-arm with other team. Everyone slow is sped up, everyone fast is slowed down.

Btw, running that forward, everyone fast learns to slow down, and the slow ones aren't pulled ahead as much.
Even when using ACID compliant databases, Consistency check should be replicated in your application layer, atleast for mission critical data. But maybe that's just me.
Microsoft allows you to re-download the virtual machine after 30 days. I am not sure how sensible the system in the place is, but I believe Microsoft is happy that their browsers get support from the web developers.
Obviously your employer sucks at bureaucracy. My employer has a "project and quality management system" (PQMS). Basically we have a group that sits around and thinks up more useless things that we could be documenting. Some documentation that they wanted last week is not good enough this week.

We have "phase reviews" before anything is released, no matter how minor. A "phase review" is essentially a long meeting with a dozen or more people (including one or more people from development) where the PQMS people bicker about the wording of something but no one cares that the thing does not work well. Then half a dozen people have to sign the documentation.

At the end of each sprint (we do something that we call Agile but is actually its antithesis) developers have to sign off on their peer reviews, which have been printed out. QA people have to create several documents (this seems to be QA's main function) and sign them and then everything is signed by multiple managers who know very little about what went on. We also have daily "stand-up" meetings that all development and QA people must attend. These meetings usually last 15-30 minutes but can last an hour or more. Before each sprint we have a "design review" meeting where people who know nothing about software development try to create user stories in our ticket system while everyone watches. A few days later we have a retrospective meeting and then we do sprint planning where we watch the same people who created the user stories try to enter sub-tasks for developers. Most of these meetings must be documented and of course people must sign the documents.

There is also a large repository of documents which supposedly describe every process that we use. These documents are of course inaccurate and rarely useful. A few of them are updated each week and everyone is required to read the updates.

No one, other than top executives who do not care, has any real power to dispute any new policies that PQMS creates. I should also mention that the people in the PQMS group have no understanding of software development.
While it would mean an easy transition, I'm not sure this is the best way either. As others have noted, I've seen odd cases of things performing extremely poorly or failing in strange ways under OpenJDK 6.

Remember, if people have Sun's Java installed now, it's because they deliberately opted to install that over OpenJDK - Sun's has always been in the partner repo, which is disabled by default, OpenJDK being the default on Ubuntu. Silently moving people back to OpenJDK would cause all kinds of non-obvious breakage.
The P code is on a different frequency, so the Iranians could have just jammed the P code, and then presumably the drone would rely on the the unencrypted C/A code which they spoofed.
Time will tell. Pretty safe prediction that they may decay in six years though.

If they grew at the rate they have over the last six years for the next six years, you can do the math.
Having it all: Pythy syntax for C++
any cloud that never flies away from my backyard is called private cloud
I Made Things with LEGO blocks growing up. I loved the kits and the space themes. But I would always end up creating my own spaceship.

My young sisters build… but they mostly just build very simple props and then play with the LEGO people like dolls, inventing dramas and friendships and the like.

It’s the same set of LEGO bricks I used.

Is it evil to recognize this?
The Facebook birthday reciprocity experiment
Here's neat little side project to figure out birthday reciprocity (who has given and received birthday wishes) from Facebook. I found it pretty interesting as it really surfaced those who I was closest with on Facebook. You can see my results here or try it out yourself here http://favo.rs/birthday/o/AsdjkBashcBbf0wj.
Is it still stalling? It's on Heroku's free plan, so that may be an issue.
What becomes really really scary about this is the idea that they're relying solely on GPS to fly.

GPS is pretty damn precise, especially once you add local ionosphere corrections (via WAAS or similar) and get to use the military signal. It's certainly good enough for navigating an airplane, because it's more accurate than what was in use before GPS (VOR).

Edit: relevant diagram: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Accuracy_of_Navigation_Sys...
This is what the US congress should be investigating instead of passing bills that have no chance of becoming law or reaffirming "in god we trust".
Amazon Selling 'Well Over' 1 Million Kindle Devices Per Week
I've been a Lego fan for, what, 45, 50 years? I've never in that time bought a single "kit" from them. You buy bricks. And other parts. But kits? Why would I want to build someone else's design. The whole idea behind Lego, as I've understood since I was 5 years old, is that you make your own cool stuff.

I've built space ships and air planes and monsters. I think I even built a Starship Enterprise once. But designing the things yourself is part of the process.

When my nieces were prime Lego age, at the advice of their mother, I did look at some kits, but was horrified at the prices. The bricks are pricy enough. I converted my money into tubs of bulk bricks. You can never have enough bricks.

(Now I did make some Tinker-Toy machines from company plans, but only enough to understand the principle. I then adapted them to my own nefarious purposes. I did the same with balsa wood flying model airplanes later.)
offtopic: does forbes page look to you like this http://i.imgur.com/8ZF4S.png? soemething is wrong...
Congrats!

Note to self: great visualization; very good javascript; what would I do to get those guys on my team ...

Note to bastian: you may consider adding viewport statistics to your google analytics account (you can add many other useful events the same way):

http://wishfulcode.com/2011/11/02/measuring-viewport-size-wi...
> hard wired

I keep on hearing those words with respect to brains. I do not think they mean what you think they mean.

Brains are not "hard wired" for much. They are really quite malleable and adaptable. They are affected by many things in the environment; experience, culture, training. The biggest differences between male and female children will come about from how they are raised, not innate differences. Once they hit puberty the hormonal differences will have more of an effect, though nothing that could be described as "hard wired", it's more a question of predisposition.
On the other hand, if you're developing a website for the general public, you probably don't care much about people who only use IE6 for internal sites either.

If you rarely or never go on the actual internet, the fact that you're using an old browser doesn't matter any more than if you're using an old native program to do the same things.

Of course, there is still the issue of people who do go on the internet but don't visit any of the sites that actually track these statistics; however, I don't know how much of an issue this is because I don't know which sites do the tracking.
As the creator of Correlated.org, I couldn't help but submit this one!
Leaked Facebook Revenue Numbers, $700m profit.
Why not divert all of that funding, even if it is not much, to useful space projects instead?
We originally thought about doing that, but we decided not to. It is likely that some users have installed sun-java6 in order to use applications that are incompatible with OpenJDK. If we silently replace sun-java6 with OpenJDK, they may experience unexpected failures or odd behaviour that will be difficult to diagnose.
Thanks Zeratul, that's very kind feedback!
You are correct. As far as we know, the "unencrypted data" was just video, NOT control codes.
> It's easy to blame the companies -- but in reality it's very hard for a single company to change the macro culture that informs their product decisions. If you want to find the root cause, look at the users and ask why they demand the products they do. In this case: "why are so few parents buying Legos for their girls?" or "why do girls feel a stigma about playing with Legos?"

I don't believe there's a "root cause", or at least it's not on the same conceptual level as "companies" and "consumers". It's a feedback loop. Companies create markets and needs by marketing, but marketing is never done in vacuum, it's correlated with what people already need. There are lots of loops like that (concept of popularity, or TV - as the quote of Steve somewhere in this thread goes), and we have one side of the loop blaming the other side of the loop, where in fact each side is fine by itself; it's just the combination that's broken and seems to converge on something bad.
I would agree that the reaction was over the top had this been any other pundit/writer that Topolsky was responding to. But this may have been the 'straw that broke the camel's back' for Topolsky. I get the feeling that he's tired of hearing arrogant and dismissive write-ups from these guys.

Topolsky's reviews are in depth and well thought out. It would be somewhat frustrating to have someone like Gruber turn around and say "you don't get it" without rationalizing or explaining the point.
I felt pretty jerked around at my last job, and stood my ground.

I was pretty much forced to quit 2 weeks later. Of course there were some other issues, but the point being, some people don't really like you standing your ground and would rather you be a yes-man.
I read his article less as a refutation than as a "get off my side!" argument. He seems to fundamentally agree with Gruber and MG but fundamentally disagree with their presentation of the argument. This is similar to how many of my friends and family members believe homosexuality to be immoral but believe picketing the funerals of gay people with offensive signs is awful. The Pyramid of Refutation (which is new to me and awesome, by the way) doesn't apply because the goal is not to refute.
I've decided to start flagging posts that merely link to LMGTFY. Even on /b/ that would be considered stupid.
Mike, you are correct. It is a heat map of the paths taken by the couriers while doing deliveries. I work at Postmates.
Defensive comment by OP questioning your maternal lineage!
When I see the string "Xian", I read it as a Chinese word, and it sounds completely unlike "Christian". This is a problem.
UPDATE: Some screen shots... I think the Heroku account is hanging a little bit:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/169446/Screen%20Shot%202011-12-15%20...
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/169446/Screen%20Shot%202011-12-15%20...
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Coincidentally whenever I research Mongol battles from the 13th Century the Mongols are kicking ass. I need some less biased history books.
I'd be ok with that, provided they have similar or greater inspiration potential. Inspiration is like an investment, do it right and with any luck when all babyboomers die and are replaced you'll receive much more funding. For the same reason, that new project should be similarly international. I'd advocate defunding the ISS in a heartbeat if there was another project that I felt met those qualifications.

However, without looking at the numbers, I fear that the cost of running the ISS would only pay for a fraction of the cost of launching a new project. So of course in either case you'll need to find new funding.
Uploaded some screenshot of the main dashboard screen.